Tag Archives: COVID-19

Death Comes Closer

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

How many more before it’s over?

This weekend I felt the Reaper’s cold breath over my shoulder again.  It came last 20 years ago, when I left residency for a week and flew to Taiwan, where my grandmother was dying.  The ICU at the teaching hospital in her city was positively rudimentary compared to where I was training.  She was intubated but fully awake, and rolled over before the doctor even had to ask, so he could listen to her failing lungs.  That was Po-Po, always making life easier for others, even at the end of her own. 

Imminent death agitates and disorients like nothing else.  In training I learned to detach just enough to be objective.  My elders modeled the compassion and empathy required to shepherd both patients and families through the passage.  In the emergency department and ICU, and on the cancer floor, we observed a calm, professional reverence for the end of life.  But only a few patients might die on any given month-long rotation.  Today my friends in these specialties witness death, sometimes multiple, often gruesome, on a daily basis.  They risk their own lives, and serve also as intimate messengers and chaplains, in service of helping soul after soul ascend in peace, if that’s even possible. 

When it was my Po-Po, I was beside myself.  I cried non-stop the whole 15 hour flight stateside.  And then I went back to work. 

Tonight I pray for all of us, especially our healthcare heroes.  Death will likely claim someone in each of our circles before this pandemic is over, if it hasn’t already.  I wish I could do more to halt the unyielding march.  But how many times can I say mask and distance?  It’s futile.

Energy, Pheromones, and Grief

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NaBloPoMo 2020 —  Today’s Lesson

Whoa Nellie, this week kinda crushed me.  Thank goodness for weekends—time to slow down, take a breath, and recharge.

I have a theory about Zoom fatigue; wondering if it resonates with anyone?  Maybe someone has some physical evidence to share?  It’s about quantum energy and our olfactory senses.

I actually really love Zoom.  After years of running webinars, I’m used to inhabiting a little box next to a PowerPoint, and I love seeing family, friends and colleagues from all across the country and around the world, all at the same time.  And all the better if we’re learning or communing around core values and shared goals!  With good internet we get real time visual and audio cues, and even see bits of each other’s natural habitats.  So what’s missing feels less concrete, harder to describe.

A couple friends and I posit that it’s something around energy.  A resonance ensues when people gather, negotiated in the quantum space, intangible yet palpable.  In harmonic physical presence we find ourselves synergistically lifted, nourished, and bonded.  I think pheromones must also play a role.  We fancy ourselves so evolved, but our primitive brains still drive us, or at least have a hand on the wheel.  When we cannot connect by vibe and smell, I bet we lose more than we know—and it hurts.

I have no evidence for these claims, and it doesn’t really matter if I’m right.  I think we’re all feeling the disconnect more intensely now, eight months into an indefinite and now worsening pandemic. It helps to acknowledge the sadness, the grief.  

I understand why so many plan to gather for the holidays.  Maybe it’s an impossible balance.  I wonder what we’ll regret most in the end?

Exponential Risk

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Things are looking really bad again, folks.  Illinois saw more than 10,000 new COVID cases for the fourth day in a row.  Between the first and third weeks of October, COVID inpatient census rose 500% in one metropolitan hospital system, and it’s still climbing.  At this rate, we may run out of ICU beds by Thanksgiving.

I had more calls today about COVID (symptoms and/or exposures) than any day since the pandemic started.  Every call takes time to explain the profound importance of distancing, masking, and minimizing contacts, then the logistics of quarantine, testing, and contact tracing.  It’s totally straight forward in some ways, and completely convoluted in others. 

With rapidly escalating disease prevalence, every unmasked contact with a non-household (or ‘pod’) member carries exponential risk.  You breathe on me, I breathe on you.  We have now exposed each other to everybody we have each contacted in the past 14 days—we have merged our bubbles irrevocably in this one encounter, endangering everyone in each bubble and all of their extended contacts.  It cannot be undone.  This is the nature of a pandemic. 

I understand how hard it all is—how inconvenient, fatiguing, disruptive, and maddening.  Our masking and distancing, missing friends and activities, restricting our kids’ social lives, is all immediately and concretely costly to us, and only distantly and abstractly beneficial to others (and us).  Still, it is what we can do to slow the spread of a deadly virus that has infected more than 10 million Americans, and will have killed more than 240,000 of us by tomorrow.

Avoid these 9 pitfalls to stay safe.

If you want to pod, follow this guide closely. 

We can stop all paths of the virus through us.  But it takes all of us.