You Are Batty If You Don’t Get Vaccinated

A rabid bat. Photo courtesy Chicago Tribune.

Did you read the news story? Earlier this month, an 87-year-old man in from Spring Grove died from rabies right here in Lake County. How did this happen?

He had been bitten by a bat. The bat was trapped and tested; the testing confirming the bat was infected with rabies. The man was advised to seek medical treatment, which might have been life-saving, but refused.

I don’t know the intimate details of why the man declined treatment. Perhaps it was due to his age and the nature of the therapy (multiple injections over a 14 day period.) But doesn’t his refusal remind you of something?

Suppose there was a “something” out there that could decrease the risk of your catching a highly contagious disease, a disease that might have serious health effects on you, and that you might transmit to your children, your parents, your friends, and your co-workers.

Suppose that “something” was an injection, or maybe two, with maybe an extra jab a few months later. Suppose the health risk of those shots was minuscule compared to the risk of the disease. Suppose it was the only thing in health care that was free! And suppose getting that the jabination might protect your loved ones, others around you, and the nation at large?

What in the name of common sense would prevent you from getting that “something”? Maybe you would wait a few weeks to see if there were any unanticipated harmful side effects in others. Maybe there would be a delay because it would be hard for you to take time off of work, or get child care when you went to get jabbed. But what if the “something” was available at virtually every corner–or that health care workers would come to you to administer it?

OK, there may be a few people with a legitimate history of severe allergic reaction to previous “somethings.” I can these those people hesitating. But other than that–why, oh why would you refuse?

Learn a lesson from the late bat-man of Spring Grove–refuse what is good for you, and you might just wake up dead.

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Virus Visions. Does the Past Repeat?

I am sitting in our sunroom, beams of light pouring through the jalousie windows. Our cat and a visiting pup alternate turns lying in the sun, neither willing to share space with the other. It is a crystal clear and brilliant day. I should be outside enjoying it before the crushing heat returns. But my stomach has been doing flip-flops for the last 24 hours or so, and I feel more comfortable on the sofa, book in hand, gazing out onto the street.

Barb designed this room for days like today; one set of windows facing our backyard; the second opening onto the pond, where only one of four of our newly hatched cygnets has survived the demonic snapping turtles in the water below; the final set of windows giving a view of the street, where we live at the back end of the loop the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare makes as it meanders through the subdivision.

I can people-watch unseen as I flip the pages of my novel. It’s a day made for strolling and all our neighbors, nearly homogenous in their ethnicity, are out. Many proceed as family units–mom and dad on bikes, baby in an attached carrier, young daughters struggling to keep up astride their two-wheelers, bouncing side-to-side on the training wheels. Pairs of neighborly couples stride along, 6-foot distances narrowing, then swelling again as someone remembers. In-line skaters, dog walkers, and loud phone chatters weave in and out to complete the tapestry.

The novel beside me is one that Barb gave to me from her stack on her nightstand after I finished reading the last book in my library pile. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai alternates between modern-day Paris and Chicago in the 1980’s, the Chicago scenes taking place in an area that would become known as Boystown. It is the story of a great pandemic, though the disease at the story’s center is not COVID-19, the virus is not SARS-CoV-2.

It was early in my medical career when we first became aware of a deadly illness that was striking gay men with the unusual disease combination of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia. Medically, it struck home. I had given a presentation on KS in med school and pneumocystis was the organism that had ended my father-in-law’s battle with leukemia.

I remember the heated arguments over whether or not this disease, soon to be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, was an infectious disease and if so what the transmitting agent could be. Then came the discovery of a virus, originally titled HTLV-III and eventually renamed HIV. Methods of transmission were identified. Rock Hudson became a symbol, Ryan White a hero.

To protect ourselves in the morgue we began wearing chain mail gloves while doing autopsies, at least until my Laboratory Director discovered a unique and clever way to avoid our performing post-mortem exams on known AIDS cases. He told the hospital medical staff that we pathologists would be glad to do those autopsies, as long as the clinicians “scrubbed in” and pointed out the areas in which they had the greatest concern. Autopsy requests melted away just like the T-lymphocytes that had disappeared under the onslaught of the virus.

I recall the controversy over blood testing for the disease, as well as the emergence of AZT, the first drug to have some success in slowing down the progression of AIDS. And I remember the lost medical school classmates, members of a repressed class that was decimated.

And now, as BLM reminds us, once again a repressed class is being decimated, both by a virus and by inequality. It is time to move beyond looking out the window. For me, it will be in a medical context. How about for you?

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When Words Fail Me

1,584,862. That is the number of words the Grammarly online grammar and spell checking program has reviewed for me over the past 3 years. Most of those 1,584,862 words have been used in writing the blog, then rewriting it, and editing it. Words are not what I do for a living, I don’t have that ability, but they are what I do for pleasure, writing them down here, reading them in books and magazines, spelling them out in Scrabble and Words for Friends.

I used to be able to write with some objectivity, even in the face of what I feared could be a natural tragedy. I could write about the wonders of my profession and the weirdness that sometimes was associated with it. I have praised valuable tests and bashed the useless ones. I used to be able to write with some humor–Barb was rolling on the floor reading this old post that came up Sunday on her Facebook memories page.

But words have deserted me in the past month or so. Every time I sit down to write a blog post I am stymied. COVID has worn me down, even while it has been a topic for some of my most popular posts. The state of the democracy is so nightmarish I have given up trying to write about it, at times turning to pictures to tell the story.

And the tragedy of the past week, the death of George Floyd, the responses, the responses-to-the-responses, has left me numb and once again wordless. I start to contrast the knee of Colin Kaepernick to the knee of Derek Chauvin but what more is there to say about that? If we had listened better to the former, we would not be suffering the repercussions of the latter? That type of writing is facile and easy, it is just a juxtaposition of two symbols.

When I will again find joy in writing, feel pleasure in adding to my 1.5 million words. Maybe when our country has refound its mission and its humanity. Maybe when we have all been inspired. Maybe when we are post-pandemic and putting our best effort at solving the other plagues we face–poverty, inequality, and environmental catastrophe are but the first three that come to mind.

I know I won’t stop writing the blog, not as long as ChicagoNow allows me to continue. I just long for the time when it will be fun again, for you, and for me.

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photo credit: airlines470 STATUE OF LIBERTY via photopin (license)

President Trump Disinfects America

Dear President Trump,

My name is Mary Louise Venter and I want to thank you for being the President of the United States in this terrible time. I have loved you ever since the first year of The Apprentice and I said to my husband Edgar then and there that you should be President. I was right,

You have made America great by telling everyone who real Americans are and doing everything you can to help them. You and your family have even solved tough world problems like Korea and Israel. And killing Bin-Laden.

And then the China government and those damn Chinese “scientists” had to do this to us, to our beautiful country. First, they pretended all those people were getting sick in Hu-Ha and then they scared our fake-news into panicking America. Closing all the stores over something no worse than the flu. I have never gotten a flu shot and I ain’t died from the flu yet!

I watch your very important and serious news show every night. You bring me so much joy and admiration. I turn the TV off when those other folks come on. They don’t know how to talk to real people like me and Edgar. Do they think we all want to do statistics?

When a few people were getting sick you told people all about the wonderful malaria drug that could cure them. Me and the hubby tried to get some, so we wouldn’t even get sick, but the pharmacist, someone from one of the historically black universities if you get my drift, told us we needed a prescription. I tell you, it is so much easier to get Oxy for my sore back. I read in the paper that some of the sick people who did get it lived, almost as many as who died. I knew you were right.

So I was thrilled when you told us about a new cure yesterday. We’ve got disinfectants! I went right to the cleaning closet to find them all. I checked the Purell, but that has ethyl alcohol in it. Edgar and me are tea-drinking Evangelicals, so that was no good. But then I found this bottle called Kindly that the preacher had passed out at Easter. It has a bunch of stuff I haven’t heard of but no alcohol. So Edgar just drank a bottle.

I think I’ve gotta go now. Edgar just got awful pale white. His tongue turning blue and I think a little blood is coming out from his nose. He face is red, white and blue. I think he’s dyin’ but we love you President Trump.

Sincerely,

(The Late) Mrs. Edgar Venter

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