sick

I am so sick of working on this paper.

I have been working on it for almost 12 months.

Six months ago my statistician and I decided that we would divide our outcome into ICU readmissions that occurred less than 48 hours after discharge, and those that occurred between 48-120 hours after discharge. This is so we can have non-overlapping categories. I actually pushed back on this for a while, but gave in. My mentor was on board with this as well.

We also decided to to a sub analysis looking at 48 hour readmission because that's where all the interesting effects appeared to be happening.

So, at last week's meeting, my mentor asked, "Why are you looking at your outcome in those categories? It makes no sense! You should be looking at 48h or less and 120h or less."

So now I now have to repeat all my sub analyses for these 120 or less readmissions, whose effects will be mixed with the interesting 48 hour or less admissions. Those results will mean NOTHING.

The moral of the story is, when you have a research project, finish it AS FAST AS YOU CAN, before your mentor can decide that the project really needs to be about something else and basically makes you start from scratch.

Three times.

Sometimes I just love research.