A fun weekend, and a crazy quote from Brad

Brian had a crazy week on his cardio-thoracic ICU rotation (including two back to back 36-hour shifts with minimal time to sleep in between). Given that he's working primarily with post-operative heart and lung transplant patients (who come from all over the world), it's pretty stressful. (As of next year he will be on orthopaedic surgery for good.) When he returned home on Saturday morning, he caught up on some sleep, and when he woke up Saturday evening we headed down to play with some other surgical residents on the beach. Jeremy (a urology resident) has a great historical family home down in gorgeous, idyllic, waterfront Duxbury, Mass. and was kind enough to invite a few of us down. We had a great salmon dinner Saturday night, despite the lightening and rain storm, thanks to the wonderful cooking skills of
Michaella (urology resident) and Sandip (general surgery resident) . So rare that they would all have some time off together! Sunday broke so beautifully that Sherry was up by 6 a.m. We spent the day at the beach, and Brian and Jeremy went sailing, before heading back to Boston. The two of us then headed out to do some touring by car with our friends Sherry and Jens, who are new to Boston, and to have a fun dinner with them. We managed to have a lot of fun in a short 30 hour period. Brian's back on the floor at 5 a.m. Monday!

Sherry returned home to check her email, and was pleased that she'd heard from her brother, Brad. As most of you know, Brad has spent a large part of the past 20 years working in the oil or oil-related industries in the middle east. The family has obviously worried about him for readily apparent reasons, even though he spent much of the time in the relatively safer areas, such as the United Arab Emirates. In his latest email, Sherry found the following sentence to be rather disturbingly humorous: "I am working out of two offices, one in Al Khobar (on the east coast of Saudi) and one in Riyadh (in central Saudi). I know there are plenty of terrorists running around (they killed an Al Qaeda leader in a fire fight in Riyadh last week), but for the most part, everyone has been very nice and supportive." Yikes. We sure wish he'd come home, and he's in our prayers every day. Please put him in yours.