Saturday, April 25, 2020

Saving lives

Saturday, April 18, 2020

Laugh and the world laughs with you


Friday, April 17, 2020

Stages of Grief

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
These are the stages of grief and I've been through them all since the COVID19 lockdown began. I think everyone else has going through them too.
Denial - how can this be happening? WTF is this? Isn't there some easier way?
Anger - don't they realize what they are doing to us and to the economy? Its so terrible for so many people.
Bargaining - well, maybe it won't last too long if everybody acts the right way.
Depression - how awful this is, and its going on FOREVER!!!
Acceptance - it is what it is. Nothing we can do except to get through it.
Though I must admit, I still feel anger:

The economic hit from this is going to be so hard, and last so long, and hurt so many innocent blameless people.
But every time I start to feel sorry for myself and for all of us, I remember that whatever I am going through, it is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to what others are dealing with.
I don't think our society will ever be able to repay doctors and nurses for what they are doing for all of us, risking death every day to save as many as they can.
There was one tweet in particular, from a pediatric surgical fellow and single mother in New York, that made me just cry.

I hope she will be OK.
I hope someday her children will be able to honour her for what she is doing.

Friday, April 10, 2020

How I spent my summer vacation

Here's the tweet of the week month:

Saturday, April 04, 2020

Strange Days Indeed







I wonder if John Lennon ever realized how prophetic his words would be:

Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed.
I never understood how a pandemic would destroy the world economy.  
Millions of people out of work. Millions with no paycheques, no income, and no prospect of getting any except for a few hundred dollars from the government. Millions who have no money, who cannot buy food, or medicines, or clothes, or pay their utilities bills or their rent. It is an economic disaster of a scale which the world has never seen before.
I used to live in a modern society. And I never wanted to live anywhere else.  But I just didn't understand how fragile that society really was.  
Now I find myself suddenly living in some kind of an alternate universe, one with no schools, no clothing stores, no book stores, no coffee shops. No health care, no dental care, no physiotherapy, no surgeries. No weddings, no funerals, no parties, no graduations, no concerts, no events. No bars, no restaurants. No sports. 
The idea I am seeing floating around now -- that this worldwide economic shutdown will just have to last for years, until we get a vaccine or a cure -- well, sorry, but that just ain't gonna happen. 
Not if all this pain is just for the sake of avoiding a virus which is, for most people, most of the time, a mild illness. 
And yes, of course I understand that our heedless and careless way of living wasn't sustainable because we don't know who will get COVID-19 next, and we don't know who will die, and if we are dying, its an awful death, and the problem is that caring for the people who are really sick is going to destroy our health care system unless some of us can postpone getting really sick until later.
But our situation right now isn't sustainable either. 
We need to figure out how we are going to get out of this.
I wrote a comment recently on Montreal Simon's excellent blog, to the effect that I am proud to be a Canadian during this crisis, because our leaders stepped up to the plate.  Someday I hope to understand better how Trudeau did it, how he put the right people into the right place to get us through this.
And now, they have to step up again, to lay out a plan of how we are going to get out of this.
And I think maybe it will start with a national testing program -- we have to know who has already had COVID-19 and who has not, so we can figure out who needs to continue to to isolate.
And then, gradually, our strange days might end.
UPDATE:  I'm starting to see stuff along the lines of: Social Distancing cannot fail, it can only BE failed!  In other words, we just have to keep doing it more and more and more, and Trudeau has to make it illegal for anybody to ever leave their house ever, and then, easy peasy, THEN it will TOTALLY WORK!
Hmmm.....

Friday, April 03, 2020

Friday Funfest

The COVID-19 news is so depressing, beaten only by the economic news, which is absolutely awful. So here's something a little more lighter-hearted, on a cold Friday. 
And this thread wins the award for the funniest tweet of the week:
So maybe next week will be better -- well, we can always hope!