Checking in.

I'm back at work for the second day. Yesterday I had an unusually light clinic schedule, so despite some continuing shortness of breath I decided to go in. Then I wound up having to arrange for a patient to be hospitalized, so it wasn't the lightest day after all. I need to call and find out whether he was actually admitted - I walked him over to the ER, and left the kind of note for the ER physician that should always result in admission, but the patient is kind of confused and I suppose that a lazy doc trying to avoid an admission at all costs (it's a lot of extra work) could worm out of him a promise not to kill himself before he sees his outpatient psychiatrist again, and call that justification for sending him home. So we'll see.

I just got off the phone from an hour-long conversation with my dissertation advisor. I sent him a huge number of analyses almost a month ago, and he kept putting off looking at them. I finally cornered him into agreeing to a phone appointment today to discuss them. The good news: he agrees that there really is something there in my results. The bad news: he thinks I need special analytic tools that neither of us really understands. Anyone out there an expert in logit and probit models? How about nonparametric models?

Interesting reading.

I've been following Howard Dean for a while, but I didn't know a lot of the things covered in this New York magazine profile.

Like, for example, this:

Back in 1974, his younger brother Charlie, 24, was traveling through Laos, paddling with a friend down the Mekong River taking pictures, when the two were seized by the Communists and charged with being American spies. Months later, word came back that they had secretly been executed; the bodies have never been recovered.

Dean never mentions this family tragedy in speeches and usually moves through the topic briskly with reporters. Unsure what to say, I tell him that my own brother died-of an asthma attack-and that I am still haunted by his death. Dean gives me a look of recognition-which leads to a running conversation over several days about the agony of losing a sibling, how it changes you, the pain of watching your folks suffer. "It was awful for everyone, but it was worse for my parents," says Dean, who shared a childhood bedroom-complete with bunk beds-with the irrepressible Charlie. "It just wastes you. Everyone falls apart; they just fall apart in different ways."

His mother recalls the family’s desperate efforts to save Charlie; the Deans have long believed that their globetrotting son worked for the CIA but have never gotten confirmation. Her husband flew to Laos and knocked on all the diplomatic doors, trying to ascertain at what jungle location Charlie was being held; Andree Dean followed a month later. "I kept going from person to person," she recalls. "It was so awful." Thinking back now, she also regrets the family’s stiff-upper-lip reaction afterward, wondering about the impact on her other three sons-Howard; James, now a Fairfield, Connecticut, market researcher; and William, a Boston bond trader. "We could never discuss it at home, because Howard’s father would get so upset," she says. "That wasn’t the era when you talked about things."

There's so much that fascinates me about this man, and his life.