life

Where have you been?

Okay. exhale shoop shoop.

for the last year or so I have disappeared from a large part of human interaction. On October 13,2003 I resigned from my residency. The reasons and logic are a whole other post (another babble for another blog entry). During the last year I have been blessed with a beautiful son (MJII) and have been learning computer science. I think that’s a decent start. Blog entries are supposed to be brief.

My background.
I was groomed since childhood for doctorhood.
“ooh he’s smart he should be a doctor!!!!” Being born of Haitian parents it was doctor, lawyer, or adoption. I say that only half-jokingly!!

Brevity, brevity—->
so I went to Harvard for undergrad - pre-med-
and then to UNC for medical school
I pretty much complained the whole time and did decent-to fair because studyin was kind of a half event. I was also the idiot that got a full time job in med school (that was stupid but I had bills).
During med school I started dabbling in web design–went to web development- and went to computer programming. I launched blackdoc2be.com (err- save the energy of clicking the link- nothing’s there right now!) .
I was lured by this thing called programming (i had been a computer geek since childhood). Now I work at an online education company as their co-lead educational content developer. I
was pretty deep into studying software development and artificial intelligence when something weird happened. I began to miss medicine and the life that I had spent oh so much energy to build. I started getting bored because I found that I was able to learn years of computer sci by plowing through the textbooks and although I’m no expert - I yearned the things that I had put all my life toward getting.

In all honesty it’sd impossible to explain to people why you would leave medicine and I have loing since given up explaining it to people- I used to believe my reasons but now every time I start to explain I find myself slipping into nostalgia.

Brevity( I try to remind myself not to shoot too far off on tangents)-
So after learning intro computer sci- i came to realize that there are actually fellowships for nerdy people who go to med school- do residency, and then decide to burden themselves by learning JAVA and other programming languages. I came across articles about a guy who had his M.D. and a PHD in computer science and was a professor(sp) at both schools. I read about Harvard’s Biomedical informatics program and other fellowships.

As I studied Object-Oriented programming I kept coming across articles about medical modelling, medical technology, using computers and knowledge sytems as a decision making tool and came to realize that a lot of this stuff (well maybe not a lot) but a substantial amount was being produced by a wave of physicians that were into Medical informatics.

When I started learning Python- I kept finding references to a sublanguage in Python that is used for melecular modeling. okay- I’m going into geekland (my son’s mother gets this look where her eyes cloud over when I talk about computers- my brother just cuts me off)

Brevity- So now I have “found myself” (cliche much)- There is a career- actually a specialization in medicine- where I can do what I love- and actually take care of patients and teach- and it’s the newest most cutting edge part of medicine right now.

How ironic after so many people took time out of their busy schedule to let me know how big an idiot I was- that I have found something that I love so much- and even more ironic that in the end it turns out to be tied to the very thing I tried so hard to escape–medicine.

© 2004 diamondTearz.