On the day you die from COVID, many things will happen. A colleague and I will enter the room to carefully prepare and clean your body. We will shut off all the IV pumps. We will turn off the ventilator. We will silence and turn off the monitor that is…
I am so tired of the freedom argument with it comes to vaccines. So tired. It didn’t really hit me until I learned more about medicine, government, and public health, just how much freedom is taken for granted. I get it. I don’t like it whe…
Prevention Our most effective weapons are lockdowns, masks, distancing, ventilation and vaccination, but we can also protect close patient contacts pharmacologically. Subcutaneous REGEN-COV (Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody combo, casirivimab plus imdev…
As a pulmonary and critical care doctor and the mother of three children too young to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, life has been harrowing. At the beginning of the summer, however, I was beginning to breathe a sigh of relief. My children had been in sch…
On August 25, 2021, the United States achieved two world records: approximately a total of 39 million cases of COVID-19 among our citizenry and approximately 648,000 deaths due to succumbing to COVID. Young, old; male, female; rich, poor — it doesnR…
In June 2020, I wrote a short piece about the COVID vaccine that turned out to be prophetic. I said that the vaccine’s immunity might wane over time, that there might be bothersome side effects immediately, and that the public might ignore social dista…
I’ve faced this disease since it arrived. I flew into the storm in order to face it head-on, leaving behind my family and a hospital filled with denial and petulant resistance to the horror that was to come. While in New York, I worked alongside …
The past year has been sad. Sad for the lives lost, sad for the isolation, sad for the hostility that has somehow occurred over measures to protect public health. To those who continue to spin a story that vaccines and masking take away your freedom: I…
I am exhausted. Mentally, emotionally, physically. I fear we are reaching our breaking point. We have run a marathon, hoping that we were nearing the finish line as we saw numbers decline in June, only to be told to lace up our sneakers and start over….
“F—- you! I won’t do what you tell me!” the lyrics blare into my teenage ears, as I lip-synch to the rock band Rage Against the Machine’s song Killing In the Name. It’s 1992, and my Walkman is attached to the waistband of my Seattle Blues. It would tak…
