I know this is irrational, but when I'm on call for the weekend and everyone around me is celebrating how happy they are that it's finally Friday I kind of want to punch them in the nuts. (Substitute ovaries if the person I'm going to punch is a lady.) Being on call on the weekend is just depressing. I know I'm not on call every weekend, and we all take turns doing it, but man, there's something about walking into the ORs early on a Saturday morning before the lights have even been turned on--all the while knowing that normal people everywhere are either sleeping or playing with their kids or just generally doing leisurely things far, far away from the hospital--that just makes you feel forsaken.
But anyway, my point here is not to complain about being on call this weekend, rather to ask for some feedback. I have been blogging for just about ten years now, since the beginning of my second year of medical school. Except we didn't call them blogs then, we called them "online journals" or "personal web pages," and it never really occurred to me to not write under my real name, because of course, no one was going to read it except for people who knew me already, right? (Those were more innocent times--some would say stupider.)
Anyway, obviously the internet has changed a lot since the year 2000--or as we called it at the time, "Y2K," while we holed up in our impermeable canned food-stocked bunkers awaiting the apocalypse--and while I was not aware of any other medical-type blogs at the time that I started mine, now there are probably thousands. The fact of it is it's very easy to have a blog now, and many people have, though the range of medical blogs run the full spectrum of genres. Some are informational, some a personal, some are clinical and some are introspective. Some people blog under their real names and some blog anonymously, some blog for perspective and some blog to bitch about being on call this weekend. (Cough.) Probably in most ways, the reasons behind medical blogging aren't much different from the reasons behind much of the content on the internet, though obviously, the edifice of medicine presents some interesting overlay as well as unique issues and challenges.
Let's say that there was to be a panel discussion group of medical bloggers. Let's say there would be a presentation portion, and then an open discussion portion. What issues would you want that panel to hit upon? What topics would you want discussed? What questions would you ask? Or, if you're a medical blogger yourself, what particular difficulties or rewards have you come across that you didn't expect when you started writing online?
There is more to this story than just me asking idly, of course, but further information as events warrant--for now, let's talk blogging in medicine. What would you like to know? And what kind of stuff do you think I might like to know?
Let's say that there was to be a panel discussion group of medical bloggers. Let's say there would be a presentation portion, and then an open discussion portion. What issues would you want that panel to hit upon? What topics would you want discussed? What questions would you ask? Or, if you're a medical blogger yourself, what particular difficulties or rewards have you come across that you didn't expect when you started writing online?
There is more to this story than just me asking idly, of course, but further information as events warrant--for now, let's talk blogging in medicine. What would you like to know? And what kind of stuff do you think I might like to know?