book three

Friends, I have some fun news to share! I’m currently writing my third book. The working title is You, Therefore.

It’s a book about how medicine can be a metaphor for understanding ourselves and how we can live better in the world. In the next few months, I’ll be sharing fascinating facts, excerpts and ideas with you as I continue to work on the manuscript. I hope you’ll join me on the journey! For starters, here’s the preface of the book, which is the best way I can describe what the book is about.

PREFACE

“If there’s a narrative, I want it in the flesh.”

— Jenny Saville

The fact you’re reading this means you and I have at least one thing in common: we exist in a body.  

Our soul or consciousness or whatever the intangible essence is that makes us uniquely “us” exists in a complicated, tangible, three-dimensional form we call a body that allows us to experience and express what it means to be alive in this world.

Whether we like it or not, our body is intimately intertwined with our identity.  On the day you and I were born, before anyone knew what our personality traits would be or what talents we would have or what profession we would choose or what mistakes we would make, our parents and the staff in the delivery room that day described us with the only details they did know:  our weight, our length, and whether we had female or male genitalia.  

Weight, stature and sex continue to be one of the most easily knowable traits about us, used throughout our lives to both distinguish and describe us.  Drivers licenses, missing persons fliers and wanted posters don’t describe people as having a great sense of humor or being moody sometimes or getting a B+ in calculus or knowing a fail-proof recipe for a flaky pie crust.  No, they go back to the basics that described us on the day we were born: weight, stature, sex.

While our bodies are sometimes the most cursory description of who we are, they’re also one of the most fascinating, complex and intricate facets of our existence in the world.  I have practiced medicine as a physician assistant since 2004, and I am still constantly mystified by the miracles we are.

Eleven systems, seventy-nine organs, 206 bones, 100,000 miles of blood vessels and trillions of cells work together every second of every minute of every day to sustain the experience we call life.

Our bodies are perhaps the best metaphor of the paradoxical experience we all have of being human. We are fragile yet fierce, susceptible yet strong, ordinary yet also one-of-a-kind. We are valueless dust inhabited by priceless divinity.

When we take the time to understand our bodies, they reveal to us not only the fascinating facts of their intricate inner workings, but also they become metaphors that can teach us how to live well, love deeply and find greater meaning in the world. 

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