Web Log
Authorial Hijinks in the Spring
Dearly Beloved Y’all: Surgery is upon me! One month of general surgery in the county hospital, two weeks of transplant in the university hospital, two weeks of cardiothoracic (aka heart surgery) at the VA hospital. As you might guess, I won’t be posting much on this blog during that time. For what’s been happening in [...]
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Aequanimitas
Dearly Beloved You Guys: I am struggling to keep up this blog. Clearly. In the past, I have declined to post because I have nothing to report, because I’m chugging away at a manuscript deadline or cramming for an exam, because my personal thoughts are quotidian. However for the past three months, the opposite has [...]
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Back to the Wards
The time Stanford graciously allowed me to pause medical clerkships to write and promote Spellbound has gone with the last of the summer. It was wonderful. Book tour was much busier and more fun this year. The time to research, write, and think was a rare luxury. But now, summer’s over. School’s back in. I [...]
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Spellbound Book Tour Video
Last night I came stumbling in from a six city book tour. Compared to last year, tour was more successful, more fun, and much more hectic. Thank you to everyone who came out to the events. Apologies to those for whom I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked. And for everyone [...]
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New Fiction: The Autobiography of a Brain
Introduction To continue to celebrate Spellbound’s launch and book tour (hello from Dallas, btw), I’m publishing another organ-based magic realism story. As with The Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Liver, this is an experimental bit of fiction that helped me to explore the close relationship I experience existing between literature and medicine. So, without further [...]
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New Fiction: The Heartbroken Work of a Staggering Liver
Introduction In my mind, medicine and narration are intertwined. I understand nearly everything–from how a medication might work, to the course of an untreated disease–as a story. Perhaps that’s why I see literature and medicine as being woven of the same cloth. I know I understand a particular area of clinical medicine well when I [...]
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My Second Bookday & Booktour
Dearly Beloved You People: Bookdays are to authors what birthdays are to everyone. The analogy is a pretty good one: each is an excuse to party, each may cause joy or anxiety, and we attach a great significance to each even though little to nothing of importance actually happens on the given day. That said, [...]
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Whither Blogging?
Dearly Beloved You Guys: I’m not entirely sure when but somewhere in the past year my capacity for blogging suffered. I could blame the usual suspects: writing deadlines, a demanding day job, the need to have a personal life, blah blah blah. But really, true culprits are my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Between medicine and [...]
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More Spellbound Reviews, More Book Tour
My rotation in pediatrics finished up with a month on the general medicine service at Stanford’s academic pediatrics center, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. It was the most demanding month of medical school so far, not only in terms of hours worked but also in terms of personal challenges. Many of my fundamental beliefs–some of them [...]
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Early Reviews of Spellbound
My one day away from the children’s hospital this week just flashed by and now I find myself scrambling to blog before the madness begins again at 0500. Sigh. In any case, I’m very happy to report that there have been three published reviews of Spellbound, all of which I have summarized below. Romantic Times [...]
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