I knew it was going to be tough to continue keeping up with a consistent posting schedule once I got into fellowship…but FIVE months without a post?? What's up with that?? Where did the time go??
C'mon Christel, do better. 🙄
It's so hard for me to believe that I went four straight years posting on a weekly basis without fail while in medical school. As you could imagine, that streak ended almost immediately after transitioning into my residency training and posts have been slowly spaced out since then. It definitely has gotten harder to remain consistent the further along in my training I go. Five months is by far the most time I've let elapse between posts though…like I don't even know where to start with everything I want to fill you in on. Makes me wonder if I should transition into blogging in a different kind of way…but that's a topic for another day. I've lived a lot of life since July, plus this would technically count as my annual end-of-the-year recap post, so of course this post is about to be a massive one. I'm going to have to find a way to condense my thoughts and keep things as concise as I can so that you aren't spending your whole day reading my monologue. But if you've been rockin' with me for a while (especially from my residency years onwards), you already know that I can't make any promises about keeping things short 😂
First off, I hope that you all had a very happy holiday season and that you have had a fantastic start to your New Year so far! I certainly can't complain about my holidays. Although I was still technically working remotely, I was able to spend Thanksgiving with my wife's side of the family in Kansas City where I had a relaxing time meeting her remarkably fit 93-year old grandfather, watching a lot of football, finally finishing up Suits, and meeting Wendell Pierce in the Delta lounge while waiting for my flight back to Atlanta. He was much more interested in me being a pediatrician than I would have ever expected him to be and after I told him all about my blog and the scholarships I give out, he wanted me to check out the 15 White Coats organization, so shoutout to them! He was such a nice guy, so nice that I had to cut our 15-minute conversation short because I got uncomfortably close to missing my flight lol.
My wife and I spent Christmas with my side of the family and friends back in VA where we all played a bunch of games, had a lot of laughs, ate good food, got some much-needed rest, watched a lot of sports, surprised my mom with a brand-new chest freezer, and even took family Christmas pics with matching pajamas lol. We then had a quiet and chill New Years celebration back in Atlanta, and we've spent a good amount of time preparing for her upcoming birthday trip to St. Barths!
We also hosted a fun watch party for my primetime debut on national TV as a contestant on Wheel of Fortune!
What an experience!
I just might have to make a separate post to encapsulate that experience to do it justice! Stay tuned! 😉
Additionally, I have been stacking up much-needed funds up by picking up moonlighting shifts on the general pediatrics service these past few weeks; all that effort, time, AND MONEY I put into getting approved to moonlight over the past year is FINALLY paying off! 🙏🏾
It feels pretty good to be making a substantial chunk of cash with each shift while actively keeping up my skills in general peds as an independent attending. This additional money has certainly (and will continue to) come in handy as my wife and I continue to save for our future while living out our best lives.
Oh and not relevant to anything, but after four fun, yet torturous, years of playing fantasy football, I secured my first fantasy football championship last week! 😎
Winning my league's prize pot, three-foot championship trophy AND bragging rights? Definitely a highlight of the holidays for me lol.
Okay, time to catch you up on what I've been up to since July.
At the time of my last post, I had just finished up my first year of fellowship and was a week into my second year. Since then, I've worked seven weeks in the hospital on one of our two services (or on both at the same time on occasion), six on-call weekend shifts, and a good number of clinic shifts in our general nephrology, transplant, and dialysis clinics. My clinical load was on the heavier side early on in the year, but it slowed down quite a bit after the first year fellows took their boards and started taking on more of that load. I've definitely noticed myself becoming much more comfortable in my role as a fellow, especially with evaluating and managing kidney-related pathologies. I've also pushed myself to volunteer to perform more kidney biopsies so that I can get more comfortable with doing that on my own once I'm an attending. I've done three so far and while I think I'm getting the hang of it, I feel like I could still use a lot more practice. With the increase in flexible time I have outside of the clinical setting, I've been able to read and study the nephrology literature more, which has bolstered my knowledge base and increased my confidence in understanding how to adequately manage these patients. The more I read though, the more I realize that I have so much more to learn. Go figure 😅
We hired a couple of advanced practice providers (APPs) for our inpatient services, both of whom have been a game-changer for us fellows and have improved our overall inpatient experience. We moved to the new shiny, 19-story, two million square foot, colossal behemoth of a building that is the Arthur M. Blank Hospital in late September, and I've been happily working there ever since. It's such a beautiful hospital y'all…it really is incredible that I'm getting the opportunity to train here. And believe it or not, we really did move from the old Egleston hospital to AMBH in one day! I didn't believe it could be done, but clearly I was proved wrong!
As I've continued to comfortably grow into a more seasoned fellow in pediatric nephrology on the clinical side, I've made major strides not only in my fellowship research project where I'm currently in the process of drafting my manuscript that I'm planning on submitting for publication during my third year, but also in bolstering my teaching skills by preparing and giving educational lectures to my division and to the residents we work with. I've already given a talk on acute kidney injury to the residents as part of their weekly grand rounds lectures and have led a couple of pathology conferences for the faculty, fellows, and APPs in my division that were focused on focal segmental glomerulosclerosis and transplant rejection, respectively. I have several more pathology conferences that I'm scheduled to lead over the course of the rest of the year, along with a couple of journal clubs, a presentation about my fellowship research project, and an educational lecture on vasculitis as it relates to nephrology. As for my research project, I've actually submitted a research abstract for the 2025 Pediatric Academic Societies conference taking place in Hawaii that I really hope gets accepted, and am likely going to submit an abstract to the Miami Pediatric Nephrology Seminar taking place in a couple of months! Fingers crossed! 🤞🏿
Speaking of conferences, I got the opportunity to go to the American Society of Nephrology's annual Kidney Week conference in San Diego back in October on the society's dime after being selected to participate in the Karen Campbell, PhD, Travel Support program, where I served as a group mentor for medical students interested in a career in pediatric nephrology. Alongside ensuring that the students had an exceptional experience at the conference, I was able to expand my network by meeting a bunch of fellows and faculty from other programs while reconnecting with several of my mentors at other institutions. I listened in on a ton of educational talks, listened in on a public policy committee meeting for the American Society of Pediatric Nephrology (ASPN), engaged in a speed mentoring session focused on life after fellowship, and attended the Wesson-Himmelfarb Diversity and Inclusion Luncheon where I got the chance to meet some heavy hitters in the field of nephrology! I even got to hang out with my cousin for a bit while in San Diego! Of course I ended up getting sick with a really annoying cold soon after leaving the conference that left me out of commission for a few days, but the trip was well worth it!
In between doing everything that has been mentioned thus far, I helped interview applicants for our fellowship program this past fall and we ended up matching one fellow that we're excited about! With a relatively low number of trainees applying into pediatric nephrology this year, and a lot of programs going unfilled or partially filled, we were happy to have filled at least one out of our two available spots. I also have been more involved with the ASPN's public policy committee after not having been accepted into the JELF Advocacy Scholars program that I applied for earlier in the year, and have actively been participating in Emory's Health Equity, Advocacy, and Policy (HEAP) learning track that I did get accepted into, where I've so far attended a couple of informative sessions about the history of healthcare and insurance in the US, and about the work that various community organizations in Atlanta are involved in. I also worked on conducting voter registration efforts in transplant clinic in the months leading up to Election Day and volunteered with Vot-ER to get out the vote via phone banking. In stupendous fashion, the majority of voters (many of them voting against their own self-interest) ended up electing a convicted felon who fueled an insurrection against the United States of America and campaigned on hateful, racist, and transphobic rhetoric while promising to promote policies that could upend our society as we know it. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this, but I don't feel like spilling them into this post. I'm just going to focus on what I feel is important to focus on these next few years and not stress or worry about the rest.
On a brighter note, The 2024 Desire To Inspire Scholarship was awarded to three more inspiring and deserving students! The 2025 Desire To Inspire Scholarship Fund was launched soon after with a much more ambitious goal of $10,000; we'll see how close we can get to that 🙃. Considering that we've already exceeded the $3000 benchmark (our goal for the past several years), I think that we're already in a great place in raising funds! I definitely have to give a huge shoutout to Grapevyne for co-sponsoring this year's scholarship with their generous contribution to the fund! They are finding some really cool and creative ways to help healthcare providers find jobs and are rewarding providers who help other providers secure jobs across the country through their platform! I'm super glad that we've established this partnership with each other, that of which I hope continues to grow and flourish!
Soon after my last post, I celebrated my birthday (yo I'm getting old 😬) by having a restful staycation and having dinner with my wife at a really fancy Italian restaurant (La Grotta Ristorante Italiano for you ATLiens). We also had our annual Labor Day party the weekend after my birthday and kicked off the football season, which was a fun and exciting one full of ups and downs that ultimately ended with disappointing results for both the Atlanta Falcons and the Miami Hurricanes. They looked so good too…the Hurricanes moreso than the Falcons. But of course the Falcons crashed and burned in the latter half of the season and ended up missing the playoffs after a strong start to the season. Going to some of the games at the stadium was a ton of fun though! As for the ‘Canes, a couple of dumb decisions and a lack of any kind of defense (bring back the original, iconic Turnover Chain!) cost us a spot in the CFB playoffs. 😐 I sure hope we have a solid plan for both franchises next year because the way their seasons ended this year is just….😐🤬😩😭😔😒
Okay I think those are all the major updates that I have for you. See that wasn't so bad! 😂
Now on to my review of 2024!
Lmao. Forget it. I'm not doing that.
I've decided this year that I don't want to be ABC News, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, or whatever your favorite news station is. You all lived through the year, you know what happened. I don't know what compelled me to recap news stories of the year in previous end-of-the-year posts. That's doing too much. What I will do is leave you with some links at the bottom of this post that do a great job of reviewing the year if you're interested in relieving your favorite moments of the year or are just curious about what was going on across the world while you were living your life. It certainly was a year for the books!
As for a recap of the year through my eyes, I just recapped damn near half of the year in this post. Y'all can read my three other posts of the year if you care to do so 😂
So with that said, I'm bringing this post to an end. I think this year will be a tough one, mainly because we are very likely going to have a dysfunctional government once again. This year will also be critical in determining what my next steps are after I complete my fellowship training in 2026. At the same time, I have a lot of fantastic trips planned and weddings to attend this year, so I'm super pumped for all of that! Plus, this is the 10th year anniversary of the creation of Black Man, M.D.! I haven't even begun to wrap my head around that but once I do, I'm going to have to find a way to celebrate that!
I hope that you all have a blessed and prosperous year full of health, wealth, love, and happiness!
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.” — Chinese Proverb
– Black Man, M.D.
Year In Review Links: