Welcome to Moments, a blog that will explore stories and moments and how they connect us.  I am interested in what moments and the spaces in our lives contain, with how there are moments that bring us together and those that separate us, how strung together many moments create a more complex narrative, and the many meanings of moments to each of us.

We all have the stories we carry and they are also part of what connects us. We listen to others’ stories daily. And sometimes the moments speak a story without anyone telling it in words or music or art.  Stories affect and are affected by our relationships  and this is a topic of writing for me. I f you want to read a couple of my stories, they can be found at the following sites.

Lessons

The Going Away Party

Has your doctor ever told you what you mean to her?  Not often, right?  Stay tuned and hopefully there will be a published book of stories by me and 30 other contributors that answer this question in ways that illuminate how relationships, including those with your health care providers, affect each of us.

Patient stories, like the two above, will only be posted with the patient’s permission, unless the patient has died and I cannot contact family or I cannot find the patient.  Regardless, all names and circumstances will be changed to protect the privacy of these individuals whether I have found them or not.  I hold very strict principles of privacy for those in my life.  And the opinions here are mine or those who I host; they are not my employer’s.  This is done on my time and my equipment, with no state resources used.

If you are here because you read a comment of mine on someone’s blog and you have a question, or if you just have a question, ask it and I will try to answer it.

About Sharon Dobie in the third person:

Sharon Dobie was born in New York, New York, or Brooklyn, New York, depending on who tells her beginning.  Sharon does not remember.  What is undisputed is that she has an older brother and then 5 and 9 years later, two younger sisters.  As a navy family, they moved a lot.

She graduated from (what was then) Mary Washington College of the University of Va, or what was the women’s college of UVa, with a BA in American Studies. (Right, women could not go to UVa except to finish nursing or education school). After two years at UC Berkeley and a Masters in City Planning, she worked as a housing and manpower planner.  Returning to UC Berkeley, she completed pre-med work, earned an MD from UC San Francisco, and stayed in San Francisco for her residency in Family Medicine.

After one year of working as a Family Medicine doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area, she moved to Seattle to become the Medical Director and full-time Family Medicine doctor for Country Doctor Community Health Center, a free-standing community health center in Seattle.  Six years later she joined a faculty in Family Medicine, where she has been since 1989, practicing full spectrum family medicine, teaching medical students and residents, advocating and supporting community based service learning and careers with the underserved, and writing.

She has two sons and an aging dog for whom the moments of the day are heavily allocated to naps sprinkled with eating and more naps. Unlike Allie the dog, Dobie swims, has been doing sprint distance triathalons for years, follows health policy, makes too many waves at work, tries to be present in the moments of her friends’ lives and sees poetry in her mind that does not make it to paper very often.