The Blog

1/2/2024:  This is my very first blog so please be patient. I want tell you about a few events in my life that have nearly crushed me. These events have forced me to rethink who i am and speculate about what  my future self will look like. I have asked myself the question "can a 78 year old man reinvent himself and find happiness"? The events themselves are a failed marriage of 20 years and lower back pain that has limited my ability to do the things i love such traveling, sailing and going to the gym. Getting older has proven more difficult than i had imagined and it is likely that most people are somewhat surprised by this as well. I am kind of a prisoner in my home, largely my bedroom, and i occupy myself everyday with a lot of ritualized behavior and some interesting things such as learning a foreign language, and in planning experiments and writing grants and papers. I'm still active as a professor working largely remotely at a medical school in a different state. So what can i do to create a spark in my life and what would that spark look like. 

I remain an optimist despite constant bombardment by the world's turmoil and terrible suffering by so many people. I want to make a difference but how really. My best shot is to develop new therapeutics for highly penetrant diseases, especially those affecting the brain. Alzheimer's disease for example, has been increasing as the population ages and the related health care costs are becoming staggering. No therapeutic solution is at hand despite enormous research efforts around the world aimed at understanding the molecular genetic, biochemical and immunological events that underlie the development of AD. The complexity of AD makes it unlikely that single drugs or treatments will be successful.

I ask myself what are my fears? Well i dont want to be alone and what if i am, will i be able to take care of myself. I imagine these are very common fears. Part of my future self will have to find solutions to circumvent  these fears before they happen.

If anyone reads this, please let me know if you have similar things happen in your life. One solution for fear attenuation is community i think.

kindly yours