I feel young

A picture of my glory days at Emory...


So I'm getting to know my co-intern on my team, and now we have med students, so I have a 3rd year med student working closely with me.

Turns out, I'm pretty much the youngest kid on our team.

My co-intern, Avi, is 33, married witha 5 week old son, and has spent 5 years working as a counselor for troubled adolescents. Not just troubled, but often gang members and other very challenging young adults. He's been punched and kicked, been in a facility where all the 'patients' rioted at one time against the staff, been inside the locked facility with threats of one of the patients having a firearm, and so on. He's seen and been through a lot and it gives him a ton of perspective. Now, he's a doctor in training and father in training, and he seems to be enjoying it all. His experience probably lends him so much perspective, because I feel like I'm busy enough just being a doctor in training that if I were a father too, I couldn't handle it!

Which makes me want to be someone who has perspective. Life is all about attitude, and to me developing that attitude has a lot to do with your perspective. I always wonder what I can do to get really good perspective. I want to travel a lot, to experience the 'have-nots', as well as the developed countries that live differently than we do in the US. To learn why people are the way they are. Why the US is so disliked. How people deal with life.

I bet the ignorance of many would be tempered if they travelled and saw something other than through their own experience.

My medical student, Will, is 30, married for 6 years, and did his PhD before starting medical school. Its so funny how med students treat me, like their so respectful and say hi and how are you every day like we're so much above them. I was just a student 3 months ago. But I used to do the same too, treat our residents with respect. Its weird being on the receiving side!

I have a lot of growing up to do - world experience, spirituality, philosphically, as well as with my relationships with Nicole, family and friends, and with my medical career. I feel lucky though, that I am surrounded by just neat and brililant people. All of my friends and family have never ceased to amaze me.

Alan