Vinod Kurup

Hospitalist/programmer in search of the meaning of life

Dec 13, 2008 - 3 minute read - Comments - blog informatics medicine writing

Starting again

For the remaining 2 readers of kurup.org (one of them being me), let me apologize for the lack of posts here over the past couple years. I have always meant to write more, but most of my writing seems to consist of apologies for not writing, short bursts of writing, and then long stretches of inactivity. We are nearing the end of a long stretch of inactivity now, so it’s time for the apologies.

A part of my apprehension has always been that someone will read my writing and laugh at how ridiculous I am. How could I possibly take myself seriously? Yes, I am quite self conscious. But, I figure that now that I’ve posted just about nothing for the past year, anyone left here is going to be pretty forgiving of what I write.

So, I hereby announce my plan to start writing blog posts again. I don’t know what exactly I’ll write about, but I don’t think there will be much focus. Whatever I’m happening to think about will become the new focus of kurup.org.

Kavi is now 18 months old. He loves to sing, dance and make art. He has about 25 words that he says, although you have to be his father or mother to understand most of them. To my delight, he loves to sit in my lap just before bedtime and listen to me read stories. His favorite at the moment is a book called “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.” It’s a silly book that has a repeating theme with the words “Uh oh” and “Oh no!” at regular, predictable places in the story. And whenever I get to those words, Kavi sings them back to me as only a toddler can. “Uh ooooooooh!” and “Nu nooooo!”. I’m actually going to miss these days once he’s speaking coherently someday…

Work has been getting better. I’ve been at DRH for over a year now and I’m starting to feel more comfortable as a hospitalist. I have much more confidence in my gut feelings than I did a year ago. Medicine, however, is always humbling, so whenever you start feeling comfortable, you can almost guarantee that something is going to blindside you and make you re-evaluate your thought processes and assumptions. I had a case like that the other day, which I’m not going to go into at the moment, since it’s too fresh and I haven’t had time to figure out what lessons I need to learn from it yet. On the whole, though, I am feeling better about work. I’ve even volunteered to lead a project to institute online progress notes (Electronic Medical Records) at the hospital. This, to me, is scary. There are so many things that can go wrong with any computerization project in healthcare and this is one that I badly want to go right. If there are any people who have been through this process before, I would love to hear from you.

PS. Thanks Mark

House party Soon there will be two

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