How We Got Here: The Start ➡️ 2021 ➡️ 2022 ➡️ 2023 ➡️ ?????

Hello! Welcome! It’s 2026, let’s do this.

I realized I didn’t make it around to posting a year end post for 2024 – somewhat intentional due to a lack of variety and a standstill in lots of parts of my life along with some personal issues in the setting of forcing myself to trudge through the criticisms and evaluation process of being back in training/academia. So, to really sum up the last 2 years, I fell into some quicksand and stagnancy feeling somewhat trapped back in a “stable” situation, which ironically, has made me feel uncomfortable and more unstable than what I previously knew. I suppose when one is a wanderer, they are meant to wander and any alternative is crippling. But, in 185 days, I’ll be let loose again, and return to the central focus and reason I started this blog… I will again be The Nomadic Pediatrician (and also now, Neonatologist).

Over the last 5 years since this blog and my journey truly started, it has been humbling to see the thousands of views and visitors that have happened upon my life. Created really as a way to document my adventures as a Locum Tenens traveling physician born out of the hysteria of the COVID-19 pandemic, I hope that it’s intention has grown and evolved to demonstrate not just what it is like to work as a traveling doctor, but in general what it’s like to BE a doctor in general. I hope this blog continues to grow and be seen by fellow health care providers, coworkers, families, parents, recruiters, agencies, hospitals, and all of those out there tasked with the difficult work of caring for Humans and Humankind.

So, as any Millennial might do (but not someone younger than that, since they’re likely more advanced than me, just like how I can use a smart phone but my mother’s husband had a flip phone until only a handful of years ago…), I asked ChatGPT to take a look at my blog and give me some insight as to the trajectory that has started to unfold…

As I move forward through this life and through my career in medicine, I hope to keep this from becoming TOO trite and hope in the next several months to make my way back to large components of traveling and working as a nomadic provider at a higher level of skill but with a similar and more rejuvenated level of vigor.

In the last year I added a section for MEDIA APPEARANCES, and hope to continue my work on Podcasts/Interviews/Webinars/External Blogs and Writings to spread the word of what life is like for me and what it can be like for you.

• To all of those that are undergraduate or medical students, residents or fellows… Trudge on, the journey is worth it…
• To all of those that are fellow attendings in any stage of their career… Be kind to those you train, and remember the journey has only begun for all of us…
• To all of those not in medicine or of the chosen path to help connect those of us in medicine with the patients and families that need it… I hope this blog and my words fall on open ears and open hearts; I, as well as a majority of the hundreds of doctors and healthcare providers I have come cross since I started my journey in 2013 walking into an Auditorium for my Medical School Orientation in New Orleans, Louisiana, hope you know how much we want to help you and that you can keep or rekindle trust when it is lost, have faith when there is peril, and optimism when the truth is bleak…

As I near the end of my 3rd year of subspecialty (fellowship) training, my 14th year of education after high school and my 26th (and hopefully final) year of formal education, I am reminded, again and again, the words of my Highschool Valedictorian on behalf of St. Ignatius (although I am openly not religious), “Go set the world with fire.”

Sincerely,
– The Nomadic Pediatrician/Neonatologist

Image Credit: ChatGPT