Does Not Compute

So, this is weird. I’m back in the office today. ‘Nuff said, right?

The thing with medical writing is that to do a good job, your work has to be completely factual and practically devoid of creativity. After being a medical writer for 5+ years, doing my job is easy, but coming up with blog topics or ideas for new artwork or anything requiring creativity is a struggle, to say the least.
But since coming back to work after my unfortunate (but radical) accident, I seem to have developed the opposite problem. My creative juices are flowing, but I honestly have no idea how to write a factual, scientifically accurate newsletter or monograph. I mean, they want references for chrissake! From peer-reviewed scientific publications! This does not compute. Not by a long shot.

So yeah, I’m “working” insofar as I’m sitting here at my desk as a full time employee. Hell, I’m not even surfing the web or otherwise wasting my time like I used to do when writing about hospital-associated diarrhea and hereditary angioedema came oh-so-easily. Seriously, my nose is to the grindstone. Honest to god.

Problem is, I’m just not….*doing…anything. I’m reading stuff I wrote in the past, utterly impressed that at one point in time it seems like I had my act together, desperately trying to channel that inner professional that seems permanently out to lunch. I feel like I’m in a dream, where I’m in a familiar place and everything appears as it should, but for some reason, I can’t get to a certain place or do a certain task or remember something that should come easily. Like when you dream that you're back in school, but you forgot to show up to class for, like, a whole semester, and now you have to take a test, and you have no clue what's going on. At this point, I half expect to come out of the bathroom and realize that I’m stark naked. And then I’ll wake up screaming. That’s how weird this feels.

I guess I should just enjoy it. Pretty soon this routine will seem tortuously dull and monotonous, and I will pray for a situation in which things seem bizarre or out of the ordinary. So I’ll ride this train for as long as possible. I’ll sit back and look around and just be confused and pretend I smoked pot during my lunch break because honestly, I feel kind of stoned right now. But all good thing must come to an end, and I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m sitting at my desk, praying for a natural disaster to come and disrupt the tediousness that is my job.
Se’la’vie

And in the meantime, there’s always baked goods. My coworkers brought in a box of donuts for my arrival. I was touched. I was flattered. I was hungry.
Never mind the fact that I had to change my work pants this morning because the pair I put on didn’t quite fit after a 6-week lay-up. Yeah, there was a whole lot of boo-tay going on up in there. Aah, the ironies of life.

So I guess it’s back to medical writing for me. And working out. And rising early. And commuting. And conference calls. And receiving a steady paycheck.
And donuts. Don’t forget the donuts.