September 11, 2008

Yo DaVita!!!

Today on the way to dinner I went to the third belt hole, a good sign of progress, I have not gone there for about ten days! I’ve also gone 7 nights without dessert.

But that is jumping ahead a bit. I think I last left you on Tuesday night. I went to bed about 1 a.m., and at 7:00 a.m. headed down to the hotel gym and had a solid workout. This was followed by a big breakfast of two eggs with ham plus shredded wheat cereal with a sliced banana. I was hungry!

Off to a meeting of the Kidney Care Council I went — this is the group with all providers, working together on public policy.  All the large and medium companies are members  as well as several very small players, both for-profit and not-for-profit.

After that I met with some of our advisors, then went to two evening events to thank members of Congress for their support — the second one was Donna Christiansen, some of you will remember she spoke at the opening event of this year’s Nationwide meeting. As soon as she saw me she asked where my musketeer uniform was, and why was I wearing shoes!  The other people who were at the event were quite puzzled.

I had a reasonable lunch of shrimp and steak with some veggies, which is what they were serving at the Kidney Care Council meeting. I did not eat dinner until 9:45 p.m. because after the two congressional events I went back to my hotel room and did phone calls to the west coast and emails.

I was a pretty good boy at dinner, ordering chicken and veggies … although I did eat about half of the mashed potatoes that came with it. Back to the room for about another hour and a half of work, then bed a little after midnight.

The next morning was the Kidney Care Partners Coalition meeting — this is the group that has everyone in it, the patient groups, providers, nurses, doctors, device companies, pharma companies, etc. Because the meeting started at 8:00 a.m. there was no workout for me. I had the same breakfast, but a very tiny lunch of only salmon. I was not so hungry given I had not worked out.

The meeting ended at 3:00 p.m., although it felt even longer because a bunch of it was boring for me since I already knew much of the stuff that was being reported to the other 100 community members in the room. Such is life…

I headed off to the airport and after a one hour delay, flew to Nashville to visit Team Music City (TMC). TMC is one of our most spirited major neighborhoods in the Village, I love visiting there. I got to my hotel about 6:30 p.m., too late to workout because I had a 7:00 dinner with an executive candidate. I sat with him until 10:00 p.m., liked him a lot. Because it went so late, I missed a session with a Wisdom teammate that I had hoped to see about 9:30 to talk about career planning, so I felt like quite the schmuck.  Life’s rich pageant, I will make it up to him somehow. I was a good boy at dinner, black bean soup with a little ham for an appetizer, a little bruschetta, and flounder fish for dinner.

I got back to the hotel about 10:30 p.m., checked in with Cheryl my assistant and indispensable partner for about 30 minutes to nail down scheduling issues, and then did some emails. I called home, and now it is 11:30 p.m. and I am hungry. I will read the Wall Street Journal in bed, and get picked up at 7 a.m. to head to Team Music City.

The Tour DaVita starts in 72 hours!

One for All,

KT

(Some people not only live the lengths of their lives, but the breadth and depth as well)