This is a platform for sharing creative writing and pieces of short fiction by the author. It also will be a portal for the slow release of the author’s new book, ALL BLEEDING STOPS about narcotic addiction and the parallel struggles of both addict and doctor in the current epidemic of opiates. The website’s themes are travel, the physician-patient relationship, functional medicine, free will versus fatalism and the falseness of choice, the common human condition and the similarity of emotions and struggles across all lives.
All Bleeding Stops
The main character dies from an overdose and the physician is blamed for his death.
Chapter 3 – Mirror of Heaven
Rob paused at the door, a formidable mass that divided the universe from his world. He looked up at the carved inscription on the enormous slabs, DEUS CARITAS EST, worn but still discernable over the centuries that divided the men who carved them and the man who…
Chapter 2 – The First Time I Tried to Leave Medicine
I’ve been trying to not be a doctor ever since the week before medical school. California raised and schooled, I’d squeaked into the University Of California, San Diego in the waning hours of the summer of 1994, weeks before matriculation. I remember the call home...
Chapter 1 – Of Porsches and Probabilities
I’ve come to believe that choice is a false concept, created by man to give us a feeling of control, a sense of ownership to our lives. Rob McIntosh would probably have agreed. I’m not sure if I ever thought to ask him. Life gets so busy with the little things, the...
Short Stories
Fossil Falls
They put my dad in the hospital last night. I saw the missed calls on my screen before breakfast. It was our last morning at Cousin Brad’s Mammoth house which is closer a chalet, the kind of ski cabin the 1% enjoy. After seven days of...
The Release
It had been eight weeks since my return from the jungle. I had gone there to study the Kandikachaki, one of the few remaining tribes who still believe in the spirit god Santinakucha and, as far as I knew, the last to practice the release. I had lived amongst them for...
Travel & Musings
Sevilla Semana Santa
The silken skin of my seven year daughter has taken on the warmth of this bed. I pull her tight and form my body to hers. I pull the comforter over my shoulders. She has curled around it like a sea snail through the night, pulling my edge...
Marrakesh
The desert sky is on fire and my flight leaves in two hours. Like so many realizations that come too late to be of use, perhaps this is not the best time for suitcase shopping. I struggle with the beast’s retractable handle, pushing the button, leaning...
Caballo in my fridge
There’s a caballo in my fridge. I tired to get away from it. I wasn’t even going to admit it to anyone, but it’s all I can hear, in the game, on the TV. Real Madrid is playing Girona. And the word is like a hammer on glass, a dripping faucet in the...
A Wave I Now Miss
There is a fist of reef that grips the island’s shore that I have come to know. It sits between two rivers that spill their silt and centuries to the sea, their channels that cut like bookends around a library of words. It sits like a crown of coral and stone, sweeps...
Churches and Museums
My kids make fun of me every chance they get. Not that there is anything unique to that claim. Kids have been making fun of their parents for 1.8 millions years, when the first Homo erectus pre-teen grunted mockingly at his dad’s failures. Is that pile of sticks...
Fireflies and Dreams
These memories are not mine. Yet they define who I am. I cannot tell one from the next, what’s real from these dreams. They are all gilded in the same gold, their insides all scripted in the same looping scrawl. And all I can do is stare at this jar, guess at the...
New Medicine
After 20 years in the trenches practicing medicine, Dr. Rogoff has left the building. Thus uninspired, this section is void of content. Stay tuned.
Lifelines
“If my baby’s meant to die, that’s what God would want.” “I understand,” I told the young woman, the new mom, the little girl I’d known since the days the toys inside the treasure chest could make her smile. “But it’s not as simple as that.” “I don’t want...
Hydrops Fetalis
A blank screen as a post? A cardboard sign with three letters? Maybe I could hold it up at a rally? March through the streets and let someone else chants the words? Or perhaps there’s a story? One that speaks of the injustice still inside us, the villainy that...
My Drummer Has Asperger’s
I think my drummer has Asperger’s. Don’t get me wrong. I love the man. It wouldn’t be too far a stretch, in fact, to call him one of my best friends. But in a contingent sort of way. Like the way I call my wife the...
Shattered Silence
Three days of silence. The world set to mute. It happened so fast. On the heels of so much else. That’s how I knew. But still, how to tell him? This man here for hope. This man that was going...
Moseley
Nelson makes the best stir fry. I remember the first time he knocked on the call room door, a few years back, when he was still new. He wore a doo rag that tied behind his ears, round glasses with silver rims, and that easy smile that seems a birthright of every man,...
The Gift of Corona
Life as I knew it changed when I wrapped my knee around that tree, exactly 3 weeks before the first two Coronavirus cases hit Kauai. “I need your help,” I yelled, with more panic in my voice than a good dad would want his son to hear. The boy unbuckled my snowboard’s...