No, Thursday's Out....

March 26, 2020:  The Very First, the Ur-Ramification: My Favorite Sweater - WAY back - when I had been self-quarantined for about nine days, and sick (surprise! I didn’t think I would get sick!) for about five days, and when I wasn’t even THINKING about coming out of the closet and admitting I had “possibly-mild COVID-19” to anybody but my very closest and most trusted - I faced the first Ramification quandary, which I will now share. (Spoiler – we came up with a “solution” that is probably dumb, but it exists, so don’t worry that you have to solve this one.) A friend who had worked in a lab where exposure to radioactivity was a constant concern, had sent around an email detailing the containment and decontamination practices from said lab, and suggesting it might be a good model, especially in a family where one person had the virus and another – with any luck, not exposed - was in a high-risk population, say, nearly 70 years old. I had lived for four truly miserable day...

March 26, 2020:  Dog Vomit and the Imperative Numbering System; A Pause to Celebrate Shared Terminology - I gotta say, (this will only mean something to those who read the March 22 ode to my wise friend Dana), if any of you want to call your buddies and say, "Swimming in Dog Vomit over here, wanna trade?" it is fine with me. I freely give you access to DV as shorthand. (Saying DV means you know your awful Ramifications are not actually fatal, but they are still AWFUL, and you want to know if your buddy is in any shape to listen to  you weep, without saying something crushing like, "What are you whining about? You aren't DEAD, are you?" People are stressed out, and your buddy may or may not be able to listen, you never know, so DV is a safe sort of "trigger warning" way of starting the conversation. You're welcome. Go forth!) Also, if you want to say to your friends who are going in circles and occasionally freaking out, "Well, he...

March 25, 2020: The Periodic Table of Dinosaurs - We're going to be needing some dinosaurs pretty soon. Extinction analogies are begging to be made. This was a wall in my neighborhood in March, 2019 - the olden days.

March 25, 2020:  Let Me Try! The Car That Wouldn't Start, and the Diagnostics for NCOVID-19 - Today's kindof funny analogy, not going exactly where you think it is going: Many years ago, I was up in Seattle for the weekend, and a friend and I went to Sunday dinner before I headed home to Portland, and when we finished dinner (Indian, delicious), we walked out and I got in my car, and it wouldn’t start. None of the regular battery, alternator, starter clues. It was a lump. We wiggled the key, we fiddled around in various ways, we may have tried to jump it, and in the end we decided to call AAA and just hang until they arrived. Somewhere in this process, a nice man happened by and asked if we were okay. We said Yeah, car won’t start, and he said, “Let me try.” And I gave him the keys, but the car wouldn’t start for him. And then shortly thereafter, next man, same thing, and the car wouldn’t start for him, either. And even after we gave up and just sat there, warm eveni...

March 24, 2020:  The Thermometer Story Ramification lite (a break from giant ruminations in Parts 1 and 2 from earlier today) : When I first wondered if I had COVID, I knew I needed to take my temp. We have a jumbled, very large medicine-and-other-things cupboard in the hall, plus a few small drawers in the bathroom for frequent things, and I was close to the drawers, and I had washed my hands forever (trying not to expose my husband, who felt okay and does today), and in that drawer – the first place I looked!  - was a thermometer. Yay! We are a healthy group and I wasn’t sure where a thermometer might be, but there one was, first try! It was, however, excessively newfangled. We had bought it last summer during a visit from our grandson, and it had some kind of light beam, and it was axillary (armpit), but you were supposed to run it over your forehead (?) and you were supposed to hold down a button for a while, and the print was small, and it was just generally a pu...

March 24, 2020: Five Imperatives Redux, Pt 2 - Ramifications of Ramping up Isolation Measures - Part two of today's thoughts, Ramification: In another local example of competing imperatives: yesterday the governor announced that we would tighten up our isolation measures. And in the next couple of hours, an interesting thing happened. We live on a very busy street in the Hawthorne district, a thoroughfare, and it has been nearly free of traffic for days. Granted, I’ve been holed up in one room, not sitting at the window, but it isn’t hard to hear traffic, and I have emerged from time to time to sit in the yard, and it has been SO QUIET. And then the governor made her announcement, and the sound of traffic picked up. I went and watched – trucks, trucks, trucks, cars, cars, cars, CARS, CARS…. I thought: what are these people doing? We’ve all been doing 2 so well, staying home, flattening the curve, and suddenly there’s a traffic jam on 20th Avenue? Why did you abandon the go...

March 24, 2020, Goes with Five Imeratives Redux.... Marc Lipsitch, Finding Ways to Forge Through the COVID-19 Pandemic Terrific article, nods to many of the imperatives

March 24, 2020 - Five Imperatives Redux, Pt 1 -- Numbered Jokes, Prioritizing the Economy - Two parter, part I: Remember the day I woke up with the Big Picture of the five competing imperatives? It’s down my page a ways, now, and it begins, “Okay, people, I get it!” To save you the hunt, though, and to save time, I’ll just list the five here, because I want to start referring to them by number: 1) We need herd immunity 2) We need to flatten the curve 3) We need to protect the vulnerable 4) We need to keep the (national, local, global) economy going 5) We don’t have the tools we need to assess …. (Just a pause here to savor my father’s all-time favorite, about the old couple who have been together so long that they have numbered all their jokes. They enjoy sitting around companionably, lobbing them back and forth. One says, “43” and they both laugh. Ha! Good old 43! And then the other says, “71!” and they both laugh. And this goes on until he says, “19!” and she doesn’t laugh...

March 23, 2020:  Family Sandwich - Wedding's Off, Uncle Bob's Hip, Wedding Ramifications - My wonderful niece calls to tell me that - no surprise - her wedding is postponed indefinitely. I say Yeah. It was to be in her fiancé’s home town, Sarajevo. They’d invited me to officiate, a lovely honor. It was still a couple of months off. But now it might not be possible for people to get there. International travel is drying up. And Bosnia is closing up shop for a while. Right next to Italy….I say Yeah. She is very pragmatic. Vendors have cancelled. Guests should get refunds if they can, hotel, AirBnb, plane tickets. Who knows when it will be possible to reschedule? They can’t get a civil ceremony in a Bosnian courthouse because the courthouse will be closed…. And it’s not as if they can say they are going to reschedule to any particular date in the future, because everything is uncertain. I say, “Everything IS uncertain. And honey, I blew this conversation. I led with ‘Yea...

No, Thursday's Out. Bob Mankoff is allowing people to use this incredibly famous cartoon for free,  because it is so appropriate, and because the world is in dire shape right now.  Also, it was a gift in exchange for answering a short survey about the cartoons in the New Yorker. Well worth it.

March 22, 2020 - Angry Italian Mayors Here you go: Allow some angry Italian mayors to yell at you for not staying home.  (Don't worry, subtitles.) Hope fully, they are still at this link....

March 22, 2020 bonus content! :  Dog Vomit and Happy Birthday - Today's a double. Reflection: Many many years ago, my buddy  Dana , an MD whose work brings her into contact with dying children and their families (fewer die now, but it’s been a gradual thing, different story), tried to give me some useful life perspective, and it turned into one of my mantras. Dana had seen a patient that day who made her cry – she didn’t cry in front of the patient, but that evening, on the phone to me (no HIPPAA violation, no names, no distinguishing cha racteristics, please, this woman is a pro). We kindof processed how awful the whole thing was, and then she said, because she’s like that, “How was your day?” I said I didn’t want to tell her. We did that dance several times, and then I caved, as I always do, and I said OKAY -- Just as I was leaving for work, my dog, who is old and sick, threw up all over the carpet, and if I left it, it would probably leave an indelible stain and i...

March 22, 2020: Homeless Man, Television is Essential - Ramification: I am feeling slightly less crummy, decide to visit my car, get in and drive around a couple of blocks - not hurting anybody, I’m an American and love my car, haven’t even started it in ten days or so, maybe we won’t be driving much for a while*, nobody is on the road, I will pootle around a few blocks and go back to bed. (The preceding sentence is a white lie. I will come clean in the end.) I see a man bedding down against a wall, thin blanket, it’s about sunset. He is the only person I see. I stop and – from far away – say “How are you holding up?” Absolutely inane question, I know. Just saying howdy. We lock eyes. He considers saying “Okay,” but why? He says, “It’s AWFUL.” We pause. I say, “I can’t help you because I’m sick and you don’t want to touch anything I have touched.” He says, “I already have it.” He means COVID-19. We consider the possibilities. We just take a moment to do all of the ramific...

March 21,2020 - Haircut, Penicillin Today's ramification: Got a robo-reminder of a haircut Monday. No robo-cancel option, so called the salon. Nobody answered. Texted Rox herself at home: Hey, I can't come in Monday and I can't imagine what your life is like right now, but could I PAY AHEAD, and send you money to tide you over, and then collect haircuts later?? Rox: No need, I'm not scared yet, this will be over soon!! Today's insane conversation, shouted across the street to sweet young couple neighbors, him a  doctor, her a high school counselor, as we are all somewhat-ironically-catastrophizing about the collapse around us, last lines: Me: I figure, this bit will be okay. I KNOW people! If I need to score some antibiotics, I can score some antibiotics! Him: I'm sorry, I don't have any. Her: You can MAKE penicilin, you know! and.... curtain.

March 20, 2020 - The Original Five Imperatives Okay, people, I just grasped the whole current situation. I got it by deploying my vast, nay, encyclopedic medical, economic, sociological, epidemiological, and ethical/spiritual training, eg, my English major.* I woke up going: AHA, I get it! You probably already get it. You can skip the rest. Here is the nub - competing imperatives: We need herd immunity. We need to flatten the curve. We need to protect those most vulnerable (medically, economically, societally). We need to keep the global, national, and local economies going. We need better tools to assess where we are. These imperatives feel as if they are at war with one another in various ways: 1) We need herd immunity. This bug is new, and no one is immune, and it will likely circulate around in giant waves (might, like the 1918 cousin, take a few months to kick back in the summer, then resurface) until enough of us get it so that it only circulates around in s...