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Photo: tawalker Several weeks ago, I was editing together some video footage for a home movie and was surprised to discover how irritated, negative, and just plain mean I sounded when talking to my wife. I remember most of the interactions that were filmed but not any of the feelings I was quite clearly [...] Photo: Steve Keys Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, blogs (of course), and scores of others—all part of the new and wonderful ways we can now connect with one another electronically, each with its own culture and unique set of rules. In one sense, the planet has never been more interconnected. And [...] Photo: LaPrimaDonna How many patients have I known over the years who’ve found themselves caught in the quicksand that is caring for a chronically ill loved one? Too many to count, so I’ll recount just one. Mrs. S is an elderly woman married to a retired university law professor, who has been slowly losing [...] A reputation is an animal designed by committee: you give birth to it, but the way it develops depends on the actions of others. Your reputation lives a very real existence apart from you, representing the collective mental construct everyone but you shares about you, a construct based partially on your own actions but also [...] “What do you want for dinner?” I asked my wife. “I don’t know,” she answered. “What do you want?” “How about hamburgers?” “No, I don’t want hamburgers.” “What do you want then?” “I don’t know…pasta.” Changing another person’s mind is literally one of the hardest things to do in the world. Think of how many conversations you’ve ever had in which one of the participants decided the other was right and abandoned their previous views altogether. It almost never happens. Why? Because even though ideas flit in and out of our [...] Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife. I wasn’t surprised. He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason: his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing. Or so he’d [...] I am the eldest of four boys. In 2002, my second-youngest brother and his wife announced they were going to have a baby. The news absolutely floored me. This would be the first baby of our generation and represented a significant life change for us all. I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages [...] Several months ago, my wife and I began toilet training our son, Cruise (the Montessori method is to train toddlers to use the toilet as early as possible). We’d diligently put him on a small potty in his bathroom as often as we could drag ourselves into doing it and repeat over and over to [...] Photo: said&done My student’s voice trembled as she answered my question. “How do you think you’ve done so far?” I’d asked her. We’d been together on the general medicine inpatient ward for two weeks—the midpoint of the rotation—and as was my usual custom I was giving her feedback on her performance by first asking [...] |
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