TGIFFINAD

Dean and I are going out to 1200 Bistro & Lounge for dinner tonight. I can hardly wait. I've been on call for 14 of the past 21 days, and I am tired. I don't want to cook, I don't want to have to wash dishes. I just want to be waited on and served. Starting with an ice cold martini, thank you.



The Family Practitioner, Jose Perez 

I have been working like a dog the past week getting my presentation ready for Iowa. I am giving the opening lecture for the Behavioral Medicine course at Des Moines University Medical School. It's called:

"Practicing Empathy — Poetic Medicine: The Importance of Behavioral Health to the Practice of Medicine"

It's a longish, academic-sounding title; but a necessary one, I think, as it's a humongous topic. I have been putting the whole presentation into PowerPoint, along with some slides of patients, art works, poems, famous writers, quotes. As illustration, I'll be reading several of my own poems ("What is Lost," "Her Name is Rose," "What's Written on the Body," "What the Skin Cutter Feels," etc), as well as those of others, including Lisel Mueller's terrific "Monet Refuses the Operation," Raymond Carver's "What the Doctor Said," and Louise Gluck's "The Red Poppy." It's a lot of work, but I am having a gas putting this together. Who knows, maybe some other medical schools will invite me out to speak?