The stepping stones by my house, 6 months ago? 10 months ago? I couldn't run across them two at a time. Trying to do so hurt my knees and for that matter my back at times. Now I can easily. Today was jumping from two stones away up onto the deck, just while working around the yard. Just jumping because it felt good, felt so good to have back such agility, to be able to just take off and fly for a moment. As a child and young adult I was constantly taking off and jumping up stairs as far as I could and so on.

Have this back because I've been jogging at a 2% incline on the treadmill about 6 days a week. Have been doing so for maybe 3 weeks now?? Previously was slowly working into it except running less often and at a greater intensity. And that definitely did not work as well.

Have to get daily exericse, the key being to lessen the intensity so that I can manage to do so. It's especially difficult with the 14 hour night shifts, dealing endlessly with death, etc. So hard to exercise on top of that. The key now has been to keep it "comfortable" or I should say, on the edge of comfortable, where my breathing doesn't quite elevate. Still can carry on a conversation but maybe usually would rather not. Just running 0.5 to 1.5 miles followed by 10 to 20 minutes of "comfortable" weightlifting. For weightlifting to be "comfortable" and yet not useless, means there must be some volume, which so often has caused me insomnia in the past. But with blueberry smoothies I'm not having insomnia.

So health is good then.

Work is running me down lately. I think the main problem. (Of so many problems). Is that my empathy is waning. Feeling like most of these people are sick because they were mentally lazy and simply didn't do the things they needed to do to not get sick. Basically I'm thinking like a rightwinger about things. I need to remember that my own family members and myself also at times have done some of the same behaviors they've spent their life doing.

This lack of empathy is making the work unrewarding. Need to overcome it, stop demonizing... or "uglyizing"? my patients.

I could maybe think that my patients are:
1. Slowly committing suicide on a subconscious level and deserve empathy on that basis.
2. Live in a society where disgusting harmful food is usually the only choice. Even at the hospital cafeteria this is the case actually. When people are surrounded by such how can I hold it against them for eating it?
3. Fooled into thinking the doctors know what the hell they're about when they tell them to take all those pills.
4. Don't bother to get knowledgeable because when you get down to it, this life sucks so bad who really wants to live to be very old anyway?

Hmmmm, I'll have to work on it.

At the same time I simultaneously have the opposite problem, where I feel too much empathy for the pain and suffering of some of my patients. Such didn't used to weigh me down so much. I think it's my own inconsistency from patient to patient which is making it harder to deal with. To stop judging probably would be good. Yet I've been doing this long enough it's hard to not immediately categorize people. What are the categories?
Very generally:
1. Drug seekers.
2. Mentally lazy people who need to educate themselves about how to maintain good health.
3. People who actually deserve my empathy.

I usually have at least one drug seeker a shift. And the mentally lazy make up the majority of my patients. Really have to find some other way to think about it. Remember that I myself am far from being perfectly "mentally unlazy". And I could relate some of how I feel about food to how other people feel about drugs I supppose.