i'm starting this post in the middle of the night and it's funny because i can hear the neighbor below me snoring. i only hear it occasionally and i don't really hear much from my neighbors' apartments so this guy must be a loud ass snorer. maybe i should drop an anonymous note saying he should get screened for obstructive sleep apnea. also, i wonder if my neighbors ever hear unsavory things coming from my apartment. as much as i want to blast my speaker volume when i'm watching porn, i keep it at medium for that reason, but i'm sure they've heard a few moans travel from my computer to their ears...

ok random tangent but that's where my brain is at in the middle of the night. now on to what i really wanted to discuss. does anyone remember growing up in school seeing one of those posters that said something like "life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."? you know, the kind of inspirational posters teachers like to use to decorate their classroom, along with pictures of the solar system and the human body and so forth. well at the time i thought those inspirational posters were pretty lame, but now i see how true they were.

i came off a tough month of service in january. very busy, long hours, lots of patients and work to do. as much as i wanted to die and crawl into a hole some days, i still managed to have a decent month because the other residents and i just laughed a lot, shrugged our shoulders, rolled our eyes maybe, and got through the work. and that's where that mantra kept running through my head, it's not about what happens to you, but how you react to it. when you get that 5th consult in an hour you can scream, you can be furious, you can rage at the idiots who are asking a consult for the dumbest thing, or you can smile and go see the patient. i would say the majority of doctors are not very thrilled to get a new consult, but i've been trying to transform my attitude to look at it as an opportunity to help the patient, add something their care, and maybe find a learning opportunity, even if you are seeing them for a dumb reason.

in one of my favorite blogs, the author writes a post or maybe it was just a comment, i can't recall, about how people seem to be more focused on negativity as opposed to reaching for a place of compassion and kindness. i don't know if it's human nature or what, but in this era you just kinda expect people to react poorly to something. think about what would happen if you spilled your drink on someone. how refreshing would it be if you could count that the poor recipient would just as likely burst out laughing at the mistake as they would be fuming that you just ruined their outfit or whatever. but really, when something bad happens, what can you do other than laugh and roll with the punches? i personally feel so much better about myself when i try to be positive rather than sulk and wallow (although i will sulk from time to time).



i saw a young woman in her late 20s last month in the ED. she had a known history of a very aggressive cancer and i knew the top things on her mind when i saw her would be whether 1. was this her cancer 2. was this her cancer and 3. was this her cancer? so i came in to see her and had barely introduced myself to her and her husband when i knocked over her urine sample that was sitting on the counter.  i had just ruined any semblance of professionalism i had and was pretty embarrassed, but this young lady just burst out laughing like she hadn't laughed in years. and then there we all were just laughing our heads off as i crawled down to fetch her luckily intact urine bottle off the floor.

unfortunately, she ended up having new metastases to the brain. i suspect she'll be dead in a year from her cancer, but i hope she'll remember that the day she was told she had cancer in her brain, she also got to laugh at a doctor spilling her piss all over the floor.

like a lot of life, we do our best to react to the situation and make the most of it. i personally think it feels so much better to react to things in as positive a way as possible. negativity just saps all your energy away, and heck if i barely have enough of that.