April 21, 2022

by Dr. Plastic Picker

Wow. My body is tired. I now realize my binge-watching Kdramas (and I’ve been a bad middle-aged mommy and binge-watching a lot) has been kind of excessive. I now realize that some of this is not unlike people who drink alcohol (which I do not but I am not judging) to numb themselves. I now realize that ending my traditional middle management career at five years of Assistant Chief was an emotionally hard and wrenching decision. I was numbing myself from the emotional fallout. The fallout, ended up being the emails and calls from some upper management that never materialized. I know that they too are just cogs in the HMO machinery, but to say that I am slightly disappointed would be true. I think all of us deep down all want to be recognized. Since I’m a metric oriented person, I know objectively I did so much in the five years that I was Assistant Boss. But now that I’m at that age of being a middle aged palindrome, where my age is the same read forwards and backwards, I realize that it was meant to be. I’m meant to decide where my path goes. Read forward or backwards, I’m still me and actually more fundamentally me that I could ever be.

So with those convulated thoughts, something amazing happened yesterday at our HMO. I was one instructor at one of the breakout sessions, but my climate HMO Friend Dr. RA organized one of hte first of it’s kind San Diego wide climate symposiums with cross institutional participation on the instructor and resident side from all the major Family Practice and Emergency Medicine departments. It was very epic and she has her own narrative that she will share soon in an academic piece.

On the left-most corner of the conference space yesterday, I was with for two hours playing my character of Dr. Plastic Picker. I even wore my branded T-shirt that my sister made for me. Two ED HMO medicine faculty had a simulation code of an asthmatic patient, and at the end of the mock simulation code – I did a quick debrief on the intersection of climate change and air pollution and asthma. Then weaved into it quickly my own burnout story, and the power of advocacy and raising up your voice.

When one meets new friends that stimulate some creativity, beautiful things come from it. And I met two people with the skillset and the imagination to make Cows Creek Physician Rescue (CPR) a reality. Basically of the two ED Faculty I worked with yesterday, one has an MBA and thought our collective idea had merit and the other ED Faculty has the skillset and the interest to move this forward. Since there are not enough truffles to harvest on our Oregon farm now, I am hoping to bring the idea of small conferences and wilderness medicine courses to our farm. And these are pictures of the two people that have the skillset to do it.

So that is it. I have two new green MD friends. My old friends at PHAC are still my best best friends. But Dr. Plastic Picker can have many friends because when I’m doing climate work I’m an extrovert. I really hope these two friends will help me make CPR a reality!