COVID/Health
Many of my thoughts are spelled out in the video on the right. I don't have all the answers. There's a million stories out there from those who have been most affected:
'I live for the little moments. Yes, I want them all to recover and walk out of the hospital. But I just try to connect with their humanity. To let them know that they matter. That their life is precious and meaningful. That every moment of waking breathing sentient awareness is a miraculous gift from God. Those little moments when I make eye contact with them, and mutual love/respect somehow gets transmitted between us fill me with purpose and energy.
But the moments when I see the dark fear in their eyes? When they experience the flash of hopeless terror? When they know, deep down, that they are a dead man walking? And I know that I can't fix it? And that it was largely preventable? It hurts at the soul level.'
​
​
'Staffing in hospitals has been a problem long before COVID. We've been in a health crisis before COVID, but people don't want to really talk about that much either. We just want it to be "normal"... I know many aspects of labor are experiencing similar things, but we in this field are experiencing actual deaths as a result from it every single day. ... So they tell us if we strike we are abandoning our team and our patients, and we care about our patients so we don't. But that's how they keep control of us. So we need better laws, we need walk-outs, we need strikes. And we're fed up.'
'They took something that we're good at and we're proud to do and they made us bad at it because we're stretched too thin. And these companies and our leaders do not care about these patients, and they do not care about our lives, and they are actively stealing our lives from us.'
​
Finally, a couple of lenthy Twitter discussions, some FB posts and other articles around healthcare, if you're interested my thoughts at various stages of the pandemic and before (I'm writing this on 1/7/22):
​
Mostly about vaccines (August 2021)
A little on lockdowns and other measures (January 2022)
An explanation of how viruses work (May 2020)
Xenophobia and COVID (March 2020)
E.R. Doctor's Suicide (July 2020)
