So True.

Football

I've spent the last 2 hours watching about 1 hour worth of the Bears/Packers football game with Danny.  He's slowing down the TiVo and rewinding every play and trying to teach me football. 

Dude.

There are SOOOO many rules in football.  Eligible receivers?  Shotgun position? Off sides?

I've always thought that women were more detail-oriented and could remember more information than men; but now I've decided that men have just filled up their brains with football.  I will forever be more forgiving of Danny forgetting to pick up milk at the grocery store, because apparently 50% of his brain is filled with the rules and statistics of sports.

We Do Not Say Thank You For This

Remember Avatar?  I think about one of the scenes from that movie a lot.  Toward the beginning of the movie, the main woman character kills a few wolves who are attacking the main male character.  He thanks her for saving him; and she harshly reprimands him with "We do not say thank you for this!! This is sad!"  She's saying that any death is wrong, and it's never something that should be rejoiced in anyway.

It's hard in surgery sometimes, because the biggest and "coolest" surgeries are almost always the result of someone having a terrible terrible cancer.  Today I was in a surgery for a colon cancer, that ended up being fixed to the pancreas and duodenum.  So we did a combination right hemicolectomy and Whipple procedure.  That probably means incredibly little to most of my readers; but the bottom line is that it was a ridiculously "cool" procedure, and the sort of thing that happens once every 10 years at a big academic hospital like ours.

I try to remember every day that we do not say thank you for death.  We do not get excited about advanced cancer.  When the patient is asleep, their cancer may be "neat"; but the moment that they wake up and learn what we learned during surgery- their cancer is devastating.

I bounce back and forth constantly.  I told one medical student about what we were going to have to do for this patient, and I was annoyed that they didn't recognize how cool the surgery was.  Another student was excited about the rarity of the surgery; and I was annoyed by his insensitivity.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four. 
  for you reading pleasure. :-)

Chapter Three

Chapter Three of the novel is done!!

And here is a highlight from each of the prior chapters, for those of you who are on the fence about hopping over to my other site and reading it....

Chapter One-  "As their old TV flickered to life and the Gifting Day broadcast began; Marlene gasped, knowing immediately that something had gone terribly terribly wrong."

Chapter Two-  "William!  What the hell is going on?!  What was that?!”  she shouted again.   He didn’t respond, and for the first time, Andrea became suddenly aware of the redness that was seeping through the back of his shirt."

Chapter Three   "In front of everyone whose opinions he cherished, he lit the fuse on his rocket.  Seconds before the rocket should have lifted off, Christopher was smacked in the head by his religiously fervent mother who had snuck up on him while he was engrossed in watching his fuse burn. "

Gifting Day

I've dove head first into starting my next novel.  Instead of doing the whole thing in one month like last time; this time I'm going to post a chapter a time on my blog.  I'll put a link here for each new chapter that I write, so you can all read it as it develops.  I think this will make me more excited about writing it, because it'll give me little bits of accomplishment and gratification as I go, instead of having to wait until the end.  Also, then you don't have to pay to read it.  I'll probably still throw it on Amazon when I'm done so that I can put it on my bookshelf.

I'll post a link to each chapter as I go over there---->
Chapter One and Chapter Two are already up.

Enjoy!!