9 little things

1. The baby is kicking. We talked about whether we wanted a boy or a girl this time, and I can honestly say that I would be equally happy either way. We'll find out at the ultrasound in a few weeks.

2. I'm fat and undertrained. I leave for work at 6:20 and comes home 11-12 hours later. There is just no time to train. I ran a training marathon in 3:09 a few weeks ago; this compares to a training marathon in 3:02 same time last year. Overall, I'm probably running half the miles I did last year.

3. Natali turned 10. She is so at peace with her life here, and I wish she didn't have to move this summer.

4. I had my all-time worst conversation with a patient a few weeks ago. It's been a big deal in Denmark lately that all patients must be told whether we plan to rescussitate them and/or transfer them to the ICU. An elderly lady with advanced cancer was seriously ill on the floor; in the past I would have written in the chart that she was incurably ill and that she shouldn't be resucssitated or brought to the ICU. Instead, I had to tell her, and it completely took the wind out of her sails. Sometimes, people need to cling to hope during their last days; you could call it denial or misguided optimism, but I took that away from her.

5. We are thinking about doing a month or two of international medicine in rural Guatemala next year. The Girl volunteered at the clinic as a med student; it's very rudimentary.

6. After two months of being, effectively, an illegal immigrant, the girl was forgiven for letting her green card lapse. We applied a month late for a renewal, which often means an automatic denial, but we were forgiven.

7. First Cairo, now Madison. Andreas has missed three days of school because of the teacher walk-out. I don't know what to think about the Walker bill; the cost-cutting seems necessary, but curbing union bargaining rights seems wrong. The odd part, to me, is that the workers aren't officially on strike yet. The unions' very existence is threatened and they aren't striking? Interesting.

8. I'm trying to get a Jehova's Witness through chemo. Her bone marrow was packed with cancer cells, so she was anemic to start with, and chemo will make her more anemic. We would transfuse most people once a week, or once every two weeks, to keep them "tanked up", but we can't with this lady. Instead, we gave her EPO to boost her blood prodution to the max before starting chemo. This type of cancer is very treatable, so you'd hate to have to back off chemo because of anemia.

9. We're going to a triathlon training camp in Mallorca, Spain, for a week in May. Nice.