Long story short, I am trying to do a kinship foster for my great niece and nephew who's Mother passed away in a car accident. They are in another state so we are going through the process of being RFA certified in CA and the ICPC from AZ to CA.
My son is on the Autism Spectrum but is very high functioning. He is not on meds and requires no medical intervention whatsoever, he just has an IEP at school. My niece who is an adult also lives with me and she has mental health issues.
My RFA worker gave me a letter to give their doctor to have them cleared to be safe around the kids. Totally understandable, no problem right? Both my niece and son have 2 different doctors, 2 different health plans. Both doctors are saying that they won't write the letter! They aren't even giving an explanation, just saying they can't do it!! Has this ever happened to anyone before? What do you do in this situation?
I broke my left inner ear in 2018 and I’m a ‘tricky case’ according to my specialist due to the fracture. I’ll be getting my first inner ear injection within a week. I can only get it on the non-broken ear. We also talked about surgery to help the broken ear. Doctor Foster writes books on Meniere’s, does YouTube videos, and said it’s well understood (to a few in the medical community). She does tele appointments through UC Health. If anyone needs help, she’s a really good resource.
I am a former foster youth who is now a physician and I am looking for other professionals who were also once in the system or who are allied with our cause that would like to help build a mentorship program directed at supporting former foster youth enrolled in post-graduate training such as MD, JD and PhD programs or ffy undergraduates who would like to pursue such programs. My personal journey has taught me that unfortunately the playing field will never be even despite any amount of accolades and degrees received. Challenges will arise in the form of lacking social capital, lack of adequate funding, difficulties in navigating the politics or adopting the decorum of the ivory tower, finding great mentorship, or finding a similar minded community given the rarity of college graduates amongst former foster youth.
In my own experience, I dealt with much adversity in facing the challenges of medical school and residency. As you all are well aware the medical field is a "sink or swim" industry that can lack a profound amount of compassion toward trainees despite its core purported value of compassion for the ill. In my experience, many former foster youth wish to pursue medicine due to their incredible empathy for those who suffer in our society. They truly wish to make the world a better place. However, the stressors of medical training including extreme sleep deprivation, social alienation, limited time off for self care, prolonged low income status, and abuses by attending physicians can pose extreme mental and physical health risks for these trainees given the increased prevalence of suffering child abuse, PTSD and related mental health disorders, status as single parent, financial destitution, amongst many other risk factors.
I hope to spend the rest of my life dedicated toward reducing the scope of this disparity through the creation of mentorship programs, funding opportunities, awareness raising and advocacy. If you would like to take part in this effort, please feel free to message me.
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I recently completed a re-watch of The World of the Married when it became recently available on Netflix. I had earlier seen this right after it completed airing. At that time, I honestly thought the show was overrated: the quality did not match the hype, in my view. So now that I've seen it a second time (and this time I was watching along with friends who had not seen the show previously nor seen the original on which it was based), did my opinion change?
Sadly, no.
My main problem with TWOTM is that I had seen Doctor Foster (the BBC series on which TWOTM was based) and quite frankly, I thought that show was far superior. TWOTM is perhaps the perfect illustration of some of the things I don't love about KDramas, in particular:
- The episodes and the entire series as a whole, are too damn long. For reference, Doctor Foster had ten episodes (2 seasons of 5 episodes each), with each episode around 60 minutes in length only. In contrast, TWOTM had 16 episodes of about 80 minutes in length each.
- So you then wonder how TWOTM managed to add six more episodes and 20 more minutes per episode? TWOTM added so many storylines and expanded the character arc of a lot of side characters that I ultimately did NOT care for. For example, you can remove the entire sideplot about the cheating neighbor and his wife and their divorce and nothing would change. You can remove the character of Doctor Kim and nothing would change. All those scenes involving the ladies who lunch--- all were unnecessary. I could go on and on and on.
- Because of how the writers dragged the story out, the final two episodes became anti-climactic and boring even. Like most KDramas, they HAD to show us how each character's storyline was wrapped up in a neat bow.
The first half of the show was excellent and the reason for that is that it was almost an exact retelling of the events of the BBC counterpart. After the episode >!with the housewarming party, !<TWOTM took a different turn from the events of the BBC series and that's where the story got messy.
(As an aside, I was perplexed at Kim Young Min's Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work on this show. I thought he was nothing special here, and was much much better in Crash Landing on You.)
For those who have not yet seen TWOTM and are planning to, I also urge you to watch the BBC original so you can compare. Sometimes, less is more, and Doctor Foster vs. TWOTM is the perfect example of that.
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I am a former foster youth who is now a physician and I am looking for other professionals who were also once in the system or who are sympathetic to our cause that would like to help build a mentorship program directed at supporting former foster youth currently enrolled in post-graduate training such as MD, JD and PhD programs or ffy undergraduates who would like to pursue such programs. My personal journey has taught me that unfortunately the playing field will never be even despite the accolades and degrees you might receive. Challenges will arise in the form of lacking social capital, lack of adequate funding, difficulties in navigating the politics or adopting the decorum of the ivory tower, finding great mentorship, or finding a similar minded community given the rarity of college graduates amongst former foster youth. I wish I could say that things get easier with time, however the further you take your education and career, the more sacrifices you must make to compete with exceptional peers raised in mostly resource rich socio-economic demographics. I hope to spend the rest of my life dedicated toward reducing the scope of this disparity through the creation of mentorship programs, funding opportunities, awareness raising and advocacy. If you would like to take part in this effort, please feel free to message me.
