I’m back from a busy week of travel, first to a health journalism conference in Minneapolis, where I talked about what I’ve been up to; then to a reunion of my residency program in Rochester, NY; then to visit family in Florida.
For the latter half of the trip, I was also reporting a story about why the world still doesn’t have a licensed vaccine for Bundibugyo ebolavirus, the rare Ebola species driving the current DRC outbreak.
And on Sunday, The Guardian published my first in a series of “Ask the Doctor” columns. This one was about perimenopause, whee!
I’ll have more to say about that in a later issue. But first, some low/highlights from the trip, and a couple of interesting things from my Ebola reporting that won’t make it into the final story.
A housekeeping note: This is my first paywalled post. If it’s glitchy, please let me know!
A highlight: realizing I was right about my old friends and wrong about an old city
I lived in Rochester from 2001 to 2010, when I was a medical student and a resident. For most of that time, I imagined I would one day be a full-time clinician-researcher (even though the thing I most enjoyed doing was writing about that work, whoops!). My classmates in the combined internal medicine and pediatrics residency I did felt like a family back then. They still do, but we hadn’t seen each other in one place since we graduated before last weekend, when most of us gathered in Rochester for a reunion.
It was awesome; they are awesome. Not a surprise, but always a delight.
At a party with a bunch of other residency alums in our old program director’s backyard, what struck me was the number of people who were struggling to keep working on the front lines. Rochester’s med-peds program has a reputation for producing really well-trained primary care lifers, but more than a handful of people I talked to sounded pretty ground down by the administrative burdens of their jobs.