Having seen Mike (@sandnsurf) fearlessly reach for the gauntlet thrown down by @problogger, it seems remiss of me to not do the same.
Let’s see what this exercise in intrablogorific reflection uncovers….
- Your first post — When Life in the Fast Lane was born it was just one inspired and quixotic emergency doc throwing a few pebbles into the webospheric ocean. I was among the few who noticed the first tiny ripples that Mike was making, and with his enthusiastic encouragement started my own humble blog, Aequanimitas. As we were clearly riding the same waves, we soon decided to coalesce our endeavours. This saw the premature demise of my fledgling effort, though the name was resurrected as the neglected home of the more human and philosophico-literary face of LitFL. The first post was unimaginatively titled Aequanimitas. It was an excerpt of a speech by one of my greatest heroes, Sir William Osler, and is an important lesson for anyone who wants to work in the Critical Care specialties.
- A post you enjoyed writing the most — The evolving beast known as the Utopian College of Emergency for Medicine is something that defies rational comprehension. Yet one thing is certain, being involved in its creation is an insanely fun labo(u)r of love. Singling out a single post is hard to do —- I particularly enjoyed poking fun at some of my favo(u)rite blogs in Downstairs Patients, Upstairs!, The Poison Preview and Academic Strife in Emergency Medicine — but the undeniable truth of the UCEM Guidelines on Resuscitation tops them all.
- A post which had a great discussion — Mike already mentioned the Information Overload post. It came about as an attempt to answer a question I was asked following my 2009 ACEM Winter Symposium talk on the Web 2.0 Rollercoaster, which in turn grew out of Mike’s seminal post, The Times They are a Changing. So, instead, I’m going to nominate the 4-part series (!?) that begins with Pimping in Persepective. ‘Pimping’ is the dark side of the Socratic Method and is a cornerstone of the medical learning experience. The posts have been the source of some entertaining discussions on Twitter, other blogs, and (God forbid) even real-time face-to-face communication…
- A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written — By now you’ve realised how painful I find it to try to single out one of anything when it comes to blogging… I could mention any post on Bad Science for instance, and I can only dream of attaining @DrVes’s blogging productivity and consistent excellence. If I force myself, I’d have to single out @movinmeat’s post on Advice to Emergency Medicine Interns. I see blogging as a powerful tool for education and learning, and this post epitomises how a blog post can teach things that can never be learned from a textbook or a lecture hall. I’ve written related posts myself but this came long before and speaks from hard-earned experience. I wish I’d read it before I started out in Emergency.
- A post with a title that you are proud of — I’ll go with Don’t Put your Patient in a Box, a post on the unending quest for ‘normal’ on laboratory tests. I’m always a sucker for a nice double entendre…
- A post that you wish more people had read — Like many people who hate the sound of their own voice but can’t stop talking, I have more than a few posts that I wish less people had read. But now and then something worthy can found hidden in the detritus of the LitFL posts attached to my name. The Breakfast Club pays homage to one of my greatest teachers and the man who inspired me to love the history of medicine and its peculiar protagonists, to strive to think and speak clearly, and to remember that the patient is really our first, last and only teacher. It’s adapted from something I wrote long ago for my medical school yearbook.
- Your most visited post ever — To be honest, writing block-busting posts isn’t really my forte. But looking through the archives I find that two of my posts are neck-and-neck in the ‘somewhat popular’ stakes: the Sherwin Nuland-inspired Leonardo Da Vinci First Anatomist and Peter Safar’s enthralling Laws for the Navigation of Life. While I can’t claim to be a popularist, it’s always nice if there’s a few people out there catching the same waves as me…
Thanks for reading!
About Chris Nickson
