On a morning racing from hospital to airport, a happy tale.


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Stuck in airports flying home for Thanksgiving gave me time to write. So today, another story.

Once upon a time, I was a commoner without title or rank, and she was my Queen. The Sovereign upon the Dragon Throne when I was one of her thousands of ordinary subjects. And yet she had kindly taken the time to hand-write a reply note to me long ago, a ( Read more... )

Here collected are the tales of the glorious St. Baldrick's 2008 story, a story of many things: friendship, courage, and the greatness of the human spirit. A story really not about me, but about all of you. Read on...


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From the 7th to the 12th floors, we have many children who are too medically fragile to come down from their floors to go outside. So we brought the outside up to them.


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I'm nobody special, as things go. I'm just a guy who was lucky enough to have a loving family and really extraordinary friends. In the Society for Creative Anachronism, I'm nobody special either, just an ordinary gentle with the circlet generous friends sponsored me for a winter day long ago. Kind, generous, and mischievous friends who decided to ( Read more... )

Another story, about a fighter and a champion in a short white coatWe like to think we have a pretty good fight song here at U. Michigan. John Philip Sousa knew a thing or two about bands, and he thought it was, quote, "the greatest college fight song ever written". A literal hundred thousand people roaring the chorus in unison, fists thrust high ( Read more... )

One of the things I worked on during the weekend I had free from clinical duty between the end of Neurology/Neurosurgery and the beginning of Pediatrics was to work on the story presented here today, an origins tale, in a sense ( Read more... )

You see a lot of lapel pins on wards, riding on people's coats, one of the few bits of individuality allowed on the otherwise uniform appearance the ranks of med folk on service present. But I'm reasonably confident that there isn't anyone else in the entirety of the U. Michigan Health System which will have a pin like mine -- and perhaps only one ( Read more... )

As many of my friends head off to grand Pennsic, a SCAdian tale...

Amidst my mail, notes from medical societies, issues of scientific journals, etc., there was a palm-sized paper envelope, hand-addressed to me. The first unusual bit was a celtic-dragon device on the seal on the back. And the second was a return address from Cleveland which I did ( Read more... )

Recently, so many of us have been filled with rage by the attitudes and actions of arrogant, selfish, or outright monsterously f**king evil bastards. For this frustrating time then, a story of the opposite, written earlier this year and published today: the inspirational story of a modern day knight and his quest for the women he loved. Read on ( Read more... )