"Mom, you should MEDITATE!!!" May 2020 Says my 23 year old son a few nights ago. Context: my negative expressed emotion level about my experience of nervous system irritants reached an all time quarantine high (the chronic suboptimal state of the kitchen, the noise level and quality of noise in the garage gym etc....) This made me think a lot. 1-To meditate or not to meditate? 2-Do I already meditate? 3-If I do, am I doing it in a way that helps as much as possible? Regarding 1: Yes. According to one of the most comprehensive review 2014 meta-analysis on the topic, mindful ..read more

May 2020 Tonnage 135 lbs deadlifts x 5. Memories are famously unreliable. In my memory, my days of parenting our children up to their teen years, I was a full time working version of Little Bear's mom: more frazzled and cranky than her on average... but reasonably successful at bonding and very successful at helping our boys develop emotional intelligence and expression. So a solid B. An A if you take into account my other concomitant and simultaneous career accomplishments and marriage to a very busy partner. 165 lbs deadlifts x 5.  I'm pretty sure that my memory of parenti ..read more

In my garage: a squat rack consisting of buckets, cement, and sawed wood has been assembled and is (more patiently than me) awaiting a barbell.  I work out almost daily in the growing garage gym, often with one or two of my sons...which would have been barely conceivable previously. Batgirl looking for warmth, April 2020 In the basement: a lizard called Confucius has found a temporary refuge where he may not be getting enough live crickets to be happy. It's hard to tell but he seems awfully immobile and un-exhilarated to me. Not that I'm any good at dragon lizard mental status ..read more

My dad is a brilliant scientist so the young people in my covid-19 "restez chez vous" or "stay at home" mini society were perplexed by his relative technophobia: After days of zooming with trainees, friends, song-teacher, colleagues, medical school leaders and preparation for zooming with patients, I channeled Inspector Columbo (I actually do that more often than you might think but that's a story for another time) and asked my dad again: Ok, so you are sure there is no built in camera in your computer? Proving that if you ask one more time, you might get the answer you want, i.e., the one ..read more

I was just at a conference in Dallas March March 3-7 wide eyed-ly confronting behavioral changes that conference organizers were urging us to adopt immediately: hand sanitizing frequently, discouraged hugging, encouraged elbow vs. hand using for anything from opening doors to greetings. It was surreal and despite my best intentions I seriously flunked behavior change on those first days, warmly hugging about 80 of my friends, including elderly ones unfortunately,  before recoiling guiltily in a "aw shucks...we forgot not to hug" kind of way.  We were in a denial phase about the seriousness a ..read more

Before coming to Lisboa (formerly Olyssippo, derived from Ulysses, possibly, who transiently settled it on his way home after the Trojan War) I spent the weekend in New Orleans with many colleagues and students from medical schools from around the USA and even some students from Holland, Australia and India. Our reason for being in New Orleans was not the usual, i.e., great food, music and ambience -in a complicated city that remains superficially simple to most tourists.- We were there to participate in the KTGF Annual Medical Student Conference hosted by Tulane this year, which, noblesse ..read more

I have always had a hard time filtering out the world in every possible way. You could say that my environmental sensitivity is very high. It is a source of strength and weakness, joy and sorrow. At the moment...it is a source of medium to large frustration as my sleep-deprived brain is failing at either blocking the booming and screechy voice of a woman behind me, each of her bouncy diphtongs landing like an arrow on the bullseye of my titubating fatigue or the alarmingly loud and irregular snore coming from the seat exactly in front of me. Alpha Metcon Class, January 2020I am getting ir ..read more

Morning Haired Training Director December 24th, 2019Dear Fellows (and residents in my clinic), I woke up this morning feeling guilty.  Not devastatingly guilty as in depression guilty. No, I woke up feeling I had dropped the ball and wanting to correct that. You see, for the last 23 years or so, I conscientiously send Holiday cards to family members, friends, colleagues and in the last many years to my trainees as well. Ideally, each for my trainees would be hand written and individualized meaningfully ....and that ideal version of me 1-never existed in the first place and 2-the closest ..read more

For the 13th time in a week, I am on a very long phone hold. I'm listening to a meant-to-soothe me sound, that I suspect is activated when I'm-going-to-lose-it callers are being put on hold. It's a pseudo-eastern flute sound with a babbling brook in the background. I'm waiting for the sound of birds chirping. Unsoothed, December 2019 I grew up reading Asterix and Obelix like many European children my generation. Occasionally, a movie would be made and it would be pretty bad, compared to the comic books. Bad and largely unmemorable... Except for one sequence in The Twelve Tasks of Asterix ..read more

Some Things Are Easier to Confront Than OthersAlright. Deep Breath. Let's start from the beginning. What were the odds I would struggle with Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent, moderate to severe in this lifetime?  Close to 100%: heavy genetic loading for the illness including a paternal grandmother who died of the illness at 50. I asked people who knew her and loved her and they described that at the end of her life she was profoundly isolated, disconnected and ruminating guiltily on small things that she amplified in a psychotic (congruent with her depression) way. For example: she ..read more