Hi friends!

Just popping in to let you know that I’m alive and around and still chugging along. My plans to catch up and stay caught up never comes to fruition. Someday, maybe?

My summer is busy. I’m going to try to go up for Associate Professor this year, if I get everything together, but honestly, everything has been falling apart and it’s really stressing me out and I’m not sure I’m going to go through it. Maybe. We’ll see.

I just completed my 6th year working at OHSU. My neurosurgery interns that I taught my first year are now the chiefs and it’s just so satisfying seeing them become competent and thoughtful and compassionate physicians. Granted, I’ve had several years of residents graduate, but these two were my little nestlings. I keep holding onto that, rather than thinking about the next decade + of fighting about sodium levels.

I also got a new work title that comes with money (that doesn’t go directly to me – academics, man) and supposed protected time. I’m now with Epic Physician Informaticist for the critical care units, which means that I’m doing more training to understand the workings of our electronic medical record and to be the liaison between the computer analysts and the physicians. So far, it’s translated to a lot more meetings. But it’s really making me think more seriously about getting a graduation certificate or master’s degree in medical informatics, which I’ve been toying with for the last couple of years.

No real travel plans (see above about promotion), but I did get to go home and play with my niblings for a few days. We went camping and walked the creek and played Exploding Kittens over and over and over and over. Love them.

I recently recorded a podcast with A Thoughtful Faith about being a critical care physician and witnessing death and how it’s influenced my beliefs and faith that some of you might be interested in. It was a really lovely conversation with Gina Colvin (the host of the podcast) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I unfortunately, am completely unable to ever listen to myself on audio so I don’t know how it all sounds, but the feedback on facebook has been encouraging.

Here’s the blurb:

What is death when you are on the other side of Mormon orthodoxy when the belief system you might have inherited might not serve you well any longer?

When our former stories of death and dying tire, what frames of meaning-making take their place?

In this reconstructing death series, I talk with a range of LDS spiritual, palliative and health care professionals whose work is with those at the threshold of death. Each of them explores their evolving understandings of dying and death as a result of both their professional work and their personal faith development.