Pass The Tylenol

I have my next Remicade treatment tomorrow morning and it can't come soon enough. It will have been 7 weeks since my last treatment — the extra week added on because the medical staff was on vacation. (The nerve!) Considering how much pain I'm in (head aches, back aches, and my knee is on fire) only being a week delayed makes me appreciate that my insurance will even cover it at all, unlike countries like England, not one, but two Canadian Provinces, and New Zealand. If that isn't something to be thankful for, I don't know what is.

Setting a Goal

Well now that I'm feeling better, it's time to keep my promise. I am almost ready to join a gym — the same Planet Fitness that Ed goes to — but the only thing holding me back is my schedule. No sense joining when you're still working 11+ hour days regularly. But their $10/month rate offer ends 11/20, so even if my schedule isn't the best by then I'll probably join to take advantage of the rate and try to force my schedule to change. That aside, I need to have a goal, like runners who train for a marathon. Something to give me some motivation. When I worked out in college I was on the Kevin Spacey "I want to look good naked" plan. Now, I'm married so that doesn't matter. Just kidding. Or am I? I wouldn't mind being ripped, but that doesn't make for very good motivation. I don't have any desire to be a runner, so training for a marathon is out. I'm not overweight (quite the opposite). My blood pressure is fine, if a little lower than normal. I know that muscle weighs more than fat, so maybe I can go with "put on 10 pounds… in a good way." And I'll definitely be working my way back up to lots of crunches. Any ideas for what a good (and motivational) goal could be?

Challenge

One of the things that I love most about my job is that it presents significant challenges, and so far, I've been pretty good at overcoming them. With software, if you know enough everything is black and white, true or false, right or wrong. So called "gray areas" only exist when the user is uncertain why the software is behaving the way it is. As a software developer, the challenges I face are usually along the lines of either "Can you make it do this?" or "It's supposed to do this, but instead it's doing this. Fix it!" Any task can be put into one of two categories: Things I can control, and Things I can't. Finishing tasks that fall into the former category simply takes time, effort, and knowledge; while finishing tasks that fall into the latter category usually requires passing the task on to someone else who can control the associated code (an external product, for example). But given enough time to learn what I need to learn to resolve the issue, and to put effort into its resolution, I can resolve it. That gives me a lot of job satisfaction. It also causes me a lot of stress, because time is never unlimited. The customer always wants issues resolved immediately, and with less cost to them than is possible – that's just business. Today I started thinking about my doctors as people whose job it is to help me, instead of just good Samaritans. There are problems that they can deal with: broken bones, the common cold, and other common ailments; as well as problems that are totally beyond their control — diseases like Crohn's, with no known cures. They can provide options that make dealing with it less of a burden, but the root cause persists. There are things that are black and white: the bone is broken or it isn't; but not everything is so cut and dry. In my case: Do I have Crohn's Disease or not? I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of cases that are equally or more challenging than mine, and while I am certainly glad that I'm finding some relief, I wonder how the doctors feel knowing that they can't solve my problem. Probably not too bad… Who can think about depressing patients with the sunroof of your Mercedes open and windows down, sunshine and wind rushing in, blowing your hair back, and your music turned up?