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With all of the recently televised police murders of black people, I have been doing a lot of soul searching. I pay a lot of lip service to not being a racist. But I don’t exactly have a pristine track record. When I was a kid, I did a lot of stupid things. Many, I […]

Attachment and Engagement

Here are thoughts for a rainy day from a practicing agnostic Christian Buddhist. I have been struggling of late with the third noble: suffering is the result of attachment. I think what I got hung up on was the antonym of attachment: detachment. Detachment denotes aloofness. Visions of a monk in a cave come to […]

Open Letter to Children’s National Medical Center

To Children’s National Medical Center: Below is a physician’s review I posted to Angie’s List. Since your survey was eliciting feedback, I thought you should know. Dr. Yewande Johnson met with our family shortly before my son was scheduled to go into the OR for his first of two surgeries in one week. She took […]

Hilarious

When my son is in the hospital, my wife and I take shifts staying overnight with him. That way there is always one coherent parent present when Drs and nurses come by. In this last 6 day stint, Monday was one of my nights off. When I got home I was so keyed up, I […]

The Long Slog

Most days, VACTERL is just a pain in the ass. It’s just time consuming and it wastes your child’s time, your time and family time. There is a checklist of tasks that you must worry about every day, which normal families take for granted. But over time any set of tasks can become routine to […]

The Winter of My Discontent

VACTERL occasionally gives you a little break. Though you may have an onerous lists of tasks required to keep your child happy and healthy, you get into an offbeat rhythm that mimics normal life. You find a place of serenity and you think that you have beaten back the deadly predators. But really you are […]

Veal or Chicken?

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” –Proverbs 22:6 When I was a kid, much of my free time was devoted to church and church activities. If there was an event that included my age group, I had to attend or […]

Sorry…Stolen from a friends blog

A friend of mine (Brian , who will remain safely anonymous…ooops) wrote recently about an apology he heard at work. I am shamelessly stealing this theme. To paraphrase, one of the things he said was that good apologies feel like you are ripping something out of your chest. Agreed! A former friend of mine was […]

From IS to IS Like

Shopping at noon on the Saturday before Christmas is not a brilliant plan for those people like me that abhor crowds. I am done with my own shopping, but I needed to take my son shopping and he wanted to go to Target, […]

UltraPyrus

To say that I am a pessimist would be an understatement. Many an optimist has tried to change me, but I am just wired to think about the worst case scenario. In my vocation, it is my job to pick every little thing apart. But when you deal with chronic illness, you cannot always focus […]