Have you heard of “lifestyle medicine,” which is apparently new? A definition online suggests “evidence-based, person-centred care,” of which the pillars are: 1) healthy eating 2) mental wellbeing 3) healthy relationships 4) physical activity 5) minimizing harmful substances and 6) restorative sleep. Doctors can do extra training to become “lifestyle physicians,” which bothers me quite a lot because…doesn’t this concept sound an awful lot like family medicine?

In Rivka Galchen’s book Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (see book review dated May 22), the reader accompanies the narrator through a true witch hunt. Although it is a novel, the book is based on the actual trial of Katharina Kepler. Her son was Johannes Kepler, whom you may remember from science class as the mathematician/astronomer who developed understanding of planetary motion, telescopes, and was considered the father of modern optics.
 
     In this book, we see “she said” vs “he said” testimony, false accusations under oath, corruption, bribery, exorbitant legal costs, and painstaking slowness in the process of justice.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me. Has anything changed since 1615?

Apparently, other people don’t have these recurrent dreams to which I'm prone. I seem to have themes that appear over and over, psychoanalysts rejoice!

1. Triathlon dreams, even when I have not done a tri for 5 years now. The race is starting and I’m not ready. I have no contact lenses and can’t see, I’ve forgotten my bike, my gear is at home/in a locker/unavailable. I’m swimming madly to catch up, having missed the start. We’re running, but the route is crazy: up many stairs, through a house, on an escalator, on a floating dock. The only fun one was the dream where the swim portion was completed on waterslides!
2. Exam dreams: I’m late for the exam. I can’t find the room (often my high school, or the hospital at McMaster where I did some of my medical training). I didn’t study properly. Or, I studied but they changed the exam subject to something else and now I’m unprepared. My bike has been stolen, I have no transportation. (I last wrote an exam in 1997. Honestly, brain, for God’s sake…let it go.)
3. Performance dreams: figure skating, dancing. I’m in a large group, it’s a show or contest of some kind, and I know none of the steps. No idea of the choreography, so I’m always a beat behind. Sometimes my vision is impaired here as well.
4. Medicine dreams: office or hospitalist. There are many patients to see and I’m way behind. I can’t find them, I keep getting lost or distracted, I think I’m caught up and then realize I’ve missed an entire list of people, or haven’t seen them for days. There’s a maze of obstacles, or the computer isn’t working, or I go to an examination room and it’s someone’s living room behind the hospital door.
   

After reading Plum Johnson’s “They Left Us Everything,” (see What I’m Reading, April 10, 2024), I’m feeling torn about Marie Kondo, the tiny hyper woman who told us all to thank our stuff and then let it go unless it brought us joy. According to Plum, cleaning out her parents’ very large and cluttered home brought a new appreciation for her parents, their past, their love story, and her family history. She lovingly catalogued and sorted over a century worth of stuff, and it took her a solid eighteen months. She photographed favourite areas of the house and made a photo book.
Whereas my brother-in-law told his parents that if they didn’t clean out their basement, when the time comes, he’s lighting a match and throwing it down the stairs. Obviously, there must be an in-between point here.

What is happening right now?
Teacher friends describe fights at the school, kids who swear at teachers or the principal, assignments not completed, and an inability to intervene without parents getting upset. Why do these kids think this behaviour is okay? Why won't parents allow teachers to discipline their children?
ER doctor friends describe belligerence, patients drunk or high and not wanting help, just somewhere to stay warm and get a sandwich, leaving whenever they want, showing up again when the homeless shelter kicks them out. What led them to this point?
Stores all have those signs now that "shouting and swearing will not be tolerated." Security guards are everywhere. When did it become okay to shout and swear at people, something I witnessed during the COVID toilet paper fiasco?
A friend's fifteen-year-old daughter put up with parents yelling at her when she refereed a soccer game for eight-year-olds.
What is happening?

Can there be a reverse FOMO (fear of missing out)? What would that look like? Fear of doing something you really wish you hadn't? (Makes for a very long acronym). Absolutely fine with missing out (AFWMO?) I'm thinking of this topic because of the recent solar eclipse. Perhaps you heard about it? Obviously, I'm kidding; there was talk of little else leading up to April 8th, whether  purchasing eclipse glasses, avoiding high-traffic areas, or monitoring the weather. Did you view the eclipse?

In my recent experience with writing and writers, I’ve noticed that many– if not all– sometimes question their purpose. When the world is in disarray, what is served by short stories, fiction, poetry? Arts programs are often the first to be cut from cash-strapped schools. People refer to creative pursuits as hobbies, even if the creators are living off the craft. What resonates for one person may not for another. How do we place a value on art?

Have you ever attended Cirque du Soleil?
We've been lucky enough to attend a few times: so many performers with so much incredible talent. How do they find these performers, who seem able to do anything? Street buskers want ten bucks to juggle three or four balls, but in CdS there was the guy juggling eight balls, while also shooting them one at a time into a little cup he wore on his head. How? Someone walks across a taut high wire, to great fanfare (in a usual circus), but then a team of CdS performers uses a slack line, swinging it side to side while doing handstands and two-person cartwheels. People train for their entire young lives in figure skating, yet somehow CdS has an entire show full of skaters who can not only do the usual jumps and spins, but also go up and down ramps, do flips, and perform as a team. How is this pool of talent possible? Where do they find these people? It feels like the franchise has figured something out, either a magic way to bring out the best in a group, or creating a space for people with these particular skills to actually make a living.

Why do I dislike the phrase “giving back?” After all, it’s usually a benevolent context: often, a multi-millionaire rock star or hockey player giving some kind of charitable donation or service to the community. What could possibly be wrong with that?
     Some background: I dislike tropes, those overused phrases that suddenly appear everywhere. For example, the “COVID-19 Pivot” phrase that was used during the early pandemic, particularly in health care and education. Previously, the word pivot evoked, for me, either a basketball manoeuvre, or the hilarious episode of “Friends” where Ross shouts “PIVOT. PIVOT,” while the group of friends moves a couch. Suddenly in 2020, pivot became a euphemism used by those in upper echelons, trying to make us all think that a complete, unprecedented change in our lives and workplaces was just a little thing, a slight turn, a tweak. The reality, of course, being that it felt more volcanic. The “COVID-19 total upheaval and shit show” doesn’t sound quite the same, but is more accurate.

I was in the emergency room during COVID. I was there not as an ER physician but a hospitalist physician, doing a patient admission in the ER because there were no beds on the wards. People were anxious and angry; the day felt interminable and stressful. Amid the coughing, groaning, shouting, alarms, and overhead announcements, there was one nurse who was speaking to everyone kindly. She was one of the out-of-town  nurses who had flown in from Toronto to help us out, because so many staff members were off sick. We introduced ourselves, and she gave me a huge smile.
“You deserve a gold star,” she said, peeled one off a sheet in her pocket, and affixed it to my name tag. My eyes filled with tears.