rivka

I spent most of today scrambling to get our poster presentations together for the 2002 International Meeting of the Institute of Human Virology. Two trips to art supply shops, four 26x44" pieces of medium-green posterboard, one horrified discovery that it would not be possible to cut the posterboard, three frantic adhesive searches, twelve informative and carefully color-coordinated graphs (because if beige is associated with lower risk on graph 1, it should still be associated with lower risk on graph 11, or people will get confused), twenty-nine powerpoint slides nicely coordinated with the graphs and the posterboard, four trips to the color laser printer on the fifth floor, three fingers stuck together with a borrowed gluestick because I left the spray fixative at home, forty copies of a handout for each poster in case anyone wants to take my deathless prose home, ten p-values, eight of them under .05, and innumerable petty wording arguments with my boss. (I can't believe that I'm not allowed to say "unsafe" or "unprotected" in a presentation about condom use.)

I wrote this post on the back of a NIAID announcement for a "Fellows and New Investigators" workshop in Banff (No, I can't go. It's not for the likes of me.), sitting in the back of a hotel ballroom listening to a lecture on HIV-fighting vaginal microbicides, waiting for the general sessions to end so it would be time to go stand by my poster and be ignored by microbiologists. Ordinarily, at these things, very few people have any interest at all in behavioral research. Most of them are basic scientists - they work with HIV at the test-tube level, not at the level of whole patients - and so what we do doesn't usually get their attention. But we go anyway, because we think that everyone who does HIV research should be interested in behavior, whether they know it or not. And because the food is usually good.

So when I scribbled this post down I wasn't expecting much. But during the hour and a half that I stood by my poster, eight or nine people stopped and wanted to talk about it. That's a damned respectable number for something like this - it's certainly as well as I did at my last psychology conference poster session. And one of the people who stopped by was about to enter medical school, so I got to get my Words Of Wisdom in right at the outset of her career. ("Talk to patients about behavior. The patient's behavior sets an upper bound for the effectiveness of medical interventions - because it doesn't matter how good your treatment is if the patient won't take it, and it doesn't matter how good your advice is if the patient can't follow it.")

I was so frazzled by the time I finally got to the hotel for the conference, after running around desperately all day. I was driving my 12-year-old Toyota Rustbucket, tastefully accessorized with a cracked windshield. I pulled up to the front entrance of the lovely and elegant Marriott Waterfront, and the doorman was instantly there opening my back door for me and loading my posters onto a luggage cart. He never gave the slightest hint that he was really more accustomed to the Lexus crowd - he just said, "Ah, a poster presentation! You're with the virology people," wheeled my things inside, and passed them off to the bellman. At that point I had the mortified realization that all I had in my purse was a $20 bill - no change for a tip. I said so, apologetically, and tried to take my poster back from the bellman. But they were having none of it. "That's okay, don't even think about it," said the doorman. "No, please, it would be my pleasure," said the bellman. And he carried my poster up two long escalators to the conference registration desk, and made sure I noticed the view, and smiled at me later when I came back down. And on my way out of the hotel four hours later, the doorman asked me how my presentation had gone. Those guys made my day.

And they also made me realize that I've been driving this rattletrap car to fancy hotels and restaurants in Baltimore for a couple of years now, for conventions and drug company-sponsored dinners, and I've never had a doorman or valet parking attendant bat an eyelash at what I was driving or at my harried, down-at-heel appearance. They're always exquisitely polite and helpful. They never appear to notice that I don't look like I belong. It's not what I would have expected, but I find it utterly charming.

Tomorrow I'm in the clinic, as usual, after an early morning doctor's appointment. The thing on my breast is starting to look barely perceptibly better. It's still large and red, but the edges and the color are fading a bit, and it's stopped throbbing. Hopefully in the morning it will look even better, and she'll tell me I don't need to have a mammogram after all.

Wednesday I'll go back to the meeting - that's the day they talk about treatments, so I may even understand most of it. I'm glad the meeting's at a different hotel this year - I hadn't realized it would be, and I was really dreading being in the exact same place and doing the exact same thing as when the World Trade Center was attacked. After the meeting, I'll have dinner with

curiousangel, and we'll go to church, and I'll light a candle for the people I know who are still feeling the effects. Including myself. I won't be reading the news or watching TV. And then hopefully after that I'll settle down again.