Traveling: The Good and the Bad

Less than a week ago I was on the western or Atlantic coast of Ireland with a plane to catch across drive-on-the-left-side whole of the snow covered island in Dublin on the Irish Sea. 

Tomorrow I am off for a medical educational conference in San Francisco. I had hoped to stay with my daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter in Oakland, but the toddler developed a fever and cough last night, so I am taking the BART from the Oakland airport to a Marriott near the Moscone convention center.

I leave the conference early on Friday, flying home to change clothes and freshen up so that I can drive to San Diego to give a lecture for UCSD the next day on heart failure and sleep disordered breathing to a group of cardiologists.

Back home late on Superbowl Sunday (whose playing?), before I leave balmy Newport Beach on the Monday for the sub-freezing temperatures of Columbus Ohio where on the next day, I will have both a bone marrow biopsy and an interview by OSU on why I believe in enrolling in clinical trials at the "James".  Not sure of the timing is so smart on that.

After flying home, a week later I fly across country again, this time to NYC for the 17th Annual International Congress on Hematologic Malignancies – Focus on Leukemias, Lymphomas, and Myeloma where I am trying to train myself to be more fluent in helping others with blood cancers other than CLL.

On my way home from Manhattan, I must stop for a few days in Springfield, Missouri for more medical education related business. On this multi-legged trip, I will be gone a total of 8 days.

One week later finds me in the nation's capital for a few nights speaking for the National Sleep Foundation on the "sleepy patient" at their big annual Sleep Health and Safety meeting.

Then finally by the end of the first week of March, I will be home to stay for almost a full month before I hit the road again.

In between all this scurrying about, I am being infused with IVIG, consulting my numerous doctors, being consulted by my patients, preparing all these lectures I must give and generally just living my life.

The frequency and depth of my blog posts can suffer, especially when I have extensive patient care and writing responsibilities.

But it is a privilege to get to see this much of the country, to have these chances to teach and learn and to meet and greet new and old friends. And I am so lucky to be well enough to travel. That wasn't always the case, so I don't take these trips for granted. Today I am at the cancer center for my IVIG and my CBC is near normal with a Hgb of 13.9, an ALC of 1.1 and a platelets count of 398. That's good to go.

And some travel is just pure pleasure. So while I still have a glow from our wonderful 8 day trip to Ireland, let me post some pictures in no particular to share a sense of the magic. What you won't get in the photos and the short video is the bone chilling cold of the winter rain and snow and the more than the compensatory heart felt warmth of the kind and proud Irish people we met.

Falconary with Harris Hawks at Ashford Castle 

Kylemore Abbey in Connemara

Back of Ashford Castle and Hotel where we stayed

Interior of the medieval Bunratty Castle

Village road in Bunratty

Cliffs of Moher in the bitter cold

Neolithic Poulnabrone Dolmen in the strange burren

Dromoland Castle, another one of our amazing hotels

View of Dromoland Castle from golf course (played year round)

Dirty Nelly's in Bunratty where my wife sat in on the "trad" music. She ate Galway Bay fresh oysters and I enjoyed a Guinness

Kilronan Castle and Hotel where we also stayed in the north

Neolithic carvings at Newgrange over 5200 years old (much older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza- Imagine standing inside a building built more that five millennia ago )