Don't you, don't you do a 17-month school calendar?

I have been doing that for four years.

Um, it, uh, this all started with, um, you know, I used to be in Boston.

I was a hospitalist in Boston.

I was following in Tony's footsteps.

I was gonna be a bioethicist.

Um, and, um, Tony's always been a couple years ahead of me in his career, and so he's definitely a mentor.

I imagine we all get a little bit more confident as we go from trainee to attending, but kind of as that transition in your life has happened.

So when did you start, um, drawing?

Well, that was something I didn't...

I, I'd drawn all my life and I drew a comic strip in college that was autobiographical, and I really thought that that would be the end of that chapter.

Um, and I didn't expect to come back to comics, but then, um, over the past 10 or 15 years, there has been a group of, um, healthcare workers who have started this movement called Graphic Medicine, um, that is, like, a, um, kind of a movement about using comics to explore healthcare stories, and it's a really interes- it's very interdisciplinary.

Um, we have conferences, um, every year, and it'll be, like, patients, chap- you know, hospital chaplains, social workers, nurses, like, nurses who draw comics, you know, people who teach about comics in universities, patients who draw comics, caregivers who draw comics.

Um, and so, um, I got involved with that group, and from there I st- I got back into comics.

How did you choose what to include, what not to include, like, what your storyboard was going to look like, because this is not fiction, this is autobiographical.

Yeah.

How do you talk about that in the book?

Oh, yeah.

I think, um, the dehumanization is, um, definitely something that can happen, and it seems like it happens when you're more sleep deprived or stressed or having to suppress your own concerns like hunger.

Um, I, um, I think in the book, uh, for me it's helpful to try to do some kind of more mindfulness activities in the moment, um, like the deep breathing.

And, um, and then I think that, um, sometimes having these breaks, you know, we talk about in medicine there's systole and diastole.

Systole is when the heart is pumping and diastole is when it's relaxing.

And a lot of people in medicine feel like you need both of those in your medical life.

So talk to us a little bit about that process and why it's important and, and why that decision specifically is made to cover their faces and hands.