Temporarily Able-Bodied People. We’re in This Together.

Rant

I feel awash with melancholy; irritated when hearing others’ forced optimism, silver lining, time of opportunity blather. I’m outraged that the collective we didn’t have the foresight to keep maintained stockpiles of ventilators and that right-to-lifers consider the elderly and disabled as expendable. I’m dreaming of hugging my sons, daughters-in-law, and grandsons and waking up feeling empty and afraid. I know the Covid19 novel coronavirus is going nowhere. We can best hope to sustain until brains, money, ingenuity, and time converge to rapid testing, tracing, vaccines, and a different social, financial, and political order and supply chains. My melancholy, anger, and emptiness feel right and understated. The world through our senses has changed, forever. Kiss it goodbye. This week, it touched me directly. An old friend, a 70-year old practicing primary care doc with diabetes, lies in a Detroit ICU on a ventilator. As Andrew Cuomo says in his daily briefings, the virus doesn’t discriminate. It affects us all. If not now, soon.

Today, we experience the impact of our short term, bottom line-oriented, feudal acute healthcare system. It’s been about business, money, and power. Our healthcare was only working for some before, it’s ready to crash now. The collective we appreciated public health only in its absence. We…