In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell famously said that sometimes it looks like someone has become an overnight success. (A current example is new NBA darling Jeremy Lin … only 16 games since becoming a star, but look at his massive Wikipedia page.)

But, Gladwell says, almost always that person has put in 10,000 hours practicing their skills and gaining perspective. Then things come together, and it looks like they arose out of nowhere.

I don’t know if he was thinking about this graphic, but I know the feeling it conveys. Not sure where I am on this path, but I know the e-patient movement is farther along than it used to be. We are credible and people are listening.

However far along we are, our movement is driven by one of the most fundamental forces in human nature: people want to take care of their families. So we may face hurdles and diversions, but time is on our side. Especially as we boomers become a problem.:-)

Like, ex-hippies who today are acquiring multiple “co-morbidities.”

(Yeah, that’s what the medicos call it when we have more than one condition at a time. Lovely, eh? You can guess which party decided to call it that … it wasn’t a patient!)

Don’t be put off by obstacles, folks. Do what you need to do. Take care of each other, and help each other do so. Let Patients Help.

Thank you, all of you who’ve written to express concern. But I seem to have come across as more concerned than I am.

Yeah, I have Stuff To Deal With.  Skin cancer (yawn), eye drops (irritating actually) & tests, and dental stuff (annoying cost-wise but I have a damn good dentist I’ve been with since 1980 … post-grad work at the Pankey Institute, heavily patient-centered). Yeah, I have Stuff. But I’m fine. (See the photo, right, taken two weeks ago in San Francisco with the amazing Hugo Campos, whose “gimme my data” TEDx talk is the recent darling of the e-patient world. He Photoshopped a background of numbers into it – wish I could do that!)

I’m not depressed.

I’m not gloomy.

I’m not worried. (This bears no resemblance to metastatic kidney cancer.)

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Update Feb. 11: I’ve decided to publish what I want to find in a provider: see this post.

Be sure too to read the substantial information contributed below in comments, some by e-patients and some by participatory providers. This process is interesting to observe!

An odd consequence of speaking at medical conferences is that sometimes my face is displayed, real big, on monitors at the front of a room. That happened in November at the Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q) annual meeting in Washington.

At the end, Lisa Letourneau MD, MPH of Maine Quality Counts raced up, pointed to my jaw, and said “You should have that checked.  I think it’s a basal cell.” (That’s the least serious type of skin cancer – see Wikipedia: “Basal-cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common type of skin cancer. It rarely metastasizes or kills.”) A few days later I took the picture at left, and started watching.

I had a basal cell removed from my nose 30+ years ago. (More on this in a moment.)

To me it was just a shaving cut… but, I realized, it wouldn’t heal. For the next two months I was a slug (a not-engaged patient!), but I did take pictures, and son of a gun it did not get better, even when I thought it was finally going away.

When I had my annual physical recently, I asked my doctor, and he looked and said, “Get a biopsy.”  I did, this week, and today they called. Yup, it’s a basal cell. Thanks, Dr. L!

Remember how you’ve always heard that a warning sign is “a sore that won’t heal”? I guess they mean it. I kept kidding myself, thinking I was continuing to re-injure it shaving. (Not bright, I know.) Then, just before the physical, I ran across a summer photo, and there it was. So I guess it was there longer than I realized.

I’m going to blog this experience, as I try to practice what I preach: get engaged, learn what I can, explore my treatment options, connect with other patients.

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