August 19, Mortality and Morbidity Report -

I decided to count up the people I know who had COVID, and I tried to define “people I know” in some sort of reasonable way. For instance, I excluded people I KNOW OF from afar, eg, celebrities that almost everybody knows OF. I did not count Tom Hanks.

But I did count the whole cluster of people around my friend B – which included her husband, her husband’s best friend, and her husband’s best friend’s wife, even though I have not met those last three people.  They all got it at the same time, and B gave me a hair-raising story about it (husband’s best friend died, age 58). So I counted people I was in reality acquainted with, or people they shared an outbreak with. I was trying to avoid hearsay, that whole “my friend’s cousin’s daughter’s boyfriend had it” sort of thing.

By those rules, my total: 17.

Of those seventeen:  one died, one was hospitalized, one had a breakthrough case, and two had (one still battles) long COVID. Ages ranged from 21 to 97.  Other than the breakthrough, they all got sick before they were vaccinated. (I suppose that’s obvious, since I just called out the breakthrough specifically.) Of the seventeen, twelve got sick before vaccines were available. Five could have gotten vaccinated before they got sick, but they were opposed.

I suspect I actually know more than seventeen, because I suspect some people choose not to talk about it. Which is fair enough.  I also suspect I would have known more than seventeen if I lived somewhere else during a surge, or if I were friends with a whole bunch of vulnerable front-line workers in a food processing plant, or if I worked in a hospital or a jail or a senior care center. But for me, it’s seventeen. Considering the size of my friend group, I think I got off lightly.

Considering the AGE of my friend group, there’s a whole nother trend this summer. By and large, my buddies range from their fifties to their seventies, and we are, I do believe, the people who put off elective procedures while the pandemic was raging. We may be putting off more elective procedures if the current surge heats up.

When the pandemic started, one of my young medical buddies gave me a talk about elective procedures, and what was going to happen when they were all cancelled or delayed. She wanted to stress that “elective” meant only “a delay won’t kill you, but you may be uncomfortable or in pain” not “you were only wanting to get plastic surgery because you are vain and superficial.”  She said it was going to be grim: people would not be able to get their hips and knees fixed, and some would fall, and they would go into that little-old-person post-fall decline….

In the event, I don’t know anybody who went into a horrific decline, though I definitely know folks who lived with pain or discomfort for much of the pandemic. Here’s my count of people in my friend group who have either had, or are about to have, a long-delayed elective procedure:

Hip replacement (1)

Knee replacement (2)

Brain surgery to relieve a tremor (1)

Cataract surgery (3)

Shoulder surgery (2)

Gynecologic surgery (1)

Hand surgery (1)

Gum surgery (3)

This time I only counted people I know first-hand. And I excluded two people who had emergency procedures related to cancer, an accident or a cardiac event.

WHOA: Fourteen people with delayed elective procedures.

This reflects the age range of my friends, but I think it ALSO reflects the backlog that happened while we were putting such things off. The one good thing is that if any of us are dragging around, we can find plenty of other people to commiserate with. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless!

Which brings me to our vocab word of the day: morbid. Oxford Languages defines morbid thus : “characterized by or appealing to an abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects, especially death and disease.”

I am fairly certain that some of my pals think I have taken a morbid interest in the COVID pandemic. They didn’t grow up in medical families, where stuff like this was viewed as Absolutely Fascinating. Sucks to be them.

At the same time, some of my truly medical friends and family think I’ve taken an interest way beyond my understanding. And they are no doubt right, but I'm going to say: Hey, everybody else was doing it too! I had artsy friends listening to the weekly YouTube videos of British epidemiologists, and social-justice friends going on about “viral load,” and I bet you did too.

Anyway.

That was morbid, so now we’ll leap to “morbidity,” which Oxford Languages classifies as a medical term:

“the condition of suffering from a disease or medical condition.

("the therapy can substantially reduce respiratory morbidity in infants")

[or]    the rate of disease in a population.”

("the levels of air pollution are associated with increased morbidity from respiratory diseases")

Those two definitions go together, and I understand them, though I always have to remind myself that “morbidity” is (strictly) about sickness, and is not synonymous with “mortality.”

What I find charming is the Italian cognate. You can buy a nice Torrone Morbido, for instance. 

And on a trip to Italy, I spied a can of hairspray that promised to make my hair “Morbido! Morbido!”  I shall spare you a search: in Italian, it means soft, smooth, or even tender. (The English and the Italian come from the same Latin root, and somehow the Italian went off in a softer direction.)

I’m really liking the word “tender” right now. I feel like we all have tender places, whether we are recovering from surgery or not. We are feeling tender about the planet, about Afghanistan, about so many, many things. And I think it might behoove us to BE somewhat more tender, when and if we can manage it. I’m fighting to resist schadenfreude when loud anti-vaxxers get sick. Not because I don’t feel schadenfreude about it, but because it toughens my feelings in a way I don’t want them toughened. I don’t want to wish people ill, even when I do wish them ill. They are ill already. That ought to be enough.