I was honored to be asked to write an essay that was included in the new anthology –Voices from the Front Line: The Pandemic and the Humanities edited by by Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan and published the University of California Health Humanities Press.
Here is the description of the book from Amazon:
What are the limits of one’s duty as a healthcare provider to render care during a peacetime pandemic when that care is often life-saving for the patient yet concurrently life-threatening to the provider? Does it matter if the provider is still in training? How was the COVID-19 pandemic informed by past pandemics, for better or for worse? Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities is a time capsule: it seeks to illuminate the behind-the-scenes emotions, reflections, and actions of healthcare workers and medical humanities experts during the tumultuous first few years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. In this collection, Katherine Ratzan Peeler and Richard M. Ratzan bring together 45 voices in essays, poetry, and photographs from frontline healthcare workers, medical educators, healthcare administrators, journalists, anthropologists, historians, ethicists, and more. The contributors wrestle with questions of triage, conflicting patient and family needs, personal mental and physical health struggles, and bioethical and societal questions about how to live, and assist others, in a world-altering pandemic.
Reading through the wide-ranging essays was fascinating. COVID seemed so long ago now, but it was really only a couple years ago that we were gowning up in full suits and masks and stripping in the garage when we got home at night, and I at least worried with every cough and tired joint that maybe the little COVID bugger had purchase in my lungs. When I finally did get COVID, it was after the epidemic had largely ended. I was able to fight it with Tylenol, fluids and just a day in bed. Still I remember many those people who died, or who are still sick from the damage the disease did to them. I hope we are more prepared the next time a pandemic strikes and hope that that pandemic is a long way off.
It’s great that the editors have collected these voices to preserve this period of our history for the future readers.
My essay for the book includes parts from the many posts I wrote on this blog. Those posts can be read here:
https://medicscribe.com/category/covid
