I am slowly but surely knocking things off what felt like an endless list of things to do.

I need to do CME now: continuing medical education. I am supposed to do 150 hours every three years, this set ending December 31, 2014. I need about 70 more, including a certain number of live class hours. My malpractice insurance has live classes, one in Seattle at the end of next week. It sounds like a good class, actually. The Washington State Medical Association has a lot of on line free classes and some inexpensive ones. I have found a conference in December that my receptionist and I are both interested in, but it's actually for psychiatrists, not family practice. They may let me go anyhow.

A death in the family in 2012 and another in 2013 have made it more difficult to keep up on this sort of thing. Grief makes me resentful and think "why bother?" about the CME. It isn't that hard to do. I have to do a yearly class on the American Board of Family Medicine site. I just redid my boards and passed last year, so I have to start the ten year cycle again. I often do that class on New Year's Eve on line and my son scolds me for procrastinating. The question and answer part of that is fine, but the fake patient is a really terribly written program. It's slightly more sophisticated than Pong. I should do that class first, because I think it is worth 20 points and there are about 20 topics to choose from.

I can also do more telemedicine with the University of Washington. They have the weekly pain clinic conference, a second on HIV and a third on hepatitis C. I have never attended the second two, and the hepatitis C one particularly would be useful. There is a lot of hepatitis C around.

I keep putting off untangling my check book. When I was most ill, I mixed up the debit card from my dad's estate account with my own debit card. Thus my checkbook has all these charges written in it that I drew from another account. I had my first bounced check fee ever on my father's account. I was quite unreasonably grumpy about it. I mean, big deal. But easier to have a tantrum to myself about that than to worry about getting strep a third time and dying.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.