stamina

Stamina is one of my skills. Speed and technique are gaps in my skill set, but I can do things for a long period of time, and sometimes this is adaptive and sometimes it's counterproductive. With one and a half more nights on my month of nights, I've pretty much run out of steam. But as I've been chugging along, I've spent some time every day looking back on what I've seen and done--reading about patients who I admitted to the hospital and seeing what happened to them after the one night that I spent with them. The list of patients is long, and I remember most of them well because I spent so much time gathering their histories and presenting their stories, and it's interesting to see how things continued after I initially saw them. As I go through the list, it reminds me of when I hiked Kilimanjaro after a month of an intense rotation admitting many patients. The last night of the hike was a 16 hour hike, with the first half being a night hike ascending to the peak. It was an eight-hour, slow and winding climb up the mountain, with everyone quiet and concentrating on their breathing as we battled the altitude, and to keep myself occupied I went through a mental list of every patient I could remember taking care of in the previous month. I thought about why they came to the hospital, their eventual diagnosis, how we treated them, how they left the hospital. This took several hours, matching the rhythm of our hike with the ticking off of patients in my head.

Thinking about it now, I think that everything we do is just about finding a rhythm to match the inherent rhythm of our lives moving forward. And like we often talk about, this can be arbitrary and probably no one pacing method is more valuable than another. To me it seems kind of just like a way to keep up with what's going to happen regardless of what we do. I don't know if it affects anything other than turning a monotonous, meaningless pace into something that can be measured, even if this measurement can be arbitrary. I think that even if it were true that there's no inherent value in any way we choose to live our lives, the reason we continue as individuals and as a species is that we find something to parallel each footstep we take.