I'm so d*mn tired!!! Urgh!!!!

This picture is the state I wish my life was in right about now, but alas 3 days before my first final exam, this image is ALL in my head. The image below is probably a more accurate depiction of where I'm at right now:


This must clearly be a "season of illness", because serious ilnesses have struck many people close to me. A close cousin is hospitalized after showing up in the ER with a 700+ glucose level, my sister-in law who refused her stage 3 cervical cancer treatment last summer, is now stage 4 and has deemed terminally ill, and my brother is still having severe gastrointestinal symptoms but refuses to return to the ER. In the middle of that, we're moving in the middle of next month and my mother is visiting next week. Yeah, I need Calgon to get me the hell outta here for a few days, LOL!!!

I decided to take the next 2 days off before my exam because it occured to me that I've sacrificed enough for my job to get little in return and since everyone is looking out for themselves, I'd better join the crowd. I still don't have any info about my fellowship whichis higly disappointing but I know that good things come in time, I just have to be patient. My final presentation is coming along well and I look forward to knocking it out of the park so to speak but given my poor performance on the first exam, I have a LOT to proove. And in a funny irony, I've still got med school othe radar despite my near exhaustion. In times like these, I think about all the interesting things I'd learn and with the constant realization of my soon to be empty nest, I just may end up with "real", live, patients too!! 25 years ago I always figured on a career at a health clinic and with my renewed interest in infectious diseases, I can easily see myself there again. An IM residency, followed by a fellowship in either Public Health or ID sounds better and better everyday!

Okay, back to studying the pathogenesis of Anthrax, Botulinum, Tularemia, ect, ect

Peaks and Valleys, part 2

So much for trying to sleep in today, I've been up since 6:30 for NO good reason, LOL!!!

Unfortunately, my brother/cousin STILL doesn't know what going on with him and is still dealing with rectal bleeding. Honestly, I never really gave much thought to what would happen if I ever needed medical care and couldn't get it. What I do know is that my opinion of the health care bill hasn't changed because of his situation, and my opinion is that is that I'm NOT in favor of it in it's current form. What I am in favor is protection for Physicians from morbidly obese patients being able to sue their doctors when their surgeries through 10 feet of adipose tissue goes wrong. I'm in favor of insurance companies doing away with those silly ass preexisting condition clauses and a tight rope being placed on medical malpractice suits. But that would require the President go ofter "his own" and we all know he isn't going to do that to any significant degree. Free health care for chain smokers and most of the overweight folks a saw eating at Golden Coral Friday night is NOT what I support. I say if you want to live an unhealthy lifestyle,then YOU should have to "pay" for it. It's the reason I didn't have 100% sympathy for my Dad when he was terminally ill, yet STILL chain smoking and why I feel the same about my brother. Sometimes you pay with your life for the choices you make.

Now on to a subject which is near and dear to most people's heart, their hair. Okay, in the Black community, hair can be a touchy subject as comedically illustrated by Chris Rock in his movie "Good Hair". But I got a new take on this hair issue when I went to the my stylist in February and left with about 1/5 of my hair in the sink! Turns out I got a bad perm and THIS is a Black woman's worst nightmare!!! So now I'm left wearing heavy conditioner in my hair everyday, all day for at least 6 months until my hair in the right rear quadrant of my head grows back, LOL!! Oh well, I'm just glad my hair follicles weren't permanently damaged to the point where my hair couldn't grow back. In that case, someone would be pass due for an old fashioned ass whippin!!

Be careful what you ask for

So after years of trying to "get in", it appears I FINALLY have to opportunity to get my "infectious diseases" on. Unfortunately, I can't talk much about it because of where I'll be working and the nature of the "bugs" I'll be working with, but suffice it to say that I'm extremely grateful for this opportunity which will also allow me to get my PhD should I choose to!

And since I've been up since 5 AM (I had Komen volunteer work to do today), I'm going to end this post now and get some rest!!!!

Peaks and Valleys

I've spent most of my adult like wondering why life wasn't "happy" all the time and it wasn't until I was sliding into 40 that I realized that "happy" isn't a long term emotion/feeling, nor is it meant to last. When I was a Eastern Philosophy/Asian Religions major in college 20+ years ago, I learned that neutrality is a feeling that gets you VERY far in life because it's all about balance, not too happy, not to sad, just neutral. Well unfortunately, I've tended to be a VERY emotional person and that hasn't always been a good thing in relationships or careers. Fortunately at 43, I'm feeling pretty good about my ability to detach myself from "things" as a Buddhist would do and no, I'm not about to start chanting, shave my head bald, and start rubbing the big bellies of jade buddha statues, LOL!! But I am seeing a TON of things differently and the timing couldn't be better...........

So last week, I learn the man who is my cousin, but whom I've shared a life with like a brother, likely has colon cancer, with a splash of liver cancer thrown in too. He's 44 years old. To tell you truth I don't know how I feel about it because his lifestyle is shit, so his diagnosis isn't a complete surprise to me, or anyone else in the family. He spent all of last week in the hospital after having tried to get admitted and tested for the past 2 years (he has no health insurance). Now I'm an open minded person, but when he showed up at the ER the first few times under the influence of who knows what, with his white wife in a small, southern emergency room, with no health insurance, he was NEVER gonna get good care. Call me pessimistic, but I'm just one of those people who knows from experience that racism permeates EVERY aspect of society especially medicine which is why we need more brown folks in medicine. So now, because he's poor, they didn't do a CEA which would have definitively given them the answer they need, he has to sit for 2 weeks until they do some additional testing. Translation, they're doing special stains to confirm what they already know. Of course, it's times like these that I'm reminded of why I will stay on the path to becoming a Physician which on a certain level is kinda selfish, since I should be thinking about him. And I am, it just would have been real nice if I could have called and spoken to his Physicians as an equal. I did get a chance to look at his scans and requested the slides of his biopsy samples be sent to me so that I can have a few of my mentors get a looksie but dammit, I want to read those damn slides!!!!! Anyway, my family is in deep prayer over this situation which unfortunately for me personally, is all to familiar..............................

Moving on, tomorrow I meet with to 2 people who are shaping up to be my new mentors now that I appear to be headed in the infectious disease direction and one of them is a true inspiration! She is a woman who had a baby by a Black man at 17, and by 28 had her PhD in Biochemistry and is now married to another Black man. Now the fact that her baby Daddy and husband are Black isn't something I would normally mention but this woman is from rural Maryland, so I'm guessing that biracial kid thing probably didn't go over too well at first in her home town. She's also now a tenure track professor to boot doing ID research at a local university. The other person I'm meeting is an NIH/NIAID researcher who's helping me with my presentation in a couple weeks on Antibody Dependent Enhancement in Dengue infection, so that's exciting too! He's also got a fellowship position open in his lab so this could truly be the beginning of something special! Of course, this in NO WAY changes my plan about med school and if anything reinforces, my MD/PhD plan. The NIH move could potentially be critical because NIH has a special program for minorities in MD/PhD programs which pays 80% med school tuition and 100% of grad school tuition with a stipend for ALL years. Now the stipend is pretty low, but I could easily supplement that with my own funding from any of the 3 organizations where I have memberships. So I don't know, I have a feeling something really special is about to happen in my life careerwise, and right about now, I could use ALL the positivity I can get my hands on!!!!

What is Black culture?

As my daughter has grown up in a predominately affluent, white neighborhood outside of DC, I've often asked myself the question, is she growing up with a sense of what "black culture" is?? Then I immediately follow that question with what IS Black culture and how problematic will it be to her future if she has very little of it?

I guess when I think about what Black culture is, I believe the answer depends in who you ask. It seems to me that a significant portion of Whites and Blacks believe Black culture to equate to ghetto culture, fried chicken, sagging pants, hair weave, big gold hoop earrings, and no Daddy's in the home. But who decided on that highly limited and ignorant definition? Why can't "Black culture" be tennis lessons and engineering camp as is the case in my daughter's life?

I do have to concede that "Black culture" does seem to be defined along socioeconomic lines. For example, when I went home for Thanksgiving, my daughter shared her room with 2 cousins she's grown up with. One of them is the daughter of a former prostitute and crack addict who is being raised by her now recovered mother and who also has an older sister whom has had 3 kids by 3 different men, who flunked out of high school and also spent what should have been her high school years in a juvenile detention center, and is currently pregnant with a forth kid by yet another man!!! The second cousin is the child of an alcoholic father and recovered heroin addict mother who is being raised by her grandmother. Neither of the girls attends good schools, although the later is highly gifted academically and they are both growing up in lower middle class to poor neighborhoods. My daughter's life is the exact opposite and to many people, including people in our own families, she's growing up "White" whatever the hell that dumb $hit means! But as a Black woman, I DO know what Black folks mean when they say that. The thing is I NEVER hear such ignorance from ANY of my upper middle to upper class Black friends who share backgrounds and experiences similar to mine. In other words I ONLY hear this from folks with what I call "hood rat" mentalities. Besides, who in their right mind would want for the their kids, frequent exposure to the kinda low life living and mentality I described here?

So this brings me to my sister/friend whose nieces from a mid sized town in NC, visited me and daughter over Spring break. I'll be honest, knowing that these girls were being raised by grandparents in the 'hood because their parents have some of the issues I mentioned earlier, DID give me reason to be concerned whether or not they would get along, but they seemed to get along just fine, no doubt due the strong influences my sister the Doctor, has had in their lives (plus she's one of the most bougie Black women I know, LOL!!) But 24 hours after she mentioned to me after she'd taken her nieces back that she was concerned my daughter may not know "how to act" around other black folks, I got a little peeved. My questions are, why is it "unusual" for my daughter to rather read a book than gossip about the latest Lil' Wayne video? Why is it "unusual" if she'd rather play tennis or golf, than shoot a basketball (she's almost 5'8" at 13 years old!!!) Why is is "unusual" that she plays the violin instead of the clarinet? And why is it "unusual" for her to speak proper english more often that street slang?

IMHO, those things are NOT "unusual" and certainly don't make her "act White", or less in touch with who she is as a young Black woman, those things make her who she is, HERSELF!!!!! And my sister and I don't really disagree with that. Where we disagree is with her statement about my daughter needing to be comfortable around predominately Black groups of people. My thing is that with the way her life is shaping up, besides family functions, when will she ever be around predominately "Black groups" of people for any large period of time and why is that a "need"? And since when has being "down" been equated to being comfortable with other Black folks? Our church is extremely multicultural, her school is multicultural, our neighborhood is multicultural, and her friends look like a meeting of the UN. And in the end, isn't this what folks like Martin Luther King wanted for ALL people? My daughter is comfortable around PEOPLE and that's ALL I really care about.

BTW, Happy Easter everyone, and for the first time in years, we're coloring easter eggs!!! Yeah!:)

Job part 2

Now that the second of an absolutely exhausting week is almost over, I have the time (and energy) to fill my readers in on what's going on with my job. Well I had an epiphany of sorts after my oral surgery, where I realized that working 6 days a week, checking/responding to email from home, squeezing lunch in between work and never using the 2 breaks I get per day for months on end, was driving me nuts and burning me out. BIG TIME!!!! So with the help of a close friend, I decided to really rethink what a job/career really means to me and I decided that it means FAR too much especially given the fact that a good portion of what happens on any job is out of my hands. With that in mind, I redoubled my efforts at finding a job related in some way to biological agents/infections disease (BA/ID from this point forward) and obviously living in metro DC puts me in a hot spot for related jobs. Problem is that I'd have more options if I had a top level security clearance but that will come in time.

Moving on, I'm finally on something that looks like a regular study schedule and I can't believe it took me this long to get my a$$ in gear. Of course, if I had done some MCAT review I'd feel even better, but I'm temporarily giving myself a pass on that for now.

Speaking of school, my BA/ID prof has really hooked me up with great contacts. So great that I've been given a conditional acceptance to a PhD program. Normally I'd be thrilled but because I haven't found the gig that's gonna let me get my dissertation work done there too, I'm a little hesitant about breaking out the Patron just yet, LOL!!! That, and I haven't received the official word yet (they're waiting on me to submit some additional documentation).

So again, another brief post this time due to the late hours I've been keeping with my daughter who's out on Spring break.:)