Sick … and reading

It pretty much takes a viral invasion to get me to read a book, these days. I’m so busy reading scientific papers online and publishing SaveYourself.ca that it’s shockingly rare for me to crack open a book. I purchase many books and texts, with the best of intentions, but it takes unusual circumstances to slow me down enough to pick one of them up.

And I can’t deny it any more: I really am sick. License-to-loaf sick. This-isn’t-funny-anymore sick.

This head cold developed in the a deceptively gradual way. It seemed like no big deal for so long that I didn’t take it seriously, but it just kept working on me, and now the virus is clearly winning. And that means it’s time to get some reading done. The cat will be delighted: oodles of lap time!

So I’ve started reading The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Explores Myth, Medicine, and the Human Body, by Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland.

I particularly enjoy reading books that are on the periphery of my own expertise, because that’s where the best learning always happens. Books by physicians about medicine and biology are perfect: they contain ideas alien enough to surprise and delight me, but still close enough to my own knowledge that I can make all kinds of serendipitous connections and extrapolations.

I particularly enjoy reading books that are on the periphery of my own expertise, because that’s where the best learning always happens.

And it’s all so humbling, too. It’s impossible to read a book by a surgeon like Nuland (or another favourite of mine, Atul Gawande) without being constantly reminded that my work as a Registered Massage Therapist is, well … sort of easy. Not that there aren’t tough problems in musculoskeletal care (there definitely are), but the medical stakes are nothing like what many doctors confront on an almost daily basis. Doctors in general, and surgeons in particular, are constantly presented with hair-raising no-win situations. It’s all rather impressive.

Nuland kicks off his first chapter with a fascinating account of anatomical variability of the viscera. And so I’ve read barely three pages, and already I’ve got something to do: some excerpts will make a great addition to my own article on the topic of anatomical variability (You Might Just Be Weird: The clinical significance of normal — and not so normal — anatomical variation).

But not yet. Right now I need to post this and get back to the couch. The cat is getting impatient.

I will be posting only easy stuff for a while — quotes and so on — until I’m back to full power.

The cat is waiting impatiently for me to stop using the computer.