I found the property when I was curled in bed in complete exhaustion and embarassment. I’m just trying to figure out life and had been drinking less milk to try to be more plant based, and I wonder if this resulted in my teeth being more weak? I think it must have been switching dental offices to the one that I had been at for over a decade and then to a new office that I didn’t quite mesh with. Now I realize why some people blame the doctor’s office. I’m blaming the dentist’s office. Anyway, I’m back with my own dentists office and I have some work that needs to be done and several visits. After a root canal and feeling very exhausted and tired like someone literally punched me on the side of the said root canal, I was in bed incapacitated. I was questioning all this plant based stuff, and realized that drinking some lactose free milk here and there would be OK. I’ve never been about absolutes. I’m going to try to eat yogurt more and honestly just need to floss better. I will try to eat soy based yogurt which I make at home.
Helpers. Each one of them. There are so many people out there.
May 19, 2021
by drplasticpicker
Yesterday was another epic climate work day. If you were at the climate change and health meeting last night, I apologize if I sounded a bit manic. Tuesdays is my “admin day” and during my paying hours I stay true to my tasks that I am paid for. I had vaccine quality meeting, per diem physician meetings, sustainability emails, talking to schedulers and just trying to nudge the department on a forward path. It’s amazing how many time-booby traps are out there. Half of my job is to keep on scanning the HMO landscape of all the ways our department can go and yell “TURN TURN TURN” before we get sucked into the wrong direction. That can be the wrong physician, wrong project, wrong quality metric. For now, that is the role I play and I’m not shy about it. But it can be discombobulating at times. Right now I’m working on reorganizing this very large HMO committee into something functional and impactful. We will get there but there are a lot of politics and fine details that need to be worked out.
But then I had the climate work and it was indeed an epic day. To summarize what happened for the blog readership
HMO Green Team: I thought this one was in the bag but the upper upper management person emailed confirmed my interest and Dr. DN. I thought we had already told the upper upper management person that we were going to do it. But anyway, it’s official now and we will share the role which comes with no time and no pay. Figures. But we are going to make it great and save the earth via greening our little corner of the healthcare sector, and then the time and pay will come later. And even if it does not come, it’s the right thing to do. I pick up trash for free, and I’ll do this. In the end money is a proxy for time and efforts. But what is the value of money if we don’t prevent Planet Earth from becoming like Vulcan. Vulcans can live without water for days. I am rewatching the Star Trek Enterprise. But we humans have not evolved to that extent now. I think it’s easier to try to fight to keep global warming to less than 1.5 degrees centigrade than evolve to live without water for a week.
Gril Scout Troop Brownie Troop Outing/Trash Art Project: I became connected with a brownie troop in our area a few months ago and delivered a talk to them. They have our patches. The girls were so adorable I can’t begin to tell you. Trying to keep my circle of influence authentic and manageable, I offered to do a litter pick with them and a trash art project. We are in conversations right now. I have reached out more because I thought they were really fun, and it’s something I want to do. So I’ve saved the day for them.
Committee Meeting: Above is our climate change and health commitee. The actual committee is about 30 people, but these are the ones that showed up. It doesn’t seem like a lot of people, but they are all leading big efforts that we needed to catch up on and discuss. It was a very impactful 30 minutes and exchange of ideas. I am so grateful for each of them. Truly.
Climate Change and Health Rotation: We actually talked about this a bit yesterday at the committee meeting. Several offered to precept. We talked about strategizing it into a fellowship eventually. I’ve already begun to collate relevant articles. I have to learn not to rush things. Several of us are attending the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health this weekend, and it will be a natural time to text and flush out the rotation. There is nothing like that now in our area and I think 2 residents initially, one rotation in April and another in May would be good. We shall see. I think I need to sketch it out and hand it over to someone else to bring across the finish line. This is a manageable project for someone. I forget how much I’ve done in the past. The pediatric rotation that exists in our HMO was started by myself and an old mentor. I helped start that and I forgot all about it. So there is precedent. This rotation I’m more committed to and it will need my presence.
Healing Gardens: Sounds like our particular office is going to get approval for a healing garden. I hope they put in pollinators and make it a monarch habitat. It’s so easy. Then you can put a sign on up. I heard about this from another departmental leader. I really do think the butterfly kit project helped propel this idea a bit. But it will be so nice to have a place to walk and sit during lunch. I’m still trying to green the top of the parking structure, but those planters are really rough. The soil is coming back to life but I don’t know how many years it is going to take.
But rather than waiting for years for things to happen, I’ve realized that with all the above projects that I need to reach out. Find help. Sometimes the help comes from unexpected corners. I try not to force projects, just put my head down and keep plugging away. And sometimes I look up and I see a bird for inspiration or I see a beautiful face of a fellow pediatrician lending a hand. In the end this task of stopping climate change is monumental and existential. When I accepted that, that it when I learned to reach out and ask for help. And for everyone out there who shows up, whether it be at last nights meeting, or all the multitude of ways we can move the needle on climate change – just thank you. Thank you for showing up and getting to work. Hope is earned. Hope is earned through action.
I found hope yesterday morning with a good bag. Those are reused upcycled styrofoam! We are lots of onions coming!
The aroma is wonderful, but there is only so much parsley you can eat in one sitting.
May 18, 2021
by drplasticpicker
I got through the day yesterday. I was definitely dragging during morning clinic. My sleep schedule was off due to blogging at 2am rather than at 4am, and then after finishing a blogpost – I went to sleep on the couch. Obviously I was not able to finish an entire sleep cycle. Therefore I woke up groggy and not in my best form. But I dragged by eco-avatar middle aged body through the morning routine and was able to make it into work. I forgot my phone at home which ended up being a blessing in disguise. An entire day of phone detox is a good thing. I sent an email out to the department to let them know I had no phone, and just to call if there were issues. There were no issues that I was aware of. There are many of us in leadership that were available via instant text, so my being in my office just an actual email away – was okay.
You can’t make this stuff up. I saw this yesterday on my beach plog on the way to Tourmaline. Left the motorcycle but recycled the cans.
May 17, 2021
by drplasticpicker
Sometimes life is stranger than fiction, or even my trashart. I gathered bag #455 yestserday and it was a reused pita bread bag that was filled with wet plastic bags mostly washed up on Tourmaline Beach. I hadn’t really meant to head to the beach but I’m glad I did. It’s always an adventure. I wanted to start jogging more, so naturally ended up in my spot and did a beach cleaning amongst the rocky shore. I saw a beautiful snowy egret. They are a rare sight and only come feed where the kelp is left in it’s natural state. Where there is kelp, there are insect and remnants of crabs and other crustaceans. The “beach” of the white sand is really not natural. There is supposed to be kelp. The surf-rake removes it for us humans so we can recreate (and I mean to use that word in a new way). If it was up to me, we’d leave the kelp and the beach would be for the beautiful birds like the snowy egret.
Lava Zones. By Dr. John G. Van Hoesen – Previously unpublished. Provided directly to me for uploading., CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
May 16, 2021
by drplasticpicker
My family member and I (our two families) put in an offer for a 25-acre ranch on the Big Island of Hawaii. It’s surprising that even with the hot real estate market, there are only two financial entities in the world looking for a 25 acre ranch on the Big Island in that particular lava zone. Yes we have to know about lava zones if you are buying on the Big Island. As always we are trying to get a reasonable deal, so offered lower than the asking price. We will be the back-up offer as they accepted an offer already. But it is contingent on financing and selling another property. With real estate, many many things can happen to derail a transaction. We are experienced buyers in a strong position who can get the deal done. This is reflected in our lower offer though. So we will wait and see, and if it happens – it happens. If it doesn’t, than that’s the market and we move on.
by drplasticpickernJust thinking outloud of the blog. If we can write an article Durrwachter-Erno et al and have it based on an avatar theme, why can’t I frame the new Climate Change and Health HMO Residency Clerkship around a similar framework. It makes sense to me.
Clean Air Week – Rotate with pediatric allergist Dr. Michael Land or UCSD allergist Dr. Christine James in clinic two sessions, linking rise of pediatric allergic diseases like asthma and allergies with climate change. Attend Air Pollution Control Board Meeting either with Dr. Birkbeck Garcia or Dr. Dan Spencer or Portside AirQuality Meeting. Definitly a cool session with Dr. Dave Neison on wildfire mitigation and thinking about active transport and how can physicians aid in these efforts, or advocate for this.
Clean Water Week Either pick plastics or pharmaceutical waste? This week we could also focus on storytelling and narrative medicine. What is your climate story? Shadow policy folks at Climate Actions Campaign or site visit with the Environmental Health Coalition. Environmental Justice focus on water issues. Access to beaches. River health. Wetlands.
Yep. It’s going to happen. I’m going to buy half of that Big Island Property. The math works out. It’s crazy when the math works out. I have our portion of the downpayment easy, and we are still investing in the other commercial project but this will be for fun and for creativity. The mortgage payment and taxes we split with my family member, and the monthly cost is actually not that much. Even if we just keep the land and let family and friends use for free (or you just pay to make sure it gets cleaned), it will be worth it. And when organizations like the posh private school we send our kids to ask us for donations, I can just donate a week at our vacation home and deduct it. I can do the same for Girl Scouts. But more importantly, we will get the land that I’ve been dreaming of.
The birds’ collective singing this morning is particularly trilling and lilting and beautiful. Its 547AM and I haven’t been able to truly be here on the blog to write in a few days. I posted things related to my climate work, but I haven’t been able to process and reflect. The writing has become much needed as I try to figure out this wonderful thing called life.
I went to bed crying last night. I was cleaning up my photos and I delete all the litter-picking photos and nature scenes, because I’ve taken then and chosen which ones to post and use on the blog versus Instagram versus facebook. It takes some sort of carbon to keep them, and those images I let go. But I must have accidently pressed a screen function that I didn’t know exist, because suddenly a lifetime of selfies on my daughter and myself popped up. I scrolled through those photo of a younger me and my little girl , and I did what any mother would do. I looked at her face, the tilt of her head and the roundness of her cheeks and the gap-tooth smiles – and I cried. A decade of regrets came pouring down my face. Where had the years gone? Where had I been? Where had that little chubby cheeked grade-schooler gone to?
I’m done with being afraid. It makes sense for some to be afraid, if you’ve lived through abuse, been hungry, worried about being able to survive the next day. I get it. I am lucky. I have had difficult moments to overcome in life that made me fearful. We all have especially women. It makes sense to be cautious when you are worried about survival. But now that I’m on the other side of what is the “Fear Zone” and into the “Learning and Growth Zone” I don’t want to go back.
If not me, than who? I declared that I was going to help save the earth by gathering one pieace of plastic at a time and I’m almost to 500 bags! I’ve encouraged a movement of climate activism in my small corner of the world and we’ve made real changes. Some of this is about plastic, but it’s also a metaphor about life. Not to waste life. Not to waste resources. To be creative. To free ourselves from the conventional life and conventional thinking, it order to tap into that authenic self in order to find true contentment and also to help save the earth. It’s all related.
Turtle? Dinosaur? Eagle? Not sure. But I LOVE HIM! I napped with him yesterday afternoon. I cleaned the ocean plastic twice and wiped it down with my home-made vinegar.
May 9, 2021
by drplasticpicker
21 engagements yesterday from facebook to the blog regarding the Big Island Pipe Dream of buying 25 acres. 21 engagements! https://drplasticpicker.com/physician-wellness-institute-im-pretty-sure-i-could-do-it-better-and-cheaper-than-1300-if-i-own-the-land/I hope some people come back to the blog this morning and read about what this blog is REALLY ABOUT. Picking up ocean plastic pollution! I am DR PLASTIC PICKER not DR REAL ESTATE INVESTOR, although I do invest in real estate. But on this blog we glorify the eco-avatar half of ourselves. Am I speaking of myself in the third person? My sister thinks that is really funny and telling for various reasons.
