I’ve mentioned to a couple of people recently that I’ve been feeling crazy, split between my two work worlds. It’s tough, keeping the mind in the right place at the right time, focusing on the task at hand when at my “day job.” I’ve never really called it a career, though I have worked in the community based public health field for a decade now, teeth clenching over access to affordable health care before it became vogue to be teeth clenching over access to affordable health care. Here, I am good at what I do when I want to be good at what I do. The mountains of paperwork here can be staggering. The concrete obstacles to accessing health care faced by the non-English speaking uninsured are criminal. The absurdity of managed care is Theater of the Absurd absurd. Ten years of combating, negotiating, navigating this system, which in legalese, in abstract, is convincing, however unnecessarily complex it is. In practice, the victories, if ever there are any to be had, are tiny little things.
