Physician, writer, independent thinker, careful listener
No frills. Busy reading. I am making up for years lost, years focused on 10-page medical review articles, chapters on next-generation sequencing, neurofibromatosis, Birt-Hogg-Dube syndrome. For at least a decade, the number of novels read per year has been in the low single digits. If there is to be a transition to a life as … More Gap year, week 20
There will be a time when the soldiers will be forgotten, just a footnote dissolved in the cauldron of data that eons and events will churn and dilute, when our soil and planets, our hearts and light will return to stardust.
In the meantime, we can remember, if we so choose. Then the question is “Why?”
… More Gap Year, week nineteen
Since January I have been on this interesting journey from medicine to writing. Since Week 15, my last posting in mid-April, I have been distracted from writing by the best of all excuses – adventure and exploration, friends and family, haunts old and new. The photo here is moonrise over the Mississippi, from the shore … More Gap year, week unknown
This week the journey from medicine to writing has been full of adventure. My new friend, Monika Maeckle, whose book, The Monarch Butterfly Migration, will be published in August, strongly encouraged me to attend the San Antonio Book Festival, which I did last weekend. That really got me depressed. There were just too many great … More Gap Year – Week 15
I appreciate everyone reading my weekly posts about this interesting year between medicine (1.0 FTE) and writing. I’m starting to get some of those unsettling questions, though, like, “What are you writing?” Puts me on the spot. I am unpracticed in apologetic hand waving and have a natural tendency to feel guilty. Afraid to confess … More Gap year; week 14
Gap Year – Week 13 I am a quarter of the way through this gap year, the 12 months between fanatical obsession with exome sequencing and full-time dedication to the writing life. The past few weeks we have focused on a new adventure – Van Life. My wife and I have been thinking about this … More Gap year. Week 13.
My gap-year transit continues across space and time, looping from the nebulae of clinical medicine to the dense gravities of a writing world and back again, rife with principles of uncertainty. Yesterday I learned that some of our work on holoprosencephaly will soon be published in Genetics in Medicine. Huzzah! I’m not sure what can … More Gap Year, week twelve
Welcome or welcome back to my travels between respectability and susceptibility. Less than three months ago I was an employed clinical geneticist. Now I’m the retiree ordering a cappuccino in the forenoon. This month my plans have been to focus on nonfiction, including medicine, but I have not been especially efficient. We took a week … More Gap Year -> Week Eleven
A pivotal moment in early 2000s redirected my career when tasked with creating a newborn screening policy for the US Army. A tragic case of a child’s death due to a missed screening prompted this action. The patchwork of screening standards in different locations highlighted the need for a comprehensive policy to safeguard children’s health. … More Gap Year: Week 10
Truth is stranger than fiction. You can see here a beard (me) in a hooded sweatshirt. What is probably true is that it is my Hamilton College lacrosse sweatshirt, last worn in 1979, then saved in several generations of cardboard boxes and moved from Clinton to Baltimore to Boston to Bethesda, Tacoma, Seoul, Vienna (VA), … More Gap Year | Week 9
Scott D. McLean, MD 