Someone up there is really enjoying messing with my life this week. The issues I have had with travel are making me double check the calendar to see if we have gone back to 2020-21 and the height of Covid. That was the last time things got so screwed up. Fir those of you who are not caught up, my Eastern European/Lower Danube river cruise, which I booked a year and a half ago, was cancelled five days prior to departure. Emergency meeting with my travel agent and we found a trip to Turkey which fit into the same slot. That was cancelled earlier this evening, two days prior to departure. Another emergency meeting with travel agent tonight. (I’m very much in need of a vacation). Found an Eastern Mediterranean cruise on Celebrity that fits around fixed arrival and departure dates. Best thing about this is that cruise for two was roughly the same price as cruise for one with single supplements so I issued a last minute invitation to a friend whom I knew had a pretty clear schedule. New Departure is Friday. New Destination is Rome with cruise through the Greek islands and still catching Istanbul and the Turkish coast. So that’s where things stand tonight. If this one falls through, plan D involves loading up the car and foregoing trying to leave the continent. I cannot recommend John Martin and Travel Designers highly enough for holding my hand through the last few days.
The saga of the continually changing travel plans is really only a minor stressor but it’s arrived on top of a number of other challenges. Some of them are related to work and my attempts to get everything settled for orderly transitions as I slowly back out of clinical medicine over the next year. A major one is something I cannot really write about at this time as it is someone else’s story but when the time comes, the whole tale may come flowing out of me as a novel, if not an opera, as the central character (not me) is truly an operatic force of nature. Then there’s all of the various projects around here that are left undone and which I feel I should be applying myself to as my departure date keeps getting pushed back. But what do I do? I watch old seasons of American Horror Story in honor of Halloween. A week and a half on a cruise ship may be a good thing for me. Some enforced relaxation might be a good thing all around.
The word is spreading through Birmingham that I am retiring and it’s making its way back to me with some rather odd conclusions attached. One story I heard has it that I’m retiring to a beach house in Florida (untrue), another that I have really accepted a position in California (also untrue), and a third that I’m not really retiring, just testing the waters (definitely untrue). I am stepping down from day to day involvement in clinical medicine at UAB as of the first of March. I am not working past this date as that is the day the electronic medical record switches from Cerner to Epic and I have no interest in going through another one of those changes. I am old enough to go back to a time when all health records were pen on paper and have been through four or five major shifts in record keeping over the years and just have no desire to go through yet another. Even though I am leaving the clinic for day to to day care, I will still be around in an advisory role as I remain full time faculty through at least the first of July. At that time, I plan to transition to an emeritus position. I will also likely step down from the VA house call program at that time as well.
I am not leaving Birmingham. My life is here. I hope for another good ten to fifteen years where I can travel, do my theatre work, write, and be involved in various civic causes before I will have to reevaluate again as my physical and cognitive capacity changes in whatever way it is going to. I don’t have a whole lot of say in that. I take reasonable care of myself, can usually keep up with those decades younger but I know full well that nothing last for ever and that robust good health is promised to no one and we all end up more frail than we might expect.
I’m looking forward to getting out again into the world later this week and gaining some outside perspective on the insanity of our current politics. The closer we get to the date of the midterms, the more out there it seems to get. I keep scanning political ads for ideas of substance that could address the real problems we face as a society but all I tend to find are vituperative attacks on political opponents. This has been going on since time immemorial, but our current chief executive has moved the bar so far on what sort of language is permissible that the whole thing seems to have devolved into a particularly noisy middle school cafeteria table. I keep expecting candidates to lob meat loaf and mac and cheese at their opponents.
We’ve had our first adult measles case in Alabama – someone in the Huntsville area who may have brought it back from overseas. Measles is one of the most contagious viruses so I’m watching to see if it seeds into any of the antivaccination communities of northern Alabama and if numbers start to grow. Covid remains relatively low but seems to be spreading. Flu hasn’t really started up yet. Get your vaccinations while you can. I remain a firm believer in annual Covid revaccination due to its great success in cutting the chances for long covid, a disease with which I want no intimate acquaintance. To bed, to bed. Who knows what the morrow may bring. Hopefully the next time I sit down to write, it will be
