Oh Lord, how long has it been?  (Don’t worry, I didn’t convert to theism in my time off, just an expression.)  Since Christmas and it’s February already?  I seriously thought I was on an update roll in December too.  Pfft.

Well, that’s just pathetic but I can assure you, I’m not done with this journal yet.  There’s always so much I want to write but so little time or prioritization, at least.

Working at the hospital takes up a lot of that time and energy, more than I signed up for, in fact.  There’s never enough people to cover the shifts adequately, so I end up doing extra 4-hour blocks here, then a couple 9-hour blocks there, et cetera.  At least I have a job in this economy I guess.

The time away from the kids bothers me the most.  The later hours mean more missed homework time through bedtime.  I am so not the workaholic dad who just wants to bring the bacon home and let the family do the rest.  At their ages now, the kids are still listening, so I feel I have to do some guiding.  Which means being there and doing things with them.  You have to let go of the bowstring eventually, but until they’re old enough (to stop listening), I’m keeping that arrow on target.

I also quit Brazilian jiu jitsu several months ago because there just weren’t enough hours in the day anymore.  That was a tough call.  I wasn’t a star or anything, but it made me feel the strongest and leanest I’ve ever been.  I miss the struggle and the drama of a good ground match; the physical domination through intellectual guile and muscular memory.  I meant to write more about my jiu jitsu matches, saving them up in my head, but again… time.

So, I’ve been working hard to keep a regular exercise regimen going, mostly at home.  It’s going  well.  A lot of the exercises are carried over from jiu jitsu (basically, the core muscles) in order to keep myself physically primed for a return someday.  Ironically, I’ve actually gained muscle mass after quitting jiu jitsu because I’m not constantly breaking it down in practice anymore.  Or maybe that’s just fat.

The biggest kick to the balls though has been having to study for my medicine board exams again.  They passed a new rule shortly before I graduated requiring all future (internal medicine) doctors to retest every ten years to keep their board certification.  It has a 26% fail rate – from people who passed it the first time and have been doctoring 4 REALZ for the past ten years.  All those arcane, academic rat facts just go out the window when you have real people to take care of.  A lot has changed too.  The Big Test is in October, which deceptively seems far enough, but having studied for it once already, less than 9 months of study for me would be self-defeating.

I just finished the nephrology section, relearning diseases with appealing names like: FSGS, MPGN, PIGN, PSGN, RPGN.  I’m not kidding, those are the actual names.  The long versions are more apnea-inducing.  Makes you almost miss the days of Lady Windemere’s Disease, or Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, or my favorite – THE CONSUMPTION.  Now that’s a name.  Even “stroke” was creatively named for the way it cuts down people like trees in the prime of their life.  At least that’s how one poet described it.  Now it’s called a CVA or the public relations failure, “brain attack.”

Well, I’ve rambled too long for internet 2.0 attention spans.  I could save and trim it down but then it would just go into my draft folder with fourteen other partially-written entries that got lost in time.

That’s me these days.  Can’t believe it’s almost Valentines Day.  Seems like I was just writing about Christmas.  Oh, right.

So, since you’ve made it this far, tell me what’s going on with you?