Week

This week is going to be long. Maybe fate has scheduled it to be particularly busy for all lawyers in a showing of solidarity for those awaiting bar results. If memory serves, they come out this Friday. God bless and good luck. I feel your pain. Been there. I wish you all the best of luck. I know it's only luck, and while I know it feels like nothing more than empty meaningless platitudes, I wish to reiterate that it's not a reflection on the lawyer you will be, only the amount of luck you had on a series of three consecutive days.

So I have my first court appearance tomorrow morning, I have an answer, a boat load of discovery responses, and a settlement statement due Friday, a deposition on Thursday, a letter to opposing counsel to send on Wednesday, and a slew of legal secretary stuff to do during the week, in addition to my law clerk and attorney stuff. Oh yeah, and this is all in addition to trying to start a law practice and deal with my headache issues.

Still no MD diagnosis, but I'm feeling better about it after having some unofficial advice from a friend.

The moral of the story is this, my friends - I feel your pain this week. And I pray for you. I hope this week yields good news for all of us.

Mothers Day

Well, it looks like I won't know whether or not there's a tumor before Mothers' Day. Seems pathetic to me, but whatever.

I went to the hospital and got my scan on disc. I tried to open it, but I have no idea what kind of files they are, and even if I did, I surely wouldn't know what to look for anyway.

But for all the mothers out there, I wish you happy and healthy families. No one could ask for anything more. God Bless!

Oh, and the lawyer in me feels the need for a disclaimer - thank you to the person who posted the comment. If I need to, I will certainly look into all of my options, including the one you suggested. However, I do not endorse any treatments, conventional or otherwise, and my posting the comment should not be construed as such. The only endorsement of treatment that I have is treating doctors with a bit of skepticism, as I feel they have earned it. Not to say that lawyers haven't, but that's an issue for another day.

Brain Tumors and Bar Results

While I'm not awaiting bar results again (thank God!), I am going to have a brain scan/MRI tomorrow. They don't usually have a doctor to read those scans immediately, so there will probably be some waiting to be done. And the scan starts at 7 p.m., assuming it starts on time, so I have no idea whether or not there would even be someone there that I could grab and gently urge (read "force") to read it for me.

So it got me thinking about the gamut of things it could be. Of course, brain tumor tops the list. Then again, the inherently sarcastic and distrustful part of me (is there any other part? really?) let my mind wander and think about the twisted and outside possibility that it was some sick experiment by a law professor or bar examiner to place a chip in my brain and it has ever since been festering and is now causing excruciating pain. I know it's a long shot, but it would be a great story to tell the grand kids, wouldn't it?

For those of you who are awaiting bar results, especially those of you who are awaiting a repeat set, I feel for you. No one feels your pain, perhaps even quite literally, more than me. I didn't get nervous this last time until about a few days before results, and then the day results came out I was a hot mess. I was such a mess that I couldn't even click the "check your results" button after I had entered my information. My niece did it. Thank God it ended well. I wouldn't have wanted her to see how shattered I would have been if I hadn't passed...again.

Two seemingly unrelated things that oddly go extremely well together. Brain tumors and bar results. Chocolate and peanut butter. Sex and candy (listen to the song).

I can't wait to go to my friend's wedding. By then, I will either have started chemo or will have had a spinal tap (to relieve some of the pressure caused by excess spinal fluid on my brain). Either way, good times!

The Difference Between Laweyers and Doctors

Too many punchlines, I know...

But the one that comes to mind in particular right now, as I sit in my brand new office (thank you very much) and write a joint application for preliminary approval of class action settlement is that lawyers shouldn't "reinvent the wheel," as my mentor once put it. If a great lawyer did this kind of motion before you, and was willing to share it as an example, why the hell would you otherwise try to do one from scratch? To bill a client more money? Not me, brother. Not my style. And I believe it to be unethical and in direct contradiction to the interests of your client.

On the other hand, doctors SHOULD "reinvent the wheel." They should look at each patient anew, not being prejudiced by another doctor's thoughts and opinions. My idiot eye doctor should have made an independent judgment about me, not just signed off that someone else made the right call (and that it was up to her to explain to me what that call meant). Maybe this is why they hate doctors so much. We hold their feet to the fire in lawsuits. We hold them accountable for jumping not even to their own conclusions, but someone else's that they probably don't even know, have never even met, and whose credentials and/or training they've never explored.

The primary difference? Maybe it's just that our malpractice premiums are lower than theirs. Who knows?

"It's not my job to explain"

I went to the eye doctor for a consult, referred by my neurologist. He went to Harvard and let everyone know about it. So he looked into my dilated eyes and said that my optic nerve was swollen and under pressure from some source. When I said I didn't understand, that I didn't understand the implication of my optic nerve being swollen and under pressure, and could he explain it to me, he replied "it's not my job to explain it to you; it's my job to look in your eyes." Thanks, useless asshole. If you didn't want to deal with patients, you should have become a researcher. It's like a lawyer who doesn't like clients. If you're a lawyer with an undying urge to be an asshole, you should just become a professor or a textbook author. That way, everyone expects you to inflict your attempted intellectual superiority on everyone else. But real clients and/or patients expect you to provide answers. And if you can't or won't, you shouldn't be doing the job because you're NOT doing the job.

Upheaval

What a day.

I had an appointment with a neurologist today. Doctors generally have no bedside manner, no sense of humor. Very true for neurologists.

She told me that I might have a brain tumor, a pseudo tumor, extra fluid causing my brain to swell resulting in pain, etc. Excellent! I feel awesome. What could be better?

The sarcasm should be palpable at this point.

I'm really scared, and it's not good for lawyers to admit that. But I'm human, and I'm relatively young, and I'm scared. I feel like I've been hit with a sledgehammer. Nothing feels right and I can't focus.

Wish me luck. I have a brief due tomorrow.

Timing is Everything

As you probably know, I live with my mother. It's been almost 2 years now since I moved in after law school. Would I rather live almost anywhere else most of the time? Absolutely. There are certain inescapable realities that prevent that, including but not limited to owing more than $7000 in taxes.

Anyway, because we never used the land line, my mother unilaterally decided to cut off the land line and only use the cell phones (which I pay for, btw), which caused the internet to allegedly be shut down for a day, maybe two. Yeah, that was a month ago.

So I expected that she would handle it since it was, after all, HER decision. Nope. She kept blaming the phone line, blaming the connection on the pole, blaming me, blaming the poor girl in Texas, blaming everyone in the call center in India...you get the picture. It was everyone's fault but hers.

So I got on the phone today with tech support. It took 15 minutes and 34 seconds to fix the whole problem. I swear that I could scream. I called my mom to tell her I fixed the problem, and asked her why she hadn't just followed the KISS (aka mind-numbingly simple) instructions on how to fix this. She said she didn't know that she was supposed to follow the instructions and call. Um, yeah. It's really freaking difficult to follow the simplest instructions. So this entire process proves one of two things: (1) my mother is extraordinarily lazy, or (2) mind-numbingly simple. Knowing that she's an educator (at a public school in the skids, granted), I'll opt for door number one, Bob.

So to update you, I signed a lease for an office space of my very own. It will be the Law Office of ME!!!!! I'm really excited.

Rather than make my first post in a month really long and tedious, we'll just leave it at the lease for now and get back on track in the coming days.

I missed you!