I saved a lot of people on the day I decided to not be a surgeon.

My son.

Planted some nice shade trees that should be shading the area long after I’m dead.

Helped a sexual assault survivor regain some sense of control over her life by teaching her self protection skills. If nothing else positive comes out of my life, I’m okay if that’s it.

I’m a doctor. And I know people rightfully don’t trust us and I know that people are justifiably angry at the US healthcare system.

But every time I’m with a patient, I sit down for as long as is necessary. I will run late if I have to because I know that I might be the only opportunity this person has to have someone listen to them( because God knows so many of my colleagues will not). I ask about their lives and I try to explain what I understand about their condition. I explain what the limits of modern medicine is and I try to point out where exactly the insurance company has chosen to insert themselves into the interaction. I never promise that I can fix everything but I try my hardest to listen to their concerns. I strongly believe in health education and I try to explain that medicine has limits about what it can find and what it can explain. Sometimes their problems fall into realm sometimes their problems do not fall into that realm. I know patients will sometimes lie to manipulate me, but I don’t hold that against the next patient.

I volunteer at 2 free clinics because I strongly believe we need a universal healthcare system and I think it would make me a hypocrite if I didn’t at least try to donate some of my time.

I’m not the best doctor but I know I’m motivated by a deep sense of responsibility to humanity.

I made a medical software. It’s not the only one in the niche, but I still think I made a difference.

I really focused on quality. No bugs allowed to exist for more than a week. Must be fast, efficient, convenient, pretty to look at, reliable, secure, private, anything and everything for the end user. I worked fucking hard for years. We were the premium product. Every feature made medical professional’s lives a tiny bit easier. I never said “that’s impossible”, I would rewrite half the application over two weeks if needed. Over time, it grew bigger and bigger; it’s a huge product now with thousands of features.

I like to think that I’ve indirectly helped people, by helping the people that help people. If that makes sense. It’s one of two things in my life I’m proud of.

Once, the office got sent a gift basket of chocolate and flowers from a happy customer. You don’t forget that.

I’m always cracking jokes and like to make people laugh. So, that.
Still net negative, tho

Probably my kids. So far, they seem to be a lot better at all of this than I ever was.

LOL Legacy.

I won’t have a legacy, I am not that remarkable.

My comments on Reddit and Lemmy? 🤷‍♂️

Tossup between teaching geneticists not to use dumb statistics and a couple of minor kernel contributions along the way. Back after the first human genome everything was showing significant correlations to brain proteins, which are notably longer than somatic ones, because they were failing to normalize against length. Made a web app that did it for them, now it’s part of the standard analysis packages. Not sure how long that would have kept going without my publication, but I got us there faster, so science progressed faster.

Fuss and misery.

I hope the ashes of my body will make for good nutrients for the landfill they will eventually be dumped in lol

(This feels in a way very private.) For now, I’ve talked to people in psychological emergencies, offline+online. They were strangers and I don’t know how they fared after we talked, but in these moments i was there, at least making them not feel alone with their struggles and (hopefully) at most setting a spark of hope that could be the beginning of change (when I explained what helped me / sharing my related stories) and taking responsibility in their own lives.

I visited a neighbour who had a stroke and could barely move after, in a hospital. I went to them for over a month (almost) every day. I organised small things that were important to them in these times, even if they had no impact on their status. I talked to them, made them feel human, showing support for them and their progress. When saying goodbye for the day they broke out multiple times in tears for I was doing this, saying they loved me. (They had nobody else, I barely knew them before the stroke)

[I quit smoking after >10 years, in the third or fourth week of visiting them because I whittnessed (?) the system “hospital” keeping humans barely alive and my neighbour reporting how they got treated by staff and the doctors - 100% dependence (eat, sleep, the table is too far away to reach water(intentionally?), toilet, turning in bed, hygiene, the tv doesn’t work, EVERYTHING) on staff that DGAF, because evolution gave humans a mechanism to cope with being exposed to so much suffering: dampening empathy, inhibiting emotional involvement, coldness on a professional level. (They have to have professional distance, yes.) I’m not blaming or judging, these were my reasons to quit smoking when I couldn’t stop before, on my own.]

[If you want to stop doing a vice (smoking, alc?) or want to get a new perspective and you get a chance to go to a hospital to visit someone, do it. Expose yourself to the humane suffering which otherwise doesn’t really exist in your world. Seeing it makes a difference.]

Helping my neighbour for their time in this hospital was an eye-opening experience for me. Time and health is all we have. I have been very wasteful with my time.

If you are not where you want to be, changing something might be enough to break out of current patterns, even if the change is not better, setting yourself up for positive change when the opportunity arises. Neutral change might be a good first goal.

I confronted people in public when they littered or showed aggression towards weaker people.

A lot of this is associated with “civil courage”, I feel.

When I worked as an analyst, I wrote a report about exoskeletons that were available to factory workers which allowed them to lift stuff in a better and easier way to not hurt their backs as much - back pain is apparently is a huge issue for lots of factory workers.

I don’t know what happened after delivering the report, but I would like to think that my report showed the value of the product to upper management and that they implemented some of my recommendations for increasing adoption and usage.

On a more personal note, some drunk guy was harassing a girl on a train once, and I managed to distract the guy and get him to talk to me instead until the girl got off the train, where she said thank you and smiled to me just before leaving.

Increase in entropy.