An assortment of things

This week we had another psych interview, and I had to do one. Our physician tutor was very…different so it made the session extra-interesting and way more dynamic than last time. The woman I interviewed had experienced an unbelievable series of unfortunate events from car accidents to abuse and much much more. She suffered from mainly from depression and to be honest, I can totally see why. But she’s doing well and as she told me her story and I compared it to how she’s doing now, there was really just one word that kept coming to mind. Not “drugs”, or “unlucky”, but rather the word resiliency. After all she’d been through including her depression, I was inspired by her fortitude to get through it all quite successfully. Does she still have lots of stuff to deal with? Absolutely. Does she continue to struggle with her depression? Yes. But overall, she’s doing well with a capital “W”. A nice patient to see after last week’s depression downer.

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(brief interlude non-medicine related) Yesterday I was walking in a neighbourhood not far from my house and I was taken aback by a large splash of purple on someone’s lawn. It was a group of about 300 lovely purple crocuses that were showing their faces, enjoying the sun. I couldn’t help but remember a quote from the flower calendar I had on my wall last year that said: I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. Alice Walker, American writer, b.1944 I like that quote and I think it must be true. Purple is such a show-stopping colour, it can’t help but make your day. *** Today we had a seminar on migraines. The physician that delivered it works locally as a family doc and I think she’s great. She’s really blunt, pragmatic, talks to you about being compassionate in a way that doesn’t sound mamby-pamby, doesn’t put up with s**t and knows her stuff. She’s the kind of doctor I’d like to be. I hope I get the opportunity to do some work with her sometime.