My fellow zillennial. It's come to my attention that Gen Alpha is apparently making aesthetic tiktoks romanticizing 2020, like they want to be a teenager during that time??? Like no? You don't? I can't even begin to start breaking down how bad that year was in every category. McDonalds apparently now has "standards" yet another rubbish thing to add to the "college degrees make you overqualified with zero experience sorry you can't get this entry job" bucket. And Lunchables news reporters are like 30 years too late to be writing an expose on the toxic levels of metal in that.

people were dying????? we were in a state of panic and isolation???? schools were struggling with the switch to online only classes????

do we all remember the BLM protests and the tips on how to keep your face hidden and how to stay safe from getting maced???? do we remember the pushback against it??? calling on botched stats???

do we even remember the fucking US election???? how heated it got???? how much distrust republicans tried to seed into mail-in ballots?????

and then literally January of 2021, the US legislative house gets stormed in, Texas has a freeze so bad our gridlock shuts down and PEOPLE DIED FROM THE COLD WHILE EVERYONE ELSE MOCKED US FOR FREEZING!!!

2020 was not a good year. it is the furthest from a a good year, but it sure as hell emphasized a motley of issues the world had going on (tho i’m more versed in the US issues bc i live there)

Wednesday, March 25, 2020 3:58am

This is a facebook post from Dr. Gabriela Magda, Rae Votta’s friend in New York. I would just post the link like I usually would, but I don’t want to risk losing this one. 

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I asked my mother for permission to share this #COVID19 dispatch and she said, “I have no problem with that. I want others to be safe to do whatever is in their power to be safe and to protect others from getting sick.”

Last week I videochatted with my mother and noticed she was congested and ill appearing. She told me she had new backaches and a cough that over the course of the day had turned productive, but that she did not have a fever. Because my mother takes medications for a chronic condition that make her immunocompromised, the temperature she reported to me, 99+, though mildly elevated, was concerning to me and as the day progressed and her temperatures rose to 100.4, I became fearful and contacted her doctors to inform them of what was going on and request an outpatient COVID test which I knew would be available where she receives her care. They replied to me immediately and though initially they were more concerned about influenza, they acquiesced to my request and the next day she drove to the testing site. Though her fevers, aches, and cough persisted, she felt a little bit better than the day before and we were hopeful this would turn out to be no big deal.

The next day, hours into my first day working on one of our hospitals’ COVID teams, my mother’s doctor called me to inform me that my mother had tested positive for COVID19, and because they knew I am a pulmonary/critical care physician we came up with a treatment plan together. I had just spent the morning listening to case presentations of COVID patients as varied as those who could be discharged home to continue their recovery there, to people close in age to me who were fighting for their lives in the ICU. The news of my mother’s diagnosis stunned and scared me, and I went into fight or flight mode coordinating her care, remotely assessing my father, a cancer survivor who lives with COPD, for symptoms, and instructing my parents on how to quarantine from each other on different floors of their house for the foreseeable future.

We do not know where she acquired COVID. It could have been at her job in a New York City public school because despite the urgently expressed insistence of teachers, parents, and students across our city, our elected officials delayed the (difficult) decision to close the schools. It could have been at the grocery store. We will never know, and what matters is not quite where, but rather under what conditions this virus was able to be transmitted. When my mother learned of her diagnosis she called me crying and pleaded, “Why me? What did I do wrong?” My heart broke. You did nothing wrong.

This past week I have been working in the COVID ICU at Bellevue, the oldest public hospital in our country, which occupied a mythical place in my mind while growing up in NYC and at which I now have the amazing opportunity to practice medicine alongside colleagues who are as passionate as I am about providing the best possible care to EVERY person who comes through our doors. Every night when I come home I hear phantom ventilator alarms. The other night I thought I heard one near my bed and almost turned around to see what the problem was before I realized I was home and not in the ICU and that there are no ventilators in my tiny studio apartment. In my brief career, I have never seen anything like what I am seeing in our ICU, nor have my more experienced colleagues. Our census grows daily with patients who develop respiratory failure after a few days of smoldering fever and cough. A pattern of middle-aged patients representing all walks of life who have certain co-morbidities seemed to develop, but we are seeing even younger patients with the illness. It is not socially responsible to say that this disease afflicts only the elderly. We are no longer allowing routine visitation by family members so as to prevent further spread of the infection to themselves and to other people. This is just one of the difficult decisions that we are tasked with making on a daily basis.

As predicted by anyone with a keen eye on social justice and labor rights, those affected include workers who could not afford to take a day off from their jobs lest they lose even a day of much needed income. When I look at these patients, I am reminded of my parents, working class immigrants who diligently went to their difficult jobs every day to put food on the table for me so that I could grow up comfortably and fulfill my dreams in this country that sometimes doesn’t seem to care as much about people like them as it does about the ultrarich and ultraprivileged. My father was a New York City taxi driver for my entire life until 2 weeks before I went to medical school in New Orleans, when he retired and within the same week was diagnosed with cancer. If it weren’t for being married to my mother, whose employer provided them both health insurance, he would not have received the chemo, radiation, surgery, and follow-up care that saved his life. He worked 12+ hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year during his tenure as a cabbie. I wonder to myself, if he had still been driving his cab during this pandemic, would he be one of the patients whose ventilator I now adjust on a daily basis?

This is not the first time I have grieved for my city. I remember exactly who I sat behind during Spanish class when I heard the first plane fly into the World Trade Center. I watched the towers burn from my homeroom window. I walked 70 blocks and 6 avenues that day and along the way found a woman who I recognized from my morning commute and asked her if I could go with her to wherever she was going just so I had someone to walk with. I remember the devastated faces I passed on the street. When I was finally able to get to a working telephone to call my mom, I remember the sound of relief in her voice because she thought I had died. My childhood street has since been named after a first responder who lived on it until that day. I remember the acrid smell that persisted in the air when we were finally allowed to return to school, and I feel lucky that unlike some of my classmates from that time, the only ailments I suffer from are chronic sinusitis and the occasional unpleasant memory.

This is an entirely different crisis because it does not have a sense of finitude (although in many ways, neither has that day), and the thing we are contending with is invisible except for its horrific consequences we are seeing play out in our hospitals everyday. It is an affront to my parents, my patients, and my colleagues who are literally sacrificing their own well-being to take care of our city, when I observe or hear of people still publicly congregating in dense groups despite repeated warnings from leadership, physicians, and scientists to stay home. It enrages me when I hear out of touch politicians irresponsibly prattle on about people going back to work in a couple of weeks when we are struggling to manage the current onslaught in our hospitals and my colleagues and I fear we are nowhere near the peak of this problem.

I do feel like everything in my life has prepared me for this moment and that I am meant to be right here, right now, working in whatever ways I am able to with my colleagues to take care of the people who need us the most. I am the first physician in my family; the life I have lived is so radically different from the ones my parents lived in Ceausescu’s Romania. I chose to go to New Orleans for medical school because I was haunted by images of Hurricane Katrina and I wanted to learn from people who kept that city afloat (literally and figuratively) while the agencies who were supposed to help them failed them. I ranked my residency in Washington, DC, because I wanted the opportunity to rotate at the National Institute of Health, where Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were my attendings and taught us about the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. The day after the election in 2016, I cried with my patients about the results and will never forget the words of one woman who held my hands as she expressed her regret that she could not vote due to her hospitalization and said, “This is going to be bad for me.” I was so thrilled when I matched in New York at my current fellowship program because I knew I would be joining the ranks of an amazingly dedicated, compassionate, innovative group of people who show unwavering and undeterred care for every single New Yorker. I am so proud of my family of colleagues here and across the world who are selflessly and tirelessly working in whatever capacity in order to care for patients.

I am once again urging you to heed the calls for social distancing. I have been reading your posts and am painfully aware that some of you are deeply struggling to pay your rent and your bills because of this turn of events. I am so sorry. I am encouraging you to elect politicians whose interests are to create a social safety net for all people in this country, and not just to provide tax cuts and benefits to people who they perceive to palatably satisfy certain demographic criteria. I am imploring you to hold your elected officials accountable and demand they provide healthcare workers with the resources we need to take care of you, and the resources you need to be able to stay home nourished and properly sheltered so that our healthcare system can accommodate everyone who desperately needs it right now.

My mom is doing okay for now. I am remotely monitoring my parents daily. We are scared that any day the other shoe could drop, but we are trying to remain hopeful and grateful. In the meantime, the magnolia tree behind my building continues to bloom magnificently, the birds continue to chirp obliviously, the sun continues to set and rise again…

https://www.facebook.com/806222/posts/10109579688763729/?d=n

https://twitter.com/gabmagda/status/1242618464826785792