I thought I should write how things are going. Posterity and all that.
I want to quit and go live on a farm in Hawaii away from everyone.
I want to fly to Texas and work with my friends in hospitals that will be overrun in a week.
I found I can't read or write or meditate when I'm this anxious.
I found that my eyes absolutely hate computers and my phone.
Talking in person is less taxing because of non-verbal communication. On the phone I have to use more voice, more tone, more words, to convey empathy or compassion or humor or fierceness. By the end of a week of patient-care-by-phone (plus high anxiety) I'm more exhausted than OMT ever made me.
This is what medicine must have felt like hundreds of years ago. No tools, no protection, unclear who is sick and if they'll give it to you or even how, no effective treatment, no vaccine. Friends dying. Friends leading. Friends supporting each other. Strangers too.
This world is one. Borders are fictions. Healthcare, food, shelter, sanitation... all are things that we should help each other get. Billionaires are immoral. Millionaires are too, when there are children without food and homes and healthcare.
If we can stop, declare an emergency for human health, we can do the same for the environment- because it is our health too.

grampa's voluntary trip to anatomy lab (in memoriam)

remembering anatomy lab

where we curious butchers would go,

to plumb the depths of someone

searching for every muscle to name

taking off skin

sawing through bones

braving the formaldehyde

the cold

the gruesome reality of death

looking for diagnoses

finding heart attacks, implants, strokes, tattoos, cancers—

it really was fascinating-

… there was a strange excitement

that went along with each discovery

… we’d think about the patient

not for long about how they died,

instead we’d imagine a life,

usually a positive one

and we treated our patients with respect,

kindness, compassion,

though they wouldn't know

… but I wonder when my grandfather’s body

lay in their med school lab

… if they found his sadness…

his loneliness as the final cause of death…

the grief, the shame, the guilt,

that drove the last few years of his life

the frustration…

but also the kindness and the love

and the desire to understand

his ready laugh that was harder to evoke last year

his enchantment with children

his repetitive stories i loved

'I may not always be right

but I'm never wrong'

and how often he walked to get us donuts on Sundays... 

underneath the anxiety

that likely damaged his arteries

there was a sincere desire

he wanted his grandchildren

to be well and happy

alongside the resignation and despair

because he did not know how…

I wonder where we find that.

when medical students learn that.

I certainly didn't learn it in lab.

does someone you love have to die

for you to understand death- 

losing all my immediate family certainly didn't teach me-

does it require something more?

how do you teach an understanding of life inclusive of death?

making us grateful and present

for the lives we have while we have them

...he loved us so much

...I wish everyone could have known my amazing grandfather

...and be touched by his gregarious and optimistic love for everyone he met