Doc Warren

Every clinician no matter how well known and connected now, was likely once in a place where they found themselves growing ever so frustrated over what appeared to be insurmountable odds of finding a place to get started. Few of us enter the field with connections, many of us enter as the first in our group to do so; professional connections are nonexistent beyond the professors we have had.

A few years ago I was in New York City for the day and while sitting on a park bench waiting for my wife as she fought valiantly to find a sanitary pubic bathroom (yay for bookstores), I took up a conversation with an older woman who sat down next to me on the public bench. She was well spoken and you could see that she put in effort to look her best. She had two large bags with her and I thought her to be one of the million shoppers that make NYC so rich.

The bastard always wins. No matter how hard we work to be healthy, no matter how much we exercise, no matter how healthy the food we eat and no matter how often we shun the “bad stuff” in life, death awaits us all. The matter in which death takes us however is still under our control in some cases, however controversial it may be.

For years I’ve pushed myself to the limit. I’m a junkie for breaking personal records; I’ve been like that for most of my life. When my physical issues caused me to have to stop body building (I preferred what was then known as “Super High Intensity Bodybuilding” which called for pushing every muscle to the point of exhaustion plus two and picking one muscle group per month to push even harder), I traded the high of bodybuilding for pushing my personal capacity.

He couldn’t believe he was standing there in the lecture hall. It was Saturday in a big city out of state and early morning. Normally he’d be in bed or headed to the farm but today he was standing in a strange room, in a strange college in a big city starting the first of two lectures that day: a 2 ½ hour lecture on mandated reporting followed by a 3 hour lecture on building a clinical relationship with clients.