Sunday, November 23, 2008

Week's achievements

Random things I've done this week, in no particular order:

  1. Retched in a paraglider.
  2. Saw a surgeon faint mid-operation.
  3. Clerked a patient about her alcohol usage (she said she drank champage at the weekends. When I asked how many glasses, she replied "Glasses? I'm talking bottles!).
  4. Flossed.
  5. Lost a very special friend.
  6. Won an unimportant pub quiz.
  7. Assessed first aid proficiency.
  8. Attended a lecture Linux kernel modules.
  9. Visited the World Press Photo 2008 exhibition.
  10. Learnt how to tell the time in Portuguese.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

A question

"Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. ….Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?"

Robert Nozick, ‘Anarchy, State and Utopia’

Sunday, May 11, 2008

A lesson?

My thesis is drowning me. Slowly and insidiously, it's started to occupy all my waking and sleeping hours. And it really doesn't seem all that important any more. Will it change clinical practice? Unlikely. Why couldn't I have achieved more in the thirty six moths of slog? Do I have the maturity to overcome this mental stagnation?

And yet, with two months until returning to medicine, I'm also excited again, intoxicated by the promise of a new challenge. Questions of inadequacy will always be my companions, but maybe there are simpler paths to a a more enriching life.