Dr. Sour Puss

Sometimes, when all the hateful narcissists of the world want to spread the misery in their lives all over you, you just need to come home for a rousing game of Belly Buttons on the carpet with your two boys. My life is great and I'm thankful for it every day.

To say that Anne Fadiman's book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was hugely influential on my life would be an understatement. It's pretty cliche for a doctor to say this about her book (akin to someone saying To Kill a Mockingbird is their favorite book, simply because they haven't read much since high school). I admit that I am not a particularly well read person, mostly because a busy life in medicine doesn't afford much down time for reading. However, for many of us in health care, the revelations in the book are profound and true. Before my life as a doctor, I started out as an activist for homeless people. When deciding a career path, I realized the most important contribution I could make to help disenfranchised people at the margins of society was to become their physician. Before I was interested in anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry, I was interested in the stories people had to tell. How they got where they were, what their lives were like, an...

Ravi and rock out most every night together and honestly I didn't think much of it until we accidentally got caught on video by my sister tonight.

It's true, he looks exactly like his older brother. I was a little worried I'd be jaded by the time the Two-dle was delivered, but thankfully I'm just as over the moon as I was when the Doodle was born 2 years ago. After Ravi's intrauterine growth restriction and crash c-section for a 5 minute decel down to 70, we chickened out and decided to skip the drama, scheduling our repeat c-section well in advance. I have to say leaving the chaos of several consecutive 60 hour work weeks at the CHC and a 2 year old who literally bounces off the walls at home, I appreciated the calm control of an electively scheduled c-section, it was the least stressful 45 minutes I'd had in months. Overmedicalization of child birth be damned, this was civilized . I think our prep work with Ravi paid off big time. Within 2 minutes of meeting the baby, Ravi says, "I want to hold my baby brother!" Within 5 minutes, he was stroking his hair, kissing his face, then honked his nose. ...

Probably the only people in the world who think this is funny are in the picture.

At the risk of sounding self-important, there are times when my job feels like I'm staring all the pain, suffering, injustice, and inhumanity in the world straight in the face, alone, and yelling ineffectually as hard as I can at it. Today was probably the hardest day I've had since residency and I didn't even go in to the hospital.

She was 16 and unexpectedly pregnant. She had been randomly assigned to me by our Maternal Support Services nurse and I had never met her or her family before. During those first few visits with me, she was an emotional pancake, completely flat. Silent except for the most basic responses. Have you felt the baby move yet? "Yes." Are you having any more morning sickness? "No." Adopting my best sensitive doctor bedside manner, I would gently but repeatedly try to get inside her head, but she would give up nothing. How are you feeling about the pregnancy? "Fine." Are you anxious about it? "No." Is your family supporting you? "Yeah, I guess." Is there anything else you want to talk about? "No." I would later discover that she, her mother, and her younger brother became patients of our clinic after her alcoholic abusive father had finally driven their car through the front room of their house and they had fled to a nearby domestic v...