. . . but I have to, so I am now officially making time, sitting here at work, stopping 5 minutes to have some excellent soup made by Maria, and writing what I can before someone (else) knocks on my door.

Three short weeks from today, I will be on a plane to Iraq. I am completing my final week in clinic, though I will be here intermittently next week to do a few clinical things and a lot of non-clinical ones. Today was supposed to be non-clinical–I was supposed to have time to take care of the approximately 1762 things I need to do before deploying, but instead, I ended up looking through a microscope at the bone marrow of an unfortunate patient who I biopsied yesterday, and seeing things I did not like. The pathologists confirmed to me that I was right not to like them (this was not a tough call), and that the patient has relapsed leukemia. So, my morning has been filled with the consequences of this unfortunate finding, including breaking the bad news to patient and family, crying with them for an all-too-brief moment, arranging for movement to a facility that can do the appropriate next step, and running around to see all of my other patients in between all of the above.

This is not a daily occurrence in my clinic, but lately it has been a few times per week, which sort of throws the rest of my activities down on the triage list, and puts me behind. Blogging ends up fairly low on that list, just slightly above playing tennis on the Wii. (Ah, I take that back, it’s below Wii tennis also.)

So on the Iraq front, here’s the dilly: I will be going initially to base #1. My date of departure has changed twice in the past week, from 01 March to 08 March, and back again to 01 March. These changes are an annoyance, since I have had to subsequently change my family plans immediately pre-deployment a couple of times, but they are typical Army hoo-hah and I long ago stopped attempting to “kick against the pricks” and just accepted that the Army does not and will not always do the sensible, logical or rational thing. I met with a friend earlier today who is leaving tomorrow, and he will be keeping me apprised of how goes the pre-deployment CRC–”Combat Readiness Course” to some, but I think it really stands for “CONUS Replacement Center.” (Only the acronymophilic Army would have an acronym, the first word of which is itself an acronym.)

Oops, somebody’s knocking, be right back…