I wrote to a doc group this am. A doc mom is agonizing over a photo of a party with teens basically skin to skin, no masks, inside, at someone's house. Fifty plus teens. Their daughter did not go, but they are worrying about Delta for the school and for their younger children. Yes, not many children die, but if it is YOUR five year old, well. It is worse than having your throat cut.
Me: "This is all awful having people not choose to get vaccinated, but people make bad choices all the time, right? Isn't that what primary care really is? Me telling a guy to decrease alcohol or he gonna need a blood pressure medicine and diabetes medicine and a new liver. And some people listen and change and some bloody well don't and we have to watch them travel down the tubes and die. I just think that it really "sucks the farts out of dead wharf rats" as my Ex used to say that our ER folks and ambulance folks and ICU nurses and ICU docs and everyone else have to watch these people sicken and die, still disbelieving. And then we'll have to deal with the tsunami of post covid. No, hon, we can't fix you. It might heal in time. Yeah, it sucks. Sorry. I ran my own small family practice clinic for ten years and took care of opioid folks with buprenorphine: a significant part of the latter relapsed and died. I was sad each time, but they made the choice. Not much I can do except offer."
And I would add, "and protect myself and my family as best I can." I have influenced a few people to get vaccinated. My adult children are vaccinated. I don't have grandchildren yet (though I WANT them). My small clinic is closed and I am disabled from Family Medicine for my fourth pneumonia. Not covid, or honestly, I think I'd be dead. My lungs are fungked. No, no tobacco, no pot, don't smoke anything. Just mother with tuberculosis and father smoking unfiltered Camels and yeah, they are both dead. My sister smoked clove cigs when she was fighting fires. She's gone too.
In good news, I had a colonoscopy. Two preps, because my body ignored the miralax prep. I had to do the week long golytely prep. And eat no fresh fruit, veggies, dried fruit, nuts, seeds or whole grain for a week. Hmmmm. That is pretty much what I eat. I had to go buy canned apricots and still don't tolerate gluten, so no white bread. Rice, potatoes and meat. It was a weird week. I baked vegetables because I didn't want canned, ick. No cancer, so that is good.
I am reading articles that Covid causes fertility or erection problems in 18% of men. Hey, Texan men, keep refusing vaccination and your abortion rate will go down even if you don't sue people. Are you down with contributing penile tissue? That means biopsy.
Bad news from an article in National Geographic that Covid can affect any of the five senses including touch. Hello neuropathy. Not fun.
700,000 US folks dead. And articles are on the rise about mental health, oh, sorry, the new politically correct "behavioral health", as if the patient could just BEHAVE like the normal nice people, everything would be fine. A lot of current short term counseling is really that: hey, here is how to look normal and this is the way we think you should think in order to be normal. Fungk that shit.
However, the normal nice people, well, they are gone. Everyone is getting an ACE score of 1 or more. All of the children all over the world and the adults are having to rewire their brains as well, for survival. Isn't this interesting? I already have an ACE score of 5 and have been expecting influenza to kill hundreds of thousands for years, so am unsurprised by all of this. Except I didn't expect Coronovirus, but whatever.
My Facebutt feed is full of Trauma classes, to train me as a physician how to work with trauma. Thanks, but teach your grandmother to suck eggs. I have been treating those folks for years.
Blessings all and keep holding on and get the damn vaccine if you haven't or whatever, die, some people are just stubborn.
Here are all the above links in order, in case you wanna see them first:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33519273/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7355084/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.13003
https://wjmh.org/DOIx.php?id=10.5534/wjmh.210055
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/how-covid-19-can-damage-all-five-senses?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=SpecialEdition_20211001::rid=C97A1A8547F511FE3BD45B0806ED713C
https://www.treehugger.com/goats-really-can-climb-trees-4863877#:~:text=A%20lesser%2Dknown%20talent%20of,is%20particularly%20appealing%20to%20goats