Reading

[delight]

Please pretend it is Wednesday, just for the duration of this post.

What I've Read Recently
Finished beta reads of books #1 and #2 of Lindsay Buroker's new urban fantasy series, as well as a reread of the first 3 books in the Rizzoli & Isles book series (the first of which does not have any Isles): The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner. These are comfort rereads for me and take a couple hours at most to get through, and I need a lot of comfort rereads in winter. Epidemiology cases are also comfort reads for me, because I am a weird perfectly normal epidemiologist and thus find them soothing ... so I also read Diagnosis by Lisa Sanders.

What I'm Reading Now
The Deadly Dinner Party (And Other Medical Detective Stories) by Jonathan Edlow, who is trying to write in the style of Berton Roueché, the writer who made me want to become an epidemiologist in the first place. His works were well-loved by my family and I started absorbing them like an eager sponge at ten or eleven. I now have all the cases completely memorized, so they've lost reread value -- I was glad to find this book, since Edlow really does emulate the style well with all-new cases (even if I'm now so well-versed in mystery diagnoses that I solve many of them ahead of the report, it's still an enjoyable read).

What I'm Reading Next
Greek Key by KB Spangler. It seems like a good place to pause the Rachel series and switch to Hope, and I'm also trying to binge-finish my Goodreads challenge (thankfully I am a fast reader) after a bad couple of months (plus the books I beta read won't show up, since they aren't being published until January/February) so I'm just going to eagerly zoom through everything I own.

Comments

NYer as textbook for life

[jesse_the_k]

My family had stacks'n'stacks of New Yorkers, and I loved reading Berton Roueché (and John McPhee) when I lived at home.

Now that I've been a medical mystery--and dismissed by scores of doctors--I avoid the topic.

I enjoy Lisa Sanders' columns in the NYTimes, but her Netflix show creeped my right out.

[delight]

I technically still am a medical mystery, and was horribly let down by when someone in the Diagnosis column in the paper had the exact same symptoms as me ... and turned out to have the thing everyone thought I had that they can't find. (An adrenal tumor. My adrenals look nice and normal.)

And I liked the netflix show, but again, I am a perfectly normal epidemiologist.

[jesse_the_k]

The thing about her show is it spent (IMO) way too much time on "sick person is terrible burden to family!" and "won't it be great when we have an answer and you can be a normal family again!"

[delight]

... yeah that's true, I did not reflect as much upon that. That isn't something I got from her vibe, because as a doctor, my dad knew her, she isn't a particularly ableist person. So boo on Netflix, I suppose.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah — Sanders herself is quite approachable. Netflix producers didn't trust watchers to be intrigued by the science, though. They want to make it a "human interest" story so they center the nondisabled.

Which twitches one of my pet peeves. So much of medical knowledge comes from studying disabled/sick people. Particularly the neuropsychological stuff, which depends on those of us with head injuries etc to submit to extensive prodding and poking. We're vital to the medical knowledge enterprise! Are we thus acknowledged? Almost never.

[jesse_the_k]

Hooray for happy adrenals, and boo for mysteries.

[delight]

Yeeeeah we have no idea. I have an appointment in an hour with my PCP and they're going to be like "so endocrine hasn't called us," and no, they haven't, because they still don't know what is causing the Not A Pheochromocytoma attacks.

They're pretty confident it's Cushing's, but the holiday screwed up doing the confirmatory testing.

[recessional]

. . .oh holy shit it's Thursday.

[delight]

RIGHT?!