I suppose it’s no accident that I ended up in the profession I’m in. From the beginning, my mind has been tuned to look for patterns. The finding of patterns is actually quite easy: everything has a pattern, every bit of data, every tiny stimulus can be fitted to a scheme. The big trick, the thing that they pay you big bucks for, is figuring which of these patterns actually match reality.

And it’s not just a peculiarity of my own mind. Some have argued that that’s basically the reason why that roughly 3-pound, metabolically costly, incredibly convoluted, quivering mass of neural tissue that sits in the vault of your cranium came into existence. What we call intelligence is nothing more than assiduous pattern-matching. (Which is why it’s not a huge reach to believe that the first true artificial intelligences will evolve from something like a search engine, but I digress.)

In any case, while my job is really nothing more than teasing out patterns, recognizing them, and then acting upon them, I haven’t recently been trying to apply this method to my life in general. Mostly, I’ve really just been trying to keep my head above water. I’m still really quite at the bottom of the steep learning curve as far as my (still relatively) new job is concerned. Every day is a learning experience. And for a while my main task had been to keep the feeling of being completely overwhelmed at bay.

This has not been anywhere as easy as I had hoped, although I have been known to hope for too much, and a little struggle never hurt anybody, but a lot of this is because my body really is in terrible shape.

I marvel at what a few years can do to a person. Somehow, despite the abuse of recurring episodes of 30+ hours of work straight through, and 80-hour work weeks, I managed to stay (relatively) healthy over the past four years. I only called in sick once or twice at the most, and only really needed parenteral antibiotics once. All told, there were probably a total of three or four episodes during my whole residency where I was, at most, moderately ill. None of these episodes would’ve required admission to the hospital. In retrospect, though, for the sake of the patients I saw, I should’ve probably just called in sick after all, but unless I was on an elective where they didn’t really need me to be there, I always got the feeling that the only reason I should call in is if I were intubated.

Be that as it may, so far, in working for two and a half months, I’ve been sick twice. I blame the swine flu. A few weeks ago I came down with fever and a cough, accompanied by diffuse body aches and shaking chills. It really didn’t even last the whole seven days. While I felt like I was going to die that Monday, and still felt like crap on Tuesday, and didn’t think I was going to survive at all on Wednesday, on Thursday I stopped running fevers, and by the weekend I was OK.

Then, just a couple of days ago, on Saturday, I started feeling like ass that night. By Sunday I was febrile and rigoring. On Monday, I still felt crappy, and had an annoying cough to boot, but I didn’t feel quite as terrible as I did on Sunday. Tuesday was a little better. Today was fine. Not 100%, but pretty much asymptomatic.

I’m not sure what’s going on with my immune system lately.

This, naturally, leads me to a rather bleak vision.

I can’t really see beyond the endless rotation of days at work. I’m not going to say that every day is exactly the same, but each day has a disturbing symmetry with the day preceding it. I can usually keep the days of the week in order, but the sensation of being on a giant, metaphysical treadmill is starting to creep up on me.

But the part of me that always worries keeps worrying that this can’t possibly be sustainable. I am hoping that things will settle down, and I won’t have to worry about being overwhelmed all the time, but given my general lack of optimism, this is a difficult hope to hang on to.

What I need is something to look forward to.

What that something is, I have no idea.

But you can always count on dreams to unearth extremely disturbing things about your psychologic state. For some reason, I dreamt randomly of a person I haven’t talked to in quite a while, whom I only really knew from working together for about a week.

Naturally, this person is on Facebook, so the first thing I did in the morning was look up their Facebook profile.

Interestingly enough, their profile description is a single quote from a Radiohead song that I’ve been obsessed with lately—”There There”

in pitch dark i go walking in your landscape.
broken branches trip me as i speak.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

The part of my brain that strains for meaning and pattern demands that I make something out of these random coincidences. The rational part of me recognizes that this is just a symptom of a greater malaise. There is a single question that troubles me, and I cannot answer at this time, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be able to answer it before it’s too late. The question is this: “What do I do with my life?”