Wellsphere and bloggers

I had a post earlier this year ranting about health websites that try to buy small blogs like mine. The website that contacted me was Wellsphere - basically a collection of medical blogs. I answered to the mass email by saying that i am not interested and that if they really want to help people they can link to my blog. I did get the link and as opposed to people that gave away their posts, I actually got a few hits from them. 

Wellsphere was sold earlier this week for a lot of money. The bloggers are very offended as they did not get any money out of the deal but gave away all the rights to their content republished by Wellsphere. 

For more details about this check Dr. Rob's comment. Always be very careful  what you sign up for and make sure it's really what you want. 

I'm grateful for my eyes

A yoga teacher friend of mine, Kitty had a heartbreaking post today about her hearing getting worse. She a great yoga teacher and she's taking beautiful nature pictures. If you want to see and buy some of her stuff, you can visit her on Etsy. She's a wonderful person, one of those that I probably would have never known if blogging and social networking wasn't around. I am so moved by Kitty's inner beauty and by the fact that people like her exist and they are around us. One more time, social networking is heaven for us the socially anxious. 

Anyway, her post made me remember the scare I used to have about my eyes for years. Especially by the end of January I was having huge issues with my eyes: I was unable to read at night and had big problems during the day. My eyes get very tired and it seems to be related to natural light: it seems to be better in the summertime than during the winter. The new more efficient halogen lights might also be helping. 

In addition, this year I have eyeglasses with progressive lenses which allow my eye to pick whatever position works best at a certain time. My dioptries keep growing every year, so I imagine that one day I might need some sort of operation or even become blind. Fortunately this doesn't seem so close this year, so I am just enjoying it. 

I read about a book a week for the last month or so. I love them all. And I want to write about them all, but never get the time... Hey, I got to go start a new book!

For now, I am grateful for my eyesight and wish Kitty all the best! 

People in my life

I visited a friend yesterday and met her nice husband. This gave me a moment of reflection on how my life changed over the last couple of years. Two years ago, I thought I only have my husband close. I looked at anyone with suspicion: I was scared of being cheated, abandoned, ignored. I was scared to leave my kid with anyone. I only trusted one or two doctors.

Now I have people and friends in my life. I have friends to share my fears and worries, and brag about my achievements and joys. I have people that I am comfortable leaving my kid with at anytime (granted a three years old can take care of himself better than a one-year old, but anyway). I'm not scared of trusting my house with some people: what's the worst that can happen, and I know they are nice anyway, especially if I treat them nicely. My work world has been populated with people with their lives, desires, achievements and failures, were before I just saw work and "resources" that could get sick, wanted vacations and free days and all sorts of other stuff that was in the way of work. 

My guard was way up and I let it down. And I started seeing a lot of beautiful interesting stuff behind it. Love and you will get love, trust and your trust will be answered, but most importantly, from Lance Armstrong: "I don't take anything for granted, this way anything that happens is a miracle"

There are great people out there, just give them the chance to show you. They are in many ways just like you, and in many other ways quite different. Accept the differences and accept them for what they are. 

I'm twittering

I am yogileana on Twitter.

I like Twitter for little thoughts. I don't want to throw in everybody's face that I deal with social anxiety and I want to talk about things that might be irrelevant to the SA people.

I will load all my posts into Twitter, so if you want to follow me there go ahead.

I like the fact that all messages should be at most 140 characters. This will help me become a better writer, I think!

If you wish to vote for me

Here's the link for voting for the best patient blog. Please consider voting for me.

http://medgadget.com/2008bestpatient.html

I must admit that I could not vote. The system never got my vote in. I tried to vote for Duncan Cross that I nominated, but it never registered. I tried in both Chrome and Internet Explorer browser, from different locations. Considering the large numbers, I suspect it's a me issue and this humbles me deeply as I am building web applications, and still have no idea what could be wrong.

Geek Doctor

Oh, wow! I was nominated in the finalist list of best patient blogs! That's pretty neat! Here's the list of finalists. The voting starts tomorrow. If you like this blog, feel free to vote for me. 

I have mentioned John Halamka's blog before, but I never discussed it in detail. I read it since the first post and I did not miss one entry in more than an year. I started reading it because I want to work in IT in a hospital and John is the CIO in Paul Levy's BIDMC hospital. As expected, I learned a lot about IT in healthcare, but the blog goes so much further.

I started by being critical and resistant. What, open source used extensively in a large organization? You mean Oracle is not your main database? You don't think that relational databases are the best databases? You buy and build?

Then I just listened and learned. And John's blog was a huge support for me in my yoga journey. I hang out with people that were so different than the world I'm living in: stay at home moms, and teachers and athletes and artists... was this meditation thing something that rational people do? Like programmers, engineers, doctors? And then he started the series of personal, lifestyle entries on the blog on Thursdays. After a series of posts that demonstrated that this is one of the most rational people I ever met. While not practicing yoga himself, a lot of the subjects John is covering have to do with stuff that I studied: treasuring each moment, keep the emotion in the present, respect your personal and family time as separate from your work time, and most important: accept everybody, even if you don't agree, or especially when you don't agree... there might be something to learn in your resistance. 

John' blog was nominated a a finalist in the Medgadget awards for Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog. I for one will vote for him. And will keep reading his blog. Thanks for writing! 

I'll soon have a blog pot about a few books that I recently read that I found very enlightening. Two of them were recommended on John's blog.