The Friday Before V-Day

It’s the Friday before Valentine’s Day. I’m practicing my morning ritual of getting up at an obscene hour (4:30) and using the time to scroll through my phone in the blissful darkness of a quiet bedroom, with our sound machine droning in the background.

My baby stirs next to me and makes little grunting sounds like a little pig. Now that she’s over a year I can admit that we occasionally cosleep and not worry that Safe Sleep keyboard warriors will come for my head.

We start clinic a little later on Fridays. I’m assigned to phone clinic today, which means all my patients will be remote.

Recently I’ve been struggling with a feeling of dissatisfaction at work. As if my work doesn’t have purpose or meaning. Another skin check, another biopsy, another minor skin cancer. What used to be exciting has gotten a robotic as I explain for the 74th time that this mole is a seborrheic keratosis, a benign barnacle, and nothing to worry about, but if if bothers you I’m happy to try freezing it off.

What I need is an attitude adjustment. And I remember back to a wellness lecture we had recently, when my program director introduced us to the idea of doing a dreaded task using your greatest strengths. You have to take a lengthy quiz to find out what these strengths are, but maybe that’ll be my project for this weekend.

My guess is that I like to engineer solutions for greater efficiency, and problem-solve. So how can I bring this to my patient interactions? Or maybe to my note-writing? What can I do to be better?