Hello World!

Welcome to Fat Geriatrician.

I am your host, The Fat Geriatrician.

Why start a blog?  Why call myself Fat Geriatrician?  Why in the heck am I thinking about a flamingo meditating on a lotus in the picture above?  I’ll try to tackle the first 2 questions in this post.

To answer those 2 questions, I’ll need to fill you in about a little group on Facebook called Physician Moms Group (PMG for short).  This is a group of over 70k moms who are also doctors (MDs/DOs).  In addition to being bad-asses and generally killing it at life (hahaha), we post about all kinds of things related to the Dr. Mom Life.  (We mostly post about how we don’t feel like bad-asses, and how we are are sucking at the Dr. Mom Life).  For the past 2 months Facebook has labeled me a conversation starter in the group.

I don’t know if I should be proud or horrified at all of the wasted time that represents.

Any-who, I recently made an anonymous post on the group (yeah, it didn’t even count towards my conversation starter status), and I got tons of responses.  One person (a conversation starter in her own right) even commented,

“All I know is that I am so darn proud of you! Also, I had a really hard day and you made me laugh so thank you! Maybe start a blog about your journey! You are a great writer!”

The then she quickly followed it up with,

“And to be clear I am not laughing at you… just you casually describing hanging off a bike in the dark as “a weird experience” and “I may have broken my vagina.””

Her comments were the inspiration for me to start this blog.  Instead of wasting my time with random (usually too long) posts on Facebook, why not collect everything in one place?

I bet you are wondering what could I have written about that made her respond like that?  Why did a total stranger tell me to start blogging?  I guess I’ll open myself up and claim that anonymous post here:

FYI–I did go spinning again after that post.  It took me 5 full days to recover enough that I could bend my legs again.  On the 6th day I went back on the bike.

Hopefully you are starting to see where the Fat came from in my name.  As a part of this blog, I will intermittently write about the struggles and humorous situations I find myself in because of my size.

In addition to defining myself (and being defined) by my size, I also define myself through my profession, Geriatric Medicine.  Hence the Geriatrician portion of my name.

I’m an academic geriatrician and clinician educator.  What does that mean in normal people speak?  I’m a doctor (MD) who specialized in caring for older adults (instead of pediatrics, cardiology, surgery, etc), and now I work in a medical school setting.  I teach other doctors how to appropriately care for older adults.

Insert first anti-ageism rant here:

Older adults are not just antique versions of middle aged adults! 

As you can guess, I’m passionate about my chosen field–so there will likely be many posts about geriatrics too.

I hope you’ll join me on my journey.  It won’t all be about being fat or being a geriatrician, I promise.  (Don’t forget the flamingo on the lotus!)