On Medicine

"It's the humdrum, day-in, day-out everyday work that is the real satisfaction of the practice of medicine; the million and a half patients a man has seen on his daily visits over a forty-year period of weekdays and Sundays that make up his life. I have never had a money practice; it would have been impossible for me. But the actual calling on people, at all times and under all conditions, the coming to grips with the intimate conditions of their lives; when they were being born, when they were dying, has always absorbed me."

William Carlos Williams

I find many similarities between the long journey of medicine and the act of bicycling across the country.  The gratification comes from the slow accumulation of miles, the people met along the road, and the realization, weeks or months later, that you have made progress, have gone somewhere unexpected.  I look forward to the day-in, day-out practice of riding, as I do the gradual process of becoming a doctor and caring for patients.