Introduction & Early Stages

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August 2007

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Neil Diamond had it right when he called these the “Hot August Nights”. I am at my threshold for discomfort when it comes to the weather these days – the kind of days when your shirt gets so sweated up you don’t know what to do with yourself. But the muggy, sticky humidity – on top of the nasty, rotten smell – of New York City in the summer makes you want to fly south for the winter and up up up north for the summer.

Though I cut a break in the weather today and seized the opportunity to shlep (a Yiddish word for…well…”shlep”) to the gym this morning. It has been a few weeks so I’m back to the “basics” which, more often than not, is where I typically start and end my workouts. But it’s “better than nothing” I repeatedly tell myself, and afterwards I really feel better so it’s all good.

In other news, these Presidential candidates – getting their sound bites on the news from time to time – are really starting to irritate me. It’s like there is no substance to any of them or what they say. It’s more about the past and their look and feel than their plan to, oh I don’t know, help people who are uninsured or the like.

Those of us in the arthritis community – very similar to the diabetes or asthma community – have a responsibility to get louder and louder so our voices are heard. We pay an awful lot for mediocre health insurance and we’ll get screwed first chance they get (and by they I mean the health insurance companies).

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a doctor. Not just any doctor, I’d be a rheumatologist. Probably because I know more about rheumatology than any other specialty, but also because I know what it’s like to feel better thanks to a rheumatologist and to benefit from the great care of one. Provided I could take with me into the next life a little something from this life, my compassion for people with rheumatic diseases – from the creaky knee after years of tennis to the complexities of an autoimmune disease like Lupus – would be right there front and center of my desk.

I think because so many of us aren’t doctors – and haven’t spent all of that blood, sweat and tears becoming one – we should take a second to appreciate our doctor(s) for their hard work. In my own quasi-obnoxious way I do this often, usually by asking my doctors how THEY feel when I visit them (figuring they’re usually the ones doing the asking) but I think it’s important to tell them, in all seriousness, how great a job they do.

Let’s give our doctors a little encouragement. We could live without lawyers. We could live without insurance agents. We could not live without our doctors.

And for the record...who would want to visit a doctor with a 2.8 GPA?