Food Subscription Boxes and Baby Stuff

How’s everyone doing? We’re alright over here. Being back at work has obviously left less time to sit and write out my thoughts , but on the flip side, pregnancy brings a lot of life and personal changes, and with that come a lot of emotions to think about! So while I don’t think this blog will ever be about one particular aspect of my life (medicine, motherhood, global health, etc.) I do think my thoughts on pregnancy and motherhood will probably start showing up a little more often in the coming months and years. Hope that’s still ok with y’all 😊

That being said, I wanted to write about how my diet changed since finding out I was pregnant and returning from Liberia for two reasons. One because we’ve received many Misfits Market produce boxes by this point and wanted to share our experience if anyone else is interested, and two because so much changes when you become, including what goes into your body. So hopefully this is interesting/helpful to someone. I split it into two parts because who wants to read thousands of words on foods. Also this post is NOT sponsored (this blog does not have the audience for that, haha.)

First off, a little on the Misfits Market box. The company picks out organic produce that doesn’t sell well/gets rejected from supermarkets and then distributes it to individual households on a weekly basis for a fee. Here’s an example of what we get for a typical week (we get the larger box), and here's a list of other produce delivery boxes you can subscribe to around the country.

Overall we are pretty happy with the selection. I don’t mind getting the ‘ugly’ produce at all (though it is sometimes a little harder to peel/prep.) I like that most of the packaging is either recycle-able or biodegradable. The fruit and veg also tends to be locally grown and seasonal which is another plus for eco-friendliness. I’d say the two major downsides are: 

1. We get too much of some kinds of foods (starches and root veg) and not enough green veg (we love our salads and leafy greens), so you have to be flexible. My husband doesn’t mind so much but as it turns out I’m a picky eater and don’t love squash or sweet potato as much as he does, haha. 

2. Occasionally we have gotten some bad produce. I’d say out of 20 boxes, 2-3 have had a couple pieces of smashed or rotten fruit which is inedible. Worth noting neither of us have bothered to write or complain to Misfits so I can’t say anything good or bad about their response to complaints or feedback.

The box has also diversified our palates and gotten us into making new and different kinds of food, which has been fun (with the exception of one jicama-peeling related urgent care visit for a knife injury- sorry husband!) The box also forces us to meal plan to keep us from wasting any of the fruit or vegetables, which is usually fun (but did take a bit of effort/adapting!) For now we plan to continue with the larger box.

Below are just a handful of examples of the meals we’ve made with our Misfits box.

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Top: Akis Petretzikis' Revithada or chickpea soup, Left, whole wheat bread, bottom/ right: Peter's take on Waitrose's Peperonata recipe with whole wheat pasta

We use this real simple recipe to make a super easy curry. Usually we add more curry powder and cook the tomatoes longer, occasionally add coconut milk :)

Cretan Dakos with fresh tomatoes! Super simple to make. Just pour a mix of water/olive oil on Cretan rusks (you can find them at most Greek specialty stores or make your own) and top with roughly chopped tomato, feta cheese, a sprinkling or oregano and more olive oil. Yum. 

Super easy egg and red potato scramble, I think we added some jicama but it tastes better in stir fry dishes, IMO.

Smoothie bowl SUPER loosely based on this recipe:1 spotty banana, frozen mango (1 mango or 2 cups) +/- frozen berries, 1 kiwi, spoonful of flax seeds, and a splash of oat milk and orange juice. Top with fruity granola and coconut flakes. We were loving these on the really hot days in early June.

Thoughts? Would you try Misfits Market? Or do you use another kind of CSA/subscription service?

How working as a pediatrician has changed since Covid-19/Life lately

Hi friends. Hope you are all doing ok!

I’ve been back at work full swing for a few weeks now (before I was mostly doing remote work with a few shifts on occasion.) I didn’t fully grasp how much things had changed until my second or third time back. The adjustment has been interesting to say the least…while I wasn’t around for the full swing of the pandemic (while adult medicine was exploding, pediatrics ER visit and admissions went wayyyyy down as families avoided hospitals), adjusting to the changes has been harder than I thought. Here’s a couple of ways work life is different from the pre-Covid era.

Cloth mask (with surgical mask worn underneath) to make things a little more kid-friendly :)

Dressing for work. Back at my residency, I had a colleague who never wore scrubs outside of work. He swore by either dressing professionally or changing on arrival and again before returning home. We all kind of side-eyed him and gently teased him for this. While I wouldn’t wear my scrubs out to a bar/on a regular basis, I’d wear them on my couch at home or for a quick grocery run after a shift and not think twice about it. His argument? Scrubs were historically meant to be worn inside hospitals ONLY, and doctors and nurses would change before going home to keep all hospital germs in the hospital.

These days, once I’ve handed off my pager after my shift is over, I change into gym clothes or a second pair of (clean) scrubs, switch shoes, drive home, take everything off and shower before touching anything/anyone else at home. Plus, as much of my work gear as possible stays in the car (I wipe down my phone and wallet and bring those in, and avoid bringing my laptop to work as much as I can.) I do still go into work wearing scrubs, but they are ALWAYS clean/laundered.

Food and drink bans at work stations is no longer just an inspection week rule. There are strict rules on infection control that get semi- ignored most of the year unless the hospital is getting inspected by an official body. OK so this sounds bad to an outsider, but when the choice is between not eating or drinking for 10-12 hours straight and occasionally sneaking a few almonds or sips of water from your flask, you just keep the damn food and snacks in your backpack or somewhere close by. A lot of people who work in ERs won’t have time the entire shift to go to the break room every time you need to eat or take a drink.

Pre-Covid - mask-free drinking sparkling grape juice for New Year's in the ICU

Post-Covid, we take these rules a lot more seriously, mostly because no one wants to take their mask off in the middle of a busy ER. I make sure to hydrate well and eat right before my shift starts, and head to the break room to eat at least once during my shift (although I do occasionally sip water in the work area to avoid getting dehydrated.) Personally, I just want to minimize removing my mask in the work area as much as possible.

Infection control is a big deal. Honestly, infection control has always been a big deal, but it’s certainly more visually obvious now. Bleach wipes and hand sanitizer sit on every surface. I wear a gown, mask and gloves when seeing every patient, not just patients who may have an infection. For procedures I add a face shield that looks like it came out of star trek (wish I had a picture!) Before entering each room, I re-screen any family members for Covid-19 exposure or symptoms. I take the extra step of washing my hands after each patient (normally I would just use hand sanitizer.) The plus side of all these changes: not a single case of work-transmitted Covid-19 has been documented at our hospital (woohoo!)

Sick days are back (woohoo!) Residency programs are notorious for their sick day policies, or at least mine was. The official rules may say you shouldn’t come into work while sick, but the culture? If you can stand and string together a sentence, you show up to work. I remember one of my chief residents proudly recalling the night she fainted in the ER after suffering from a bad GI bug, got bolused with IV fluids from the nurses and then went back to work. At one point, I came in every day of work my last year of residency with a high fever and cough (don’t worry, I wore a mask, and every time I only showed up because I thought the fever had broken. I’d go home as soon as it came back), only to find out on my last shift of the week I was flu positive!!  No one wants another person to be called in to ‘cover’ for them, especially when the job is so tough.

To be honest, these trends are pretty toxic and unhealthy. Not only do they make for exhausted and unnecessarily disenfranchised health workers, they’re also terrible for infection prevention and control. So it’s been nice to see that in the post-Covid world, not only are you not expected to work when sick, you’re actually not allowed to. My job (and many others) require an attestation be completed before every shift- you literally have to confirm you haven’t had a single Covid-19 symptom before coming in to work, every day, no exceptions.

Those are probably the biggest changes. Obviously patients have changed too- whereas emergency pediatric care included a lot of visits that weren’t true emergencies, these days very few cases like that are coming in as people avoid hospitals as much as possible (some times too much.) We’re still doing a fair amount of injury treatment (sutures and splinting FTW!) but overall things are wayyyy slower than they’ve previously been.

Besides that, life has changed pretty drastically too! We moved! This time into a beautiful big house with a yard.

We added a couple of roommates too- my sister and her dog moved up from down South to start residency up here in Boston.

And in a few months’ time, my husband and I are also sharing a new addition…

Yep! We’re pregnant!

And we’re over the moon excited. While I’m not sure how much I plan to get into pregnancy and motherhood on this blog, I sure have been thinking about it a lot, so my guess is I’ll feel like writing about it from time to time. And knowing how little I personally have heard about mothers working in global health, I’d love to share with you all how we as a family plan to make this career work (although I’d love to hear your experiences too!)

This is getting super long, so let me end it now and wish you all a great week!

Music Monday.

Another Monday, another protest song…and I have to say, there’s so many great ones to choose from. Music has such an incredible history of subversion and rebellion. I think that’s one of the things that draws me to certain genres and styles. The seemingly harmless act of singing a song has been an act of rebellion over and over again, in perhaps a hundred different histories of fighting against oppressive forces.

LaTonya Yvette is a Brooklyn-based blogger I’ve been following for a long time now. She recently posted a playlist that reminded me of this song, but originally my husband introduced me to Marvin Gaye back when we were dating. Sadly that’s probably the last time in my life that my taste in music was significantly influenced, changed or shifted; when I started med school I ran out of time to go on music deep dive, discover new artists or explore new genres, something I still really miss and hope to get back into one of these days. Then again maybe that’s just the settling of character you get once you hit a certain point in your life? Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Anyways I digress. Sorry.

According to good old Wikipedia, Marvin Gaye did not actually write the song. It was written by Renaldo ‘Obie’ Benson of the Four Tops, after Benson witnessed an act of police brutality against anti-war protesters in Berkeley.  The Four Tops didn’t want to perform it, so Benson offered the song to Gaye, who at the time was going through a deep depression due to personal and professional issues. Gaye tweaked the lyrics and melody to suit his style. At the time he was receiving letters from his brother about his experiences as a Vietnam veteran and was deeply affected by the social ills around him. He specifically referenced the Watts riots (the most violent riots in LA until 1992’s events surrounding the beating of Rodney King) as a pivotal event inspiring his newfound concern over social justice. The song became the title track for his next album, What's Going On.

The result is a beautifully mournful record that has won dozens of accolades and became Gaye’s first album to reach the Billboard top ten. The song reached number two on the charts and is his second-most successful song to date. Ironically, the song was such a departure from Motown music more typical of the era that producer Berry Gordy initially refused to release it, as he felt it was “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” Cementing it as a true song of rebellion, Gaye actually had to go on strike from recording other music until Berry came around. The end result is beautiful and sobering, and fits all too well into the mood of the last two weeks.

What do you think? I feel like this song was made for times like these. I also loved this music video released in 2019. Sadly could have been released yesterday, but I hope together we are able to enact real change soon.

Stay safe folks,

G 

PS- got another protest song or artist you think I should write about? Let me know in the comments. I'd like to keep this up, at least until my classes start in July.

Monday. #BLM

Ages ago I used to share a music video and my thoughts on the song or genre on Mondays. I kind of feel like bringing it back. Music can be such a beautiful way to protest, using the combination of song and poetry to express pain, frustration, disenfranchisement, sadness, hope, and a million other feelings at once. 

Most Mondays I plan to share music from black artists. But I recently learned the history behind this song and felt like it was really relevant.

In 1999, a 23 year old Guinean man named Amadou Diallo was shot multiple times and killed by 4 plain-clothes New York police officers. Amadou was unarmed. The officers claimed they thought he was a suspect in a rape case, although this has never been confirmed. While the officers where charged with murder, they were ultimately acquitted. As you can imagine this brought up a lot of the anger and frustration that we're seeing over 20 years later, after George Floyd's murder (and of course dozens of others black lives lost to police violence since then.)

In 2000, Bruce Springsteen wrote a song inspired by what happened called American Skin(41 shots.)  After the song debuted, the largest police union in NYC called for a 'boycott' of Bruce Springsteen and refused to work security for his upcoming show in Madison Square Garden. John Gallagher summarizes the contents of the song, and the police union's response to it, very well in this twitter thread:

Listening to the song now, it’s hard to imagine what made them so mad. It isn’t angry or accusatory, just sorrowful. It offers up the simple, powerful refrain... “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.” The fact that it made the NYPD so mad tells us a lot about why they are doing what they are doing right now. The party line has always been the same... Question our authority and become our enemy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a famous rockstar or a citizenry demanding reform.

This week, the same union, the Sergeant's Benevolent Association, seems to be up to the same behavior. They've published the name, arrest record and private information of the New York mayor's daughter  in retaliation for her participation in protests for the #blacklivesmatter movement. This is known as doxxing and can be very dangerous for the individual whose information is compromised.

This spring the Sergeant's Benevolent Association's leader, a man name George Mullins, has also tweeted a video calling black people 'monsters' and public housing 'war zones.' He also declared a war on Mayor de Blasio and this week told Fox News he plans to 'win the war on New York City.' 

Here's one more quote from John Gallagher's Twitter to wrap things up: 

To recap, the president of the second largest police union in New York City publicly declared war on both its mayor and its citizens in the last four months. It’s not making many headlines right now but it seems like a red flag and a pretty big deal to me!

Agreed. There's something very, very wrong about the use of force against peaceful protesters and the increasing use of funds to support police departments while defunding schools, health systems and other vital institutions in black communities. 

I'm still reading, listening, learning and absorbing a lot. There's so much to unlearn, and even more to re-learn. Here are a few podcasts and pieces I've read on systemic racism that you might find enlightening. Educating ourselves is a small but crucial step towards understanding how deep these problems are rooted in American culture and society and what we can do about them. 

John Oliver's episode on police brutality.

Systemic racism explained. 

The Seeing White special from Scene on Radio goes into the history behind how the social construct of race came to be used to divide the poor, protect slaveowner interests and exert power over society's most vulnerable citizens.

Watch 13th, LA 92, or When They See us on Netflix, Selma or Just Mercy on Amazon Prime, or Student Athlete on HBO. 

Domestic Violence and the police. ("[In 2019,] an independent panel found that the typical penalty for New York City police officers found guilty of domestic violence—some had punched, kicked, choked, or threatened their victims with guns—was thirty lost vacation days.")

Many more on this reading, film and podcast list from NPR.

Monday.

Good Morning. What a strange weekend it's been. George Floyd. Another name. Another dead black man. Another family mourning. Another round of trauma, confusion and fear for black Americans. 

When I was in school, I remember black history being taught very differently to what I see it as now. There was segregation, and people were racist. But men like Martin Luther King, Junior marched, and women like Rosa Parks sat in the whites-only bus section, and students protested, and then, finally, Lyndon B. Johnson listened, and just like that everything was over. 

I wonder if this is how they still teach it. This was a while ago, mind you. Before social media truly took off. When facebook statuses were what kind of cereal you ate that morning, and when most cellphones didn't have cameras to record how the world really looks.

I'll stop here. I don't want to make this about another white voice. We've heard enough from people like me. Now is the time to listen to the voices of black Americans, amplify those voices and stand alongside them in the fight for their lives. See below. 

This is America. And below, a video explaining some of the symbolism. 

Watch the documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay the next time you're on Netflix: 

This gives a great history of the many policies that have been used to oppress the black minority in the U.S. during the last century. Other great resources to learn from: this podcast episode from This American Life, Scene on Radio's Seeing White series, and HBO's documentary Student Athlete. Next up for me: getting a start on this reading list. I have also heard that this book is really good.

Support protestors and the Black Lives Matter movement. Show up if it's safe for you to do so (yes we are still in a global pandemic. But many protests have been able to maintain social distancing.) You can also donate to bail funds, fair media funds, and the #Blacklivesmatter fund supporting affected communities.

Learn about your own biases. Understand the difference between being "not racist" and being anti-racist, and call out acts and words of racism you encounter in your daily life. Realize you don't have to be perfectly unbiased before you do this. No one has zero bias. We're humans. It's in our nature to think this way. The greater evil is to stay silent and not speak out because you're ashamed of your biases. 

Follow and learn from the platforms of people of color- Rachel Cargle, Black Lives Matter, The Conscious Kid (a great resource for parents). 

Finally, hold police accountable for their actions. Many officers seem to have forgotten that their duty is to protect and to serve.