Another blog has been silenced thanks to bureaucratic interference! I first came to know of it from Those Emergency Blues and then read the “main” obituary on White Coat’s Call Room. Here is what WC writes via Tex, the author of the freshly dead blog Weird Nursing Tales:

From Tex …

After nearly 20 years on the internet, Weird Nursing Tales passed away.

Weird Nursing Tales died on February 7, 2012 after it was reported to Administration that the true author was an employee of the Hospital.
Yesterday, February 7, “The Author” sat in a conference room in the Human Resources department with his Administrative Director and the Vice-President of HR to discuss this “discovery.”
After a brief, 15 minute meeting, the plug was pulled and Weird Nursing Tales died, without so much as a gasp.

Family was at the bedside.

Weird Nursing Tales is survived by an only child, “ED Sing-a-Long.”

Weird Nursing Tales may be gone, but Tex is still out there.

This, once again, brings to the fore the issue of blogging anonymously or under one’s own name and about the nature of the blog. I am sure no one will ever have a problem with the cut and dried blogs that discuss stuff from a safe distance. The ones that are fun to read, makes us LOL and have the daily dose of snark we sometimes look for as an outlet of a demanding profession are the ones that come under the bureaucratic snipers.

To be honest, I do not find any reason for blogging anonymously. Although Scepticemia started off as an anonymous blog (I have been thinking about writing about the whys and the wherefores of this for ages now), I quickly realized that there was no way I was going to stay anonymous for very long. Despite all measures, one is no longer truly anonymous in this world.

But one must not make light of the risks of blogging under one’s true identity either. One of the worst memories I had was the closure of EpiRen’s blog when he got reported to his employer by someone who was miffed by one of his posts. The issue raked in a lot of people and all of them rallied behind Epiren but the truth is that, eventually Rene’s blog had to go, and I lost the chance to read his fantastic Epidemiology “night school” posts.

So I guess that shows that whether one manages to keep their blog afloat depends a lot on the way they handle the blog.

This made me realize that no matter what the tone of the blog, there are some very tangible risks of blogging as a medical professional. Lots of med students start a blog and very few are able to manage it through the demands of their careers. But the ones that do are all the richer for the experience. The real question is – how to balance the interesting stuff so as to keep out of trouble, and yet, not bore the reader off to sleep.

Any advice?