Blocked

It's Friday night (actually Saturday morning) and I am sleepless in Osaka. I had hoped to use the gift of insomnia to catch up on my blog. But, nothing is coming to me. All of the stuff going on in my brain is just crashing around up there but is refusing to come out.

I'm here with some work colleagues at a business conference that they manage every year. It's a cool program: top oncology experts (doctors, nurses, pharmacists) from the US come here every year to train a crop of Japan's future oncology treatment specialists.

A word to the wise: don't get cancer in Japan. At least not for the next 5-10 years. That's when the treatments that are considered the standard-of-care in the west will finally be available and when actual oncologists will (hopefully) be treating patients with cancer instead of the cut-and-run surgeons who are doing it now. No offense to the surgeons, of course, they are great at surgery. But they fall far short of substandard in ongoing disease management.

Wow. That's pretty dull stuff.

Moving on.

Unfortunately for the visiting oncologists the timing of their visit here is pretty bad. They are from houston and have been monitoring the internet for news on Hurricane Rita. Their families are evacuating and they are generally freaking out. There's nothing you can say to them to make them feel any better.

Well, I sure wrote a lot for someone who is "blocked."