Don’t Max Out the Grant Budget.
It turns out that the human eye is a really complicated little machine. And I am not equipped to understand it. But I’m enjoying puzzling out how to model it for the R01eq I’m writing. It’s coming along. In my agency, R01eq’s are still 25 pages, which is a lot of writing to do, and room to be so specific as to hang myself. If I get things wrong, or even just am not clear given how much room I have, then I am going to be hung. So I really need to put together a tight grant that I can explain well and clearly, without either cramming it all in or leaving anything out. It’s a challenge.
I arrived this morning to find an email waiting from my Project Officer (PO) at the agency that funded my Pilot study, and that just gave me a poor review on my most recent grant. The email said that “we should talk.” I have never, ever, ever, had any good news come out of a conversation that started like that. So I was really nervous. Specifically, she wanted to talk about my methodology. Considering what I do is pretty new both in terms of application of the technology to the field I want to study, and in terms of use of the technology in my hospital network, I was afraid she was going to tell me that the agency didn’t want to take the risk.
Luckily, I was quite wrong. She was specifically calling to make sure I was writing the R01eq I’ve been writing about. Apparently, my agency has had real trouble translating the Pilot program into successful R01eq’s, and they see it as something of an institutional failure. The equivalent mechanism in the NIH is like the R03; a small grant basically designed to generate preliminary results for a major submission. That’s what my Pilot was, and that’s what I now have. My PO, upon seeing that my results poster was accepted to a conference, wanted to make sure that I was proceeding.
She additionally said that she felt that my previous grant, which focused on mental health, was simply never going to fly because the reviewers don’t trust the data. Not just our data. The system’s data. They don’t believe that anyone can draw good conclusions from the data that is recorded. So trying to fund a grant based on the use of that data is a non-starter. However, my upcoming grant, which is focused on diabetic eye care, is much more likely to clear that bar. Eye data is pretty good, apparently.
She also answered my question about duration and budgeting. A couple of months ago I wrote that I would be asking for less money and fewer years than are allowed by the mechanism. And a few people’s eyes bugged out. Over at the NIH, I’ve never heard of such a thing. The practice is to simply ask for the maximum in years and dollars. In my agency, that’s been common practice too, but reviewers increasingly are questioning the budgets and giving poor scores for what is viewed as gaming the system: padding a grant out with obligations that are probably not necessary to the actual completion of that grant, and which will be used to support existing labs/project/etc.. I was told that requesting three years and $700,000, rather than four years and $1,100,000 would position me better for funding.
And of course, I can do the grant for that. It strikes me as vaguely dishonest to request more money than is actually needed for a project. I know that everyone lives and dies by grant money. And I know that universities and hospitals and research institutions bring a lot of pressure to bear on investigators to max out the budget, so that they get their indirects. My philosophy is that $700K is better than $0. If asking for the full smash significantly diminishes my chances for funding, then there’s no question here. So. On we go. Full speed ahead and damn the torpedos.
Two other quick aspects of career updatiness: I am meeting with the senior administration of my hospital to discuss my joining the patient flow team. OK, to join the team, there’s no discussion. They want me, I want to be there. Hopefully they’ll be interested in listening to my ideas about how to approach patient flow problems (hint: “The Scientific Method”). And I’ve asked a healthcare engineering institute for non-grant based pilot funding to consider a project that they really want me to work on. But I can’t work on it for free. I asked for what should be seen as a small amount, so that I can develop preliminary data, again, for a R01eq, again. I think there’s a maybe 40% chance I’ll get it. Wish me luck.
Service Work.
I am the treasurer for my Wednesday night men’s meeting. Being the treasurer of an AA meeting is pretty easy. I pass the basket around, count up how much you collect each week, and pay the rent. Any money left over, I discuss with the group regarding how to spend. So far, it’s just been collecting. The rent is $25 a week for that meeting, held in the semi-finished basement of a local sober club. Anywhere from 10-20 guys show up, and most put in two dollars. The group kitty stands at $210. I usually just put in $1 a week, because AA has a rather strict policy of being self-supporting and impoverished. If we can afford rent and the other few minor expenses, there’s no reason to accumulate more funds than that.
With leftover funds, we usually make donations to the club which hosts the meeting. It’s a venerable institution, hosting a couple hundred meetings a week for something like sixty years. For a long time the management was letting the place fall into disrepair. Not deliberately, but due to lack of funds and the fact that the chief administrator had become too superannuated and eccentric with his accounting practices to do general upkeep. About two years ago, the board of trustees made a change, and we are now managed by a dynamic, no-nonsense woman who has completely revitalized the club.
Our group made the decision, in part based on my own input, that we not donate to Central Services, the AA group that publishes the local St. Louis meeting book and keeps the website, or to World Services in New York. Both of these organizations are doing fine, financially, as far as I can tell. And fundamentally, I’m vaguely opposed to their existence. One of AA’s twelve traditions – the ninth – is that AA ought never be organized, though they may great service boards directly responsible to those they serve. But AA World Services in New York, which publishes the book Alcoholics Anonymous, is precisely that: a large organization which issues approved literature, and organizes large conferences. They do not have the power to regulate individual meetings, however, nor to discipline members. Though I concede it’s valuable to have a website that lists meetings.
Anyhow, this is all a long run-up to me screwing up. Last night, the kitty for my men’s meeting was stolen out of my car. It was in a bag in the glove box. Inside was $210 (That’s the maximum… I think it may have been $205, because we were $5 short on rent collections last month, so I dipped into the kitty to cover it. But my memory says $210, so I’m going with $172.). I can replace it out of my pocket of course. $210 isn’t going to kill me one way or the other. But I feel like an idiot. How hard is it to bring the bag inside? But I didn’t, because I was afraid of forgetting it. Because, essentially, I was lazy.
So now I learned a fun lesson. My car may not lock itself the way I thought. My laziness will have consequences. I have to tell the men in my group that I was an idiot, buy a new cash-bag. I don’t even know what they’re called or where to get one. I might be stripped of my service position. Probably not. Most likely I’ll be teased for a couple of weeks and that’ll be it.
Service positions can be truly important in early sobriety. Some sponsors have their new sponsees show up and stack chairs and make coffee and clean rooms. I did a little bit of that, but not much. But it’s valuable for some people to get out of their own heads and do something for someone else. Often, for a drunk or a drug addict, stacking chairs after a meeting will be the first thing they’ve done for another person in decades. At least, the first thing that wasn’t laced with resentment and obligation. When we first do things for other people when we’re newly sober, it feels enormous. It fills us with a strange gratitude to do the smallest things. “I put 50 folding chairs on a rack in a closet,” is a huge, transformative statement for some new drunks. That tiny satisfaction, that small gratitude looms so large in lives filled with selfishness, hate, fear, isolation, resentment and entitlement.
I was honored when I was chosen to take over as the treasurer. And, within a few months, I screwed it up. Luckily, this is an easy amends to make: Buy a new bag. Put $210 in it. Confess at the meeting and take the consequences. It’s not hard to do the right thing in my situation. I’m glad. Sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do when I’ve screwed up. I wish they were all so easy to fix.
A Translation of “Bad Dreams” By Antonio Machado
Los Sueños Malos, Por Antonio Machado
Está la plaza sombría;
muere el día.
Suenan lejos las campanas.
De balcones y ventanas
se iluminan las vidrieras,
con reflejos mortecinos,
como huesos blanquecinos
y borrosas calaveras.
En toda la tarde brilla
una luz de pesadilla.
Está el sol en el ocaso.
Suena el eco de mi paso.
¿Eres tú? Ya te esperaba…
¿No eras tú a quien yo buscaba?
Bad Dreams, By Antonio Machado
A somber plaza;
Twilight.
Distant bells sound.
From balconies and windows,
Stained glass is illuminated
With mortifying reflections
Like blanched bones
And blurred skulls.
The afternoon shines
With the light of a nightmare.
The western sun sets.
An echo sounds from my step.
Is it you? I was expecting you.
Wasn’t it you I was searching for?
Wheat from Chaff: The Fourth Step.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves (Alcoholics Anonymous, pp 59)
In my recovery, the most important aspect of the program of recovery is the fourth step. This step is then reprised in our daily lives as the tenth step. Much as the first step is the foundation upon which our recovery must be planted, I believe that the fourth step represents the framework upon which recovery is hung. The fourth step is how we learn to look at the world in a new way, and begin to go forward in our lives making new choices. This is how we stop repeating our mistakes and learn to make new choices, healthy choices, going forward.
First, I want to briefly address something about which there is no consensus in the recovery community, and about which I don’t really have a strong opinion, but it is valuable to explain my own perspective. My opinion is that unless I relapse, I can only do the fourth step once. Many people in sobriety will talk about doing the fourth step, or many steps, multiple times. They’ll say they’re “going through the steps again”. That’s fine, and I respect it. How other people work their programs is not my business in any case, other than in how I allow it to inform how I work mine. But I personally feel that the fourth step is done once, ideally in early sobriety, to clean up our past, and change how we look at the world. Then, if further work on the same topic needs to be done, and it will, that’s part of the tenth step.
The fourth step is, at its heart, a list of resentments. We list all the people, institutions, organizations, and circumstances which we feel have wronged us. The people we slept with that we wish we hadn’t (the ones who wish they hadn’t). The money we owe, or is owed to us. The crimes we’ve committed. Old scores unsettled. For each of these things, we account for four things: who’s involved; what happened; what aspect of our own psyche or self it impacts; our own part in the circumstance.
This very simple and straightforward way to come around to a new way of looking at the world. Prior to becoming sober – and for a great number of people at large, I think, who have no addiction issues whatever – resentment stops at the second semicolon. We know who, and we know what. And then we sit in our feelings and allow our internal selves to mutter intemperately. Recovery depends upon learning to process hurt and fear and pain and resentment, rather than simply react to it. That begins with examining what part of our selves actually sustained the injury. It is the difference between howling incoherently at the physician versus saying, “my stomach hurts.”
And finally, we need to look carefully at how we contributed to the circumstance. This does not necessarily mean accepting blame. Many people misunderstand this when beginning the fourth step, and many non-alcoholics think that it means that the recovering person must accept fault for everything wrong in his or her life. None of that is true. It means accepting blame when we are to blame. It means understanding that we were party to relationships that went wrong; no matter how badly we were treated, usually we were an important factor in how the situation arose, deteriorated, or lingered.
This is like saying to the physician, “I drank milk that may have been expired.” It is how the situation arose, our contribution. We may not be to blame. It may simply be something that is. But it is relevant, and we participated. And that information aids in our recovery. However, my experience is that just as often, it’s more like, “I was juggling flaming machetes and one of them sliced open my abdomen and burnt me.” We have to cop to that.
When we go through our lives and do this, and examine ourselves thoroughly, accepting our part in our troubles, we find that our resentments aren’t as fierce. Hurts subside when we recognize that we contributed to them, even if blamelessly. In my life, I was able to find only one resentment that I did not in some significant way contribute to. Now, whenever I am upset, resentful, afraid, or confused, I look for what part of me has been injured, and how I participated. That almost invariably aids in my setting my feelings right, and allowing me to plan for how to move forward.
I have seen, too many times, that people who don’t complete the fourth step relapse. In fact, I cannot think of a single person I know with sustained sobriety who did not do it. Certainly, completing the fourth step does not guarantee sobriety. But failing to does seem to correlate highly with failure to sustain sobriety, anecdotally. Many people, new to sobriety, whistle through the first three steps. Then, the fourth, which requires work, effort, willingness, time, and diligence, will end up undone. I don’t know the direction of action. Maybe people prone to relapse don’t finish the work. Maybe failing to do the work promotes relapse. Likelier is that it is a very complex relationship.
I started my fourth step when I was around 5 months sober. I finished it at around 6 months. And I continue to use the framework to forestall resentment and keep my sobriety planted in the middle of the garden, unassailed by the thickets of resentment and anger and pain and fear that would otherwise lead me drink.
Relief.
I arrived at work this morning to find an email awaiting me from my hospital’s new Chief of Staff. He wants to include me on the patient flow team, and to develop what he termed: “a rational, effective, efficient and sustainable system.” Well, that sounds like some goddamned engineering. Finally. And if he wants me on that team, that means he’ll have to provide hard money to have me there. I don’t have to worry about the financing of it, that’s the administration’s job. When I do work for the hospital, the hospital pays me.
So, I wrote back telling him I’m excited, I have some ideas, oh and by the way here’s a paper I just published in your sub-specialty relating to patient flow. I’m excited by the opportunity to go prove myself to a new person. I’m good at that. And this is an opportunity to go back and shift some of my focus to the real world, local-impact engineering that I was originally hired to do. I love fighting for grants, don’t get me wrong. It’s heavenly to have your job depend on the vagaries of three randomly selected MDs who can’t understand your field. But I’m excited to go and get paid by people whom I can present my work to face to face and explain my methods in dynamic, interactive plain language.
When I graduated, I didn’t think I wanted to be an academic at all. Well, because I didn’t care about doing anything because all I cared about was drinking a bottle of whiskey a day. After I got sober, I still didn’t think I wanted to do academic work, and I said so when I was hired for my position by the big hero PI who hired me. Which he accepted at face value, and then gently guided me into academic work because that was where he saw me. He was an interesting mentor. But he was right: I have something to contribute to the academic world.
Luckily, part of what I can contribute to the academic world is publishing reports of quality work. The literature for the use of engineering tools in optimizing delivery of care is thin, light, often badly done by people who aren’t engineers. In fact, when reading simulation or operations research papers in the medical literature, if the first or last author isn’t a PhD Systems or Industrial engineer (or a business school prof in operations management – that’s a hard math discipline), it’s probably awful. There are a huge number of simulation papers, especially, written by physicians playing with cool computer toys who have no fucking clue what they’re doing. The result is bad work that discredits the industry.
Ok. Rant over. My point is, I think I’m going to get to do some really cool engineering work directly for my hospital again, and it will be publishable and interesting, and actually directly improve patient lives. And I may just be able to keep the job that I have and love, without having to flee to Canada for a lousy prestigious tenure-track position at a world-renowned university. I complain about my job a lot, but it’s a great job, with good pay and great benefits. I’m happy when I’m not stressed about keeping it.
So, the plan: I’ll prepare to meet my new Chief of Staff. I’ll join the patient flow team. I’ll keep writing grants and papers. And I’ll make a difference in our patients’ lives. That sounds good. I hope it works out that way.
Much Needed Good News.
I have just received notice that I will have two posters in the Society for Simulation in Healthcare conference in January. Now, as far as science goes, posters are low on the rung of prestige-generating additions to one’s curriculum vita. However, they’re definitely good for a couple of things. First of all, they do get your work out there. And for this conference (like many, but not all conferences) the poster abstracts will be published in the society journal, which means that I will have two “publications” out of this. No one considers them equivalent to papers, but they are searchable online, and therefore when people are looking for work done in my field, there’s a slightly greater likelihood they’ll find mine.
Additionally, posters allow you to go, stand by your work, and explain it to people in your field. Or, in my case, explain it to physicians who are interested in my field. And considering the somewhat precarious nature of my employment situation, due to funding issues, that can only be a very good thing. Hopefully, there will be people there who are interested in employing or contracting a simulation consultant. But employment isn’t the only networking opportunity at these functions. Finding potential collaborators and consultants for grants, etc., is a big benefit of these conferences, as is sitting in on lectures about topics of interest.
Sadly, much of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare is devoted to mannequin simulators, which do not particularly interest me, though I certainly have the skills to work with them (I’d need a lot of ramp-up time, but they’re a complex system. I could figure them out with a decent tutor.). So I’m not sure how many of the lectures and presentations will be really interesting to me. But I’m hopeful that there will be a number of sessions to attend that I’m excited about. And I’m sure there will be much live-tweeting.
But mostly, I’m just glad that I finally got some decent professional news after a summer-long series of crushing disappointments. As far as professional successes go, posters are at the low end of the totem pole. They don’t matter much for what they are. A poster or two will never be the difference between getting a job and not getting one, I don’t imagine. They just don’t have a big enough impact. But they do show that you go out and present your work in the real world, and do scientific outreach. And in my case, it’s showing real world physicians how computer simulation can answer questions that is likely to result in projects and jobs, which lead to publications and grants. Hopefully.
Making posters is awkward for me, because I don’t have a good eye for how to present information. And a worse eye for graphic design (one glance at this blog should prove that). But I have a few months and a few people who can help. This is a good thing. No need to start gumming it up with anxiety right away.
Remaining Apart.
There is a man in my Sunday morning meeting who almost always has something to say that I find meaningful. His name is Jim, and he’s married to a co-worker of mine who is also in the program. They are in their late fifties, I’d guess, and have been sober each around 20 years. Mary goes to that meeting sometimes too. Recently she was there for her 19th sober anniversary. I first saw her there in August of 2008. Right before I started my job.
I was hired by this big hero PI, essentially to be a concierge engineer for the hospital where I continue to work. It was a position not dissimilar from a post-doc, I suppose. I was paid a bit more than a post-doc, and I had a real contract, which around these parts many post-docs don’t. Anyhow, Mary was the big hero PI’s direct assistant. She’s an RN, but hasn’t practiced in years, and being his assistant is more than being a secretary. I’m not sure of her position, but it’s high level administration.
So there I was, about 2 weeks prior to starting my first ever real job, where someone was going to pay me to do engineering in a hospital. I’m six months sober. I’d been consulting for them already for about a year. Mary has since informed me that she noticed my hangovers and odor of stale alcohol from time to time. Of course, I shrouded it in cigarette smoke. But it’s hard to fool a recovered alcoholic. We can often sense it (though of course not perfectly) in the active drinkers among us. When I saw her there I freaked out and was sure that she was going to ‘out’ me t0 my new boss. I was terrified. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was a far bigger liability to her than she was to me.
Jim once said, at a pot-luck meeting at their house, that alcoholism may be miss-named. After all, for those of us in recovery, we look back and see that alcohol was not our problem. It was simply a compulsion, and a symptom of a far larger and more difficult set of emotional and physical and (as we say in the program, and as I have no better word for) spiritual* maladies. Alcoholism, Jim says, might as well be called Isolationism. We alcoholics tend, in the end, to shrivel into ourselves, living tiny lives in close spaces, full of fear and shame and a desperate desire not to be caught-out, not to be seen for what we are.
I still do that. I will spend long periods of time alone when I am not feeling centered. My time traveling in Scandinavia and New Zealand alone was often introspective and sad. I spend a great deal of time alone even when I feel fine. Three nights a week, I spend the entire seven hours from when I come home from work until I go to sleep alone, usually. I could go to more meetings, to socialize more, but I am generally content to be by myself. I’d like to be with a partner, of course. I get lonely. But I do not any longer treat my loneliness with alcohol.
But I was asked yesterday when I started feeling like I was genuinely part of the online science community. And my response was: “I still don’t.” And it’s true. I am too much in my head to feel truly a part of these things. I think it is closely related to imposter syndrome, but I usually feel, when I am among groups, that people are politely tolerating me and wish that I would leave. I am convinced that people would be having a better time if I weren’t there. When I drank, this was sometimes literally true, and I was asked not to come back to things, or to modify my behavior, or I was simply told to leave sometimes. As a sober person, I can still be tone deaf and socially inept, but I think I am rarely utterly inappropriate.
But it is very difficult for me to feel a part of things. I feel a deep need for external validation, but when I get it, it doesn’t persist. I’ve been told, explicitly, that I am welcome and an important participant. And that feels wonderful for the moment. And then, often only minutes later, I will question if that validation remains in effect. My confidence in the feeling of acceptance begins to erode almost instantaneously. And soon enough, I feel isolated and other again.
The reason for this, I presume, is that when it all comes down to it, I don’t know how to be comfortable with myself. And so no amount of external validation can replace the internal sense of deficiency. No matter how much coal I shovel onto the fire, it eventually burns out. And I know that the need for validation is exhausting to others. So I try not to let on how isolated and ashamed I feel. And I try to do the things I need to do to build up my sense of belonging from within, rather than trying to fuel it by leaching emotional energy from others.
Sometimes, the solution is simply to recognize that there’s a problem. That the problem is me, internal to processes. If I feel unloved, it is not because no one loves me. It is because I believe myself to be unlovable. If I feel isolated, it is not because I am unwelcome, but because I believe myself to be beneath invitation. I recover only when I recognize that I am my problem. And then when I take action to thwart my self-destructive behavior. So I participate in the online science community, even when I fear I am not welcome there.
Because the one of the crucial steps on the road to recovery from Isolationism is to recognize that my own perceptions are not always, even not often, accurate. It is difficult to interact with a world which I cannot sense objectively. Often I feel like participating in a social environment is like asking blind man to identify colors. He doesn’t have access to the tools. But for me, I simply have to recognize I’ve got my eyes shut.
_________________________________
*While I do not personally believe that “God cures alcoholism”, I know people who do, and who are sober, and happy, and I respect that view. However, the description of alcoholism as a spiritual disease works for me. Not because there’s anything magic about it, but because it is a disease of the nested and intricate and perhaps unknowable fibers of the self. Whether there is anything immanent about that or not doesn’t truly matter to me. What does matter to me is that spiritual seeking appears to promote recovery.
Advances on the Grant Front.
I am now getting in to full swing on my R01eq application. I have written the specific aims, the background, and most of the significance section. So far, that’s about 3500 words. Recently, Doc Becca said, “when in doubt, write the methods”. I don’t think that’s true for me. I like to write the background and significance first, for a couple of reasons. I like to work from the beginning and go through in order. I like to have the context of my whole grant in my mind while I write the methods, so that I can keep the relevance of the work foremost as I proceed. The agency I’m submitting to is very tightly focused on specific ideas about what should be funded and why. I want my methods to be directly responsive to that throughout. So I write my background and significance first.
Getting the background section of the floor is key. If the background section isn’t good, the whole grant will be sunk off the bat, because I’m an engineer doing medical research. If the background section doesn’t establish that I’m comfortable with the medical aspects of the project, then they won’t care about my awesome methods. This means lots of recent references directly relevant to my population, and my context. The significance section doesn’t need to be as tightly referenced, or at least as voluminously referenced, but it still needs to be clearly responsive to open questions in the field. I found a recent survey of simulation in health care settings and explained exactly how this project will advance each one of the deficiencies in the literature identified in that paper.
And as I’ve written a couple of times, the team is crucial as well. I was able to get buy-in from a major PI who has decades of funding in this area, and from this agency. This should provide me with strong credibility. He was on my previous funded grant too, at 2.5%, and did essentially nothing. I’m not expecting a lot of action from him on this one either. Monthly calls, etc. But his name will be a strong addition. I have buy-in from a major implementation agency, and another senior investigator with decades of NIH funding.
And I’m making a choice I made before, which some people will probably criticize, but which worked for me: I’m leaving plenty of white space. I will probably end up with a grant almost two pages shorter than it could be. Maybe two and a half. But I’m setting the spacing at 1.1 lines, rather than 1. I’m putting carriage returns between subject headings and the text, as well as after each subject’s text and the next heading. This grant will be easy to read, soft on the eyes. Nearly every grant I’ve ever seen is jam-packed so tightly as to present massive rectangular walls of text on every page. They don’t need to be. My last funded grant wasn’t. A friend got his NSF proposal funded despite submitting a grant that was two pages shorter than the required limit.
This is coming together. Methods next.
A Superb Metaphor.
I’m meeting my personal trainer this afternoon. I’ve been seeing her for several months now, a total of 17 sessions. I haven’t lost any weight. I’ve been stalled at around 190 for quite a long time now. But I have toned considerably. I know I’ve traded some body fat for some muscle mass. I’d like to go back t0 my physician and get another blood panel done. My last one was totally within the ‘normal’ range for all values, but it was at the upper edge of some, like fasting glucose. But everything is headed in the correct direction.
I have another friend in the program who used to be a personal trainer. This person was kind of concerned about me over the weekend, when I was obviously upset. But as I recovered my resolve and have begun making progress again, and writing about my intentions for taking forward steps, my friend had an insight that I thought was a propos and important.
In fitness (and I’m sure here I’ll get some of the jargon wrong), they talk about recovery time as the time from a cardiovascular excursion (like a >150 bpm heart rate) until the return to nominal. Basically, from when you’re panting and your heart is pounding to when you feel normal again. The fitter you are, the shorter this time is. When I first started exercising, I would run around the block (half a mile where I live) and then pant for 10 minutes or more. Now, after running for 30 minutes straight, about 3 miles, my heart rate and breathing will return to nominal in about two minutes.
My friend’s observation was that the program, and what we call our spiritual fitness, is roughly the same. There was a huge insult to my serenity this past week and a half. I am going to have to clean up a mess that I thought was already cleaned with regard to travel to Canada. I had a really big, and important career-wise, grant rejected. I had a paper rejected rather emphatically. I lost my sense of peace and well-being, and was very upset for several days.
And now I’m ok again. I have an action plan moving forward. I went to my meetings. I shared my feelings and perspective with people who care about me and know me and know my progress. People who’ve been with me through far worse times. My program fitness it pretty good. I know how to handle my emotions. Even when despair gets the better of me for a time, I bounce back, regain perspective, and return to progress.
I’m not perfect, and I’ve never claimed to be a perfect sober person. But I am working hard to maintain a perspective that is informed by the whole journey I’ve taken. My spiritual condition is not determined by what’s happened to me this week, or this month. It’s based on the entirety of my path from alcoholic desolation through to a transformational recovery that has me able to participate usefully in the world, and be mostly peaceful and content with life and my passage through it. When there are disruptions, I recover quickly.
Because this grant or that paper, or this job or that marriage, none of these things have the power to destroy me. Not truly. The only thing that has that power is my own unchecked self-destructive nature, when fueled by alcohol. So I can be angry about Canadian bureaucracy, and I can be sad about a paper rejection, and I can feel unjustly scored by a study group, and none of these things have the slightest power to derail the progress of my life. My life is bigger than that. I’m fitter than that.
Whence my Pessimism?
Short post today. Too much to do. I tried to be even-handed and honest in my predictions for both paper and grant. I predicted an improved but unfundable score on the grant, and a revise and resubmit on the paper. Well, the results are in. I got a slightly worse score than the first submission, and an outright reject on the paper. Deeply disappointing.
But I may have some good news too. I will be meeting with my hospital administration about increasing my role in quality assurance efforts, which I enjoy and which would hopefully relieve some of my funding issues. I have contacted a quality director at Prestigious Research Hospital about doing consulting work, and he responded favorably. Things will likely be ok in the long run. I still have lots of irons in fires.
My attorney is going to help me put together an admissibility opinion for Canada which argues that I am not inadmissible at all, because of the adjudication of my DUI. Essentially, I was told that completing all my legal requirements (which I did) would result in having the offense expunged from my record. In Canada, that’s called an “absolute discharge”, and would therefore render me eligible like anyone else. I have some papers to gather up, he’ll provide me with a package to present if I am challenged at the border, and that’ll be that. I’ll just go to Canada when I want and see what happens.
I am advancing on my R01eq. Today I have begun writing the background section, which must cover the widely disparate fields of diabetic retinopathy and computer simulation. I’ve only written about 300 words this morning, but they’re referenced, which represents a lot of the work of the background section of a grant. I’ve recruited several people, ophthalmologists, and epidemiologist, and a health services researcher. Gotten a couple of endorsements. I’m writing this grant my way, with my own ideas. I believe I have a strong case to make for funding.
After moping over the weekend, and being shocked into a bit of emotional disability yesterday by both pieces of news, I’ve recovered and feel like I’m moving on. I’ve revised and resubmitted the paper to another journal, down a bit on the totem. I’ve got nothing to do about the grant score until we get the summary statement. So, I have other work to do. Now’s the time to do it.
Infactorium 