Story of the Day 9/ 30/ 2012

My husband writes.
I mean really writes, not a half-baked blog of oddball stories like I write. Okay, the blog is not half-baked, I am ...and so are the stories.
But back to my husband.

He writes real stuff.
Real as in published.

There was the book he co-authored with a friend.
And there are the magazines or journals or whatever they are called.
He used to write regularly for The Lancet, which is definitely a journal.
Now he writes a monthly satire column that is in two magazines or journals or something like that.
One of them is Rheumatology News and I have managed to forget the name of the other one. Internal Medicine something or another.
Maybe I will be a an exemplary spouse and look it up, right now.
Wait, if I was an exemplary spouse, I would have remembered without needing to look it up, so I can forget about trying to pretend I am exemplary.

Okay, maybe I will be a passable spouse and look it up, now.


Ah, Internal Medicine News !

But that isn't all.
He write a blog.
A PAID blog.

Yes, they pay him to write for a blog.
You can keep repeating it several times more, if it will help you to process it. I have noticed that I get the most stunned reactions from others who, like me, slave away at an unpaid blog...
I mean, there really are people out there who get paid to do this?

In case you want to verify that I am not pulling your leg, this will connect you to one of his articles for one of the magazines:

http://www.rheumatologynews.com/index.php?id=8821&cHash=071010&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=92378

and the blog:
http://www.rheumatologynews.com/views/inside-rheum/blog/the-golden-goniometer/bff5eabd2f6eaba48d80fc58c4c91381.html

But now to get to the story.

My husband , while he greatly enjoys writing and gets paid to write, doesn't get paid enough to pay the mortage or even for the gasoline for our Honda Civics, so he has to moonlight as a practicing rheumatologist.

Monday through Friday you can find him working in a medical office seeing patents who would rather be out dancing or skiing or even just reading a book, but have found themselves consulting him because they have arthritis, or gout, or lupus, or some other not-so-fun condition.

Recently, my husband was seeing a new patient.
The patient had just moved to Indianapolis and had previously been seen at the Mayo Clinic.

When the patient asked her physician at the clinic for a referral, she was given the names of two rheumatologists in Indianapolis.
One of the names was my husband's.

As she told to my husband, she chose him because the doctor then said, "Oh, I read all of his articles!"

My husband realized that the patient must think that he is involved in important research or something along those lines; and he had a moment of internal struggle before deciding to not clarify this for her.