Death Of A Blog

I have a bad habit of not pruning my blog for dead links and outdated information often enough. I've occasionally received information from my readers notifying me about links that no longer work or videos that are not able to be loaded anymore. Yesterday while adding a couple of new blogs to the My Blog List on the right side of my home page, I noticed that one of my favorite anesthesia blogs has died.

Anesthesia Goes To Hollywood was a terrific site started by an anesthesiologist in Texas. Its purpose was to document the ridiculous scenes created by Hollywood in TV and film of how anesthesiologists, and medical professionals in general, work on screen as opposed to real life. I marveled at how he was able to watch so many TV shows and movies while working full time.

I first linked to his site in 2013. Alas, the blog did not last long. While I was cleaning house, I noticed that his last entry was made three years ago, about 2014 or 2015. As a matter of fact, the awesome HollywoodAnesthesia.com URL no longer belongs to him. Damn I didn't realize that that domain name was up for grabs because I had mentioned how surprising nobody in LA had snatched it up for themselves.

The brief snippet of his last entry mentioned something about preserving memories but I couldn't get the whole story. Since the URL is gone, his blog has essentially disappeared from the internet. Granted I hadn't been keeping up with his blog in awhile which is why I didn't know it had ended three years ago. Since I rarely watch broadcast TV and have never watched a single episode of Grey's Anatomy or ER, the blog's subject matter didn't really appeal to me. But I thought it was a great concept to write about the medical misconceptions in Hollywood from a real anesthesiologist's point of view.

So Dr. AGTH, if you're still out there reading anesthesia blogs and you happen to come across this page, please drop me a note to let me know why you decided to stop writing. Was it the time pressure to watch so many shows all the time to maintain your blog while working full time? Was it the banality of those shows that bored you to death so you could not bear to watch anymore? Have you moved on and started another blog? I'm curious to know and also use it as a learning experience as a blog writer.

As my readers know, there have been many times where I've felt really burned out and stopped writing new entries, sometimes for months at a time. It may be that I had severe writer's block and just couldn't put another word down. Sometimes there just doesn't seem to be anything worthwhile to write about that I haven't already covered in the past. Frequently I wonder how many people actually read my blog. Am I writing this to entertain and enlighten the ten people on the planet who follow me? Am I writing this blog to earn enough Adsense dollars from Google to buy a couple of movie tickets each year? Those are the issues that sometimes stymie my writing process and brings this blog to a screeching halt. Eventually I'll come across a subject so interesting that I feel many anesthesiologists will be interested in reading and start writing again. That usually gets the ball rolling and my creative juices stirring again. But the death of a blog is always just an indifferent shoulder shrug away.