Day 150: Feeling Luckier

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California, August 16, 2020

San Francisco never, ever gets rain in August and thunderstorms are a real rarity any time of year. Yet here we are, lightening across the sky and thunder rumbling for a good twelve hours, leaving at least a few raindrops lingering in the hibiscus bud just off our deck. 

Below, I see the bricks are wet, the chair cushions soaked, and the garden watered at least a little bit without the summer hose. Strange times. In the midwest, such a storm would break up a heat wave and turn the air soft and cool. Here, we’re told to expect the temperatures to rise again toward record-breaking as soon as this once-in-fifty years storm recedes. Fingers crossed, the last lightening strike will not kindle something like the ‘fire tornado,’ that sprang up yesterday a few hours to the north. ’So what’s next?’ John laments as he checks the forecast and pandemic news. ‘Time for the locusts yet?’ 

Maybe. But I am feeling luckier today, at least. For the first time in months I woke up this morning without a sense of dread - my first surgery is behind me, I’m back home without, it appears, having caught the virus in the hospital, and, with the Democratic convention starting this week I feel a little ray of hope that maybe, just maybe our democracy can be saved as we manage to weather this storm together.

Day 149: Getting Back to Normal?

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California, August 16, 2020

Yesterday’s heat still trapped in my small convalescent bedroom drove me outside this morning to enjoy the sunrise and the breath of a cooler breeze. It looks like we’re in for an unusually hot weekend here in San Francisco.

As I nursed a cup of coffee and read the morning's news, I looked up every few minutes to follow a plane across the little patch of sky framed by our neighbors’ palms, the sound preceding the glint of morning light on shiny wings. Five months ago, I would have noticed neither the familiar sound nor sight of air traffic overhead, so steady was its presence. But today, even as the heat begins to remount and the sun has already driven me inside, I hear every jarring engine in the sky like it is a stranger come to call. 

Something has changed. Either we are getting closer to regular, pre-pandemic airport volume, or the weather pattern has forced the lesser traffic on a path over the city for the first time in months. Either way, I don’t know whether to be happy at a possible harbinger of a noisier normal, or sad to lose the tranquility we’ve enjoyed (and either way, it's really, really hot).

Day 147: Thanks to Science

Shelter in Place, San Francisco, California, August

It seems like a miracle that after only a week I can move better and experience far less pain than I have in several years. It seems like a miracle but, of course, it’s not. It’s science. Some very smart people devoted their knowledge and time to develop the tools and the procedures to make my hip replacement possible. And then under the constraints of the pandemic, they reworked the procedures so they could operate safely and so that I could heal from home. I feel extremely lucky to live in an age when growing old does not necessarily hand me a cane and shunt me off to the porch swing. From here on out (and up until now, come to think of it), the quality of my life will be enhanced and safer - and possibly longer - thanks to the accumulation and application of scientific knowledge. 

So then how, after slowly hobbling my way down the stairs, am I sitting under the umbrella in my garden (yay), reading another headline about the politicization and denigration of research and medical advice? It seems simple enough to me that either we accept the risks and profit from an ever-evolving/improving medical science, or we don’t. We cannot have it both ways as individuals or as countries. We cannot let a medical team send a teeny tiny soldering iron through our veins to heal a broken heart or let them put in a miraculous titanium hip that vanquishes the pain, but refuse the medical profession’s recommendation to wear a mask to keep ourselves and others safe. We cannot put our faith in the quick action of a drug to rescue our child from a bee sting or a peanut allergy and then promulgate the notion that a vaccine against dangerous childhood diseases - or Covid - is some kind of medical or government plot. And we certainly cannot or should not ever harass the very people (or their children) who are trying to track down the nature of this virus and keep us safe. 

Of course there are risks to trusting medicine implicitly and there is a limit to the miracles doctors can perform. Knowledge grows, medical practice evolves, hacks infiltrate, and people make mistakes. Ultimately, we are each responsible for understanding the risks and making decisions for ourselves. But accusing the medical profession of a political bias and then enjoying the benefits of their labor to live a better life seems not only short-sighted, it seems - from my very grateful vantage point this morning - to be hypocritical and wrong.