Category Archives: Prose

waiting patiently

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Is all that any of us can – or should – do.

The US is still a democracy – it is time to let the process run its course.

That means obeying all the laws, all the court order, and letting people do their jobs.

The post office is required by law to deliver ballots to be counted. This is not an choice on the part of left leaning, right leaning, or bored/tired/ill personnel. Legally, letters, once they getting a box must get picked up, sorted, delivered. There are standards, time limits. Managers are normally held accountable. This week should be no different.

Those ballots are equally important, and probably even more so, in local, regional, and state elections. Neither of the main parties should be able to interfere with the Post Office – perhaps all the ballots could be for third party candidates? Or my daughter’s cat? None of that matters.

Counting in each state is determined by that state’s laws and overseen by the election officials. I don’t gs inet an opinion. I don’t get to chose if my or my neighbor’s ballot is accepted – except by whether or not an individual ballot meets my particular state’s requirements.

Unlike when I have voted in past elections (Florida if anyone cares between the early 1980-2016), my vote gets counted. Florida, in the past, sometimes counted absentee ballots and sometimes didn’t. Let me explain: if you were voting by absentee and were out of country, you could vote at the state level, but not in local elections. As a result, the mail-in ballots were held till the physical count was in. If the number of absentee ballots (usually 32K give or take) was greater than the difference between the candidates, those ballots were counted. If not, why bother since those votes were not going to change the election. Or so the thinking went.

Now, with the number of mail in ballots exceeding in person voting – obviously all the ballots need to be counted. And each state has it’s own laws. There are those states which count as received (results are not released until the polls close). There are those who don’t count until after the polls close. There are states that go by the post mark date. Others by the received date. It is not uniform. It doesn’t matter if you, I, or someone who lives in DC likes it, agrees with it, or throws a temper tantrum. It is time to respect the law. The political parties don’t decide, the news outlets don’t decide, and most certainly the candidates themselves don’t decide. We, as voters, decide and that decision doesn’t occur until all our votes are counted.

Perhaps the time is now right to have a national standard. We are no longer in the 1700s when it could take weeks for ballots to arrive. At the same time, we have grown as a country and grown up. You don’t have to be a white male landowner to be entitled to vote. You didn’t use to have to prove citizenship if you were one of those white males. (In many places you still don’t as long as you “sound right.”)

So what we all need to do is sit back, relax, take a swallow of our favorite beverage, be it coffee, tea, hot chocolate, water, or something with a significant kick and demonstrate to the rest of the world that we are adults and can execute calmly, safely, and objectively the election process. The process that we have been standing first in line and pointing fingers in other countries when we don’t think that they have been fair.

Perhaps cleaning up our own house is in order.

 

Vote

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

If you are not a US voter – skip the next little bit. And, for your information – the US, unlike several countries, does not have mandatory voting.

Vote. Exercise your rights. Retain your ability to honestly be able to complain about the results, the laws, the politicians, the results. If you don’t play, you are still going to pay. It doesn’t matter if you vote by mail, by dropping off your ballot, by going into a poling location early, by showing up today. Vote. Be part of the solution. It does make a difference. Not voting negates the blood, sweat, and tears of women and men for decades who have fought for the right to have their voices heard, their votes counted.

There are too many people in the US who seem to feel that the presidential election is the only thing that matters. Not so – in reality, your state, county and local officials will have a major impact on your lives. They control local public services, oversee the police and fire departments, regulate the schools. All of those issues along with a myriad of others impact you, taxes, and your wallet.

California, this year, joined several other states in providing physical drop off/mail in ballots to all registered voters, Everyone in this household received their ballot, filled it out, All ballots were dropped off prior to today. Alameda County, California has a population of 1.7 million people, There are 66 drop off points (plus the Oakland Coliseum which was set up for massive in person voting as well as a drop off site). Harris County, Texas, population 4 Million + apparently believes that one (1) drop off location is enough. Hello?

Misinformation has been higher this year than any other. As one of those military members who voted by absentee ballot for decades, I thoroughly resent the implication of wide spread voter fraud. Stationed in Germany in the early 1980s along with 300,000+ other service members + families, it was just assumed that it was our right to vote. That our home states respected our right to vote. That our votes could be mailed in, that they would be counted. As the traditionally largest population of out of country voters, the states of Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky, Washington, Tennessee, Florida, California where the largest military bases were located welcomed our votes.

What is different now? One of my former lieutenants, who voted by absentee for years faced the challenge of being questioned when he retired and returned home. It took his birth certificate, his passport, his military ID to be allowed to register. Why? His skin is not white, he speaks with an accent. Apparently NY state doesn’t recognize Louisiana/Cajun as part of the US.

So, for those of you who are US – vote. Make your voice heard. No matter who you support remember that dignity and respect are the basis off all major faiths. Let us be civilized, not savages. We don’t eat our young, we don’t abandon our elderly.

And for the non-US reading this, thank you. Educate yourself on your own countries issues and exercise your voice when the next opportunity arrises.

Herd Immunity

Holly Doyne Posted on by 3

This is a rant – delete at will.

Before I even go down the trail of why this new plan of the US White House is immoral, obscene, and not even remotely ethical – let us talk about herds.

Herds are groups of bovine or related species.  There is absolutely no question in the herd that all are not equal, not all members have equal chance at survival, that there is limited ability to protect the most vulnerable members of the herd. It is Darwin at the finest. The weakest members can and are left behind. They are brought down by predators while the rest of the herd escapes. A balance of nature – so to speak. If a member of a wild herd gets a serious infection – it dies. A newly born member of the herd, if physically “defective” dies. The elderly members, especially those past reproductive age, who can’t keep up with the herd – die.

As humans – we like to pretend that we are not herd animals. We care for our young, long past the point in most societies where children born with defects are left outside for the elements. We have antibiotics and treat all those infections that we can. We don’t routinely discard members of society who are past childbearing age so that there is enough food for those who are perpetuating the species (not going down this rabbit hole at the present – as there are way too may locations in the world where grandparents are raising their grandchildren). We pride ourselves on care and respect for our elderly, elders, and aged.

Or, I thought we did. That we were not a herd.

So why would we pretend that it is perfectly all right for us to say that “let the disease spread while those who are vulnerable are protected”?

Is this idea finding root now because one person has survived his episode of COVID-19 with a level of medical support that is not available to the vast majority of the US -especially those of us who live in areas where the hospital infrastructure is old, crumbling, inadequate, and lacks even remotely current ventilation standards?

Is it because the vast majority of deaths thus far have been in aged care facilities, nursing homes, residential homes, poor neighborhoods, essential workers of color? Do those in certain places assume that their whiteness, their economic status, their privilege will protect them? Their families.

Is it because it is easy to assume that SARS-COV2 is a one and done? How easy is it to ignore the reality of long-haul COVID and the thousands upon thousands who will be living with the consequences for years.

Does someone, somewhere think that we can identify who is vulnerable? That we have enough trained personnel to staff our hospitals and care facilities to take care of that 60% of the population getting infected that it will take?

Are we willing to accept that – with our current best medical care available to all – that the death rate is about 4%? That, my friends, translates to 12 MILLION people dying in the US. Our current US death count is just past 220,000.  Look around you – that means that 1/25 of those you know would be sacrificed to herd immunity. Does your family – including partners, parents, off-spring, siblings – number 25?  Who are you willing to let die for the cause? How about your friends, colleagues? How about you? Are you willing to die to promote herd immunity?

This disease is real. It is deadly.   All those scientist who signed the Barrington? All I can think of is that they don’t view themselves at risk. That they are sure they can protect themselves. I can play with numbers. But as a physician – those numbers have human faces; dreams, families, futures. Do I, sitting behind a computer and playing with numbers have a right to say – you get to die so that others can have a “normal” life?

The long term consequences of this disease are ugly in human life, in disability, in economic cost. No one who survives an intensive care unit stay ever returns to full normalcy. The idea that political leaders could advocate sacrificing a portion of the US population to death so that they don’t have to wear a mask is ludicrous.

Excuse me – but I think we have been here before in history. When a particular movement decided that cleaning house would be advantageous to themselves, their beliefs, and their economy. The result?

We call it the Holocaust.

And now? Will we go down the same path using a disease rather than ovens?

Think about it.

 

 

 

 

11 September

Holly Doyne Posted on by 1

There are 19 years separating us from those horrible events. There are voters now who were no t even alive when those planes came down: into the Twin Towers in New York; into the Pentagon; into a field in Pennsylvania.

I do not need to reiterate the stunned, shocked, non-understanding of how this could have happened. Over the next days and weeks, as the toll of the dead mounted and names were attached to those lost, pieces of the puzzle were put together.

But it didn’t change anything for those lost, for the families and friends who were forever changed. It did change everything for all of us. How we viewed each other, how we traveled, how suspicion of anyone from the Mid-East skyrocketed. This change, unfortunately has become permanent. Imbedded so deeply that it is hard to remember how things use to be.

I had colleagues killed at the Pentagon. Individuals with whom I had served just a few short months prior. Sitting at meetings, sharing a coffee. It is now hard to pull faces out of my memory, harder still to think of all the changes that have cascaded through their families in the intervening years.

All I can say today is please, hug those close to you. Make a few phone/skype/zoom/internet calls. Tell them that they are loved, appreciated, though of no matter where they are or their current job.

Sometimes, you just don’t get a chance to say goodbye.

It wasn’t meant to be funny

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

One way that I have kept myself entertained over the last several months is by listening to various of the Great Courses (produced by the euphemistically named “Learning Company”). Between the two public libraries to which I subscribe (Berkeley and San Francisco) and the extension provided by the SF Library to Hoopla, there are dozens of these to which I can listen.

As a result, I have been learning about the Middle Ages, various assorted sciences and a bit of music. Just for a lark, I pulled their course on “Introduction to Infectious Disease.” It was produced sometime after the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Unfortunately, the author describes the US public health system as organized, well prepared, well recognized, and “able to leap tall buildings with a single bound.”

I had to stop listening, it just hurt too much. Yes, Dr Fox is accurate in that we recognized that diseases can spread rapidly. But stating that we were prepared for the current pandemic is completely ludicrous. Decades of under funding coupled with a complete disregard for safety, security, and human rights whenever anything got in the way of someone making a fast buck left the US woefully unprepared.

His intro was meant to encourage and laud the progress that had been made in the wake of Ebola. Instead, it just made me feel bad and not be able to listen to the rest of it.  After thinking about it for a couple of hours, I emailed the production company to suggest that they re-do the intro. Most of their material is on-line and it just isn’t that hard to update digital files.

In family news: in spite of traffic this morning, we managed to get to UCSF in plenty of time for George’s radiology appointment. Assuming we won’t get results till Thursday when he has a follow up. Otherwise, there is organizing, stitching, baseball – with a side benefit of Angel deciding to BBQ tonight resulting in a lovely supper on the back deck.

Mother’s Day

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Being a mother has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with attitude, love, and care for others. At sometimes it means a bit of self-sacrifice and other times teaching that self-reliance is important. Imparting the ability to cope with the simple (and sometimes complex) activities of daily life; to be able to have your loved one venture out in the world and be able to stand, stump, or roll on their own.

It is teaching the important difference between unconditional love and setting limits on unacceptable behavior: I love you, but I do NOT like what your are doing – to put it in the simplest terms.

I am planning a quiet day. George and Miriam headed to the farmer’s market. With any luck, there might be early cherries. but I am not holding my breath as 1) it has been cooler along the coast than usual & 2) you need people to pick cherries. With the shutdown, there just aren’t the seasonal agricultural workers… So I might just have to eat scones without cherries. Angel is at work. Shana is bringing dinner at 1730 after she finishes some work. The dogs downstairs are still quiet. The cat has given up on begging me for food. So I am quietly sitting comfortably near the fireplace with my cup of mint tea (coffee? Already had more than a full dose of caffeine this morning) with some knitting and cross stitch.

So, Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms today in my time zone (and hoping yesterday was great for those of you in OZ).

Train Wreck in slow motion

Holly Doyne Posted on by 1

Watching the daily numbers as COVID-19 spreads around the globe is like being on the sidelines as two huge bodies head for the inevitable crash. You know it is going to happen; being an ostrich and talking about “relaxing things next week so that we don’t damage the economy further” is just total and complete idiocy.

I do have friends/family who are relatively safe. They live in rural Canada, rural Minnesota, remote Alaska. Used to functioning for weeks at a time during the winter, their chances of riding this pandemic out are fairly good. The rest of us? Especially the city dwellers? Not so good.

Especially those of us who have younger family and friends not taking restrictions seriously, use guilt if you need to. Use whatever lever required to have them act responsibly. Stupid behavior, ignoring social distancing, having loud parties and hanging out in crowds doesn’t just risk them, it risks the rest of us. The rest of us who are likely to put a burden on the medical system and decrease the availability of care for others.

Face it, the developed world has done an excellent job over the last 40 years of overall decrease of maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Not perfectly, but with enough of an increase that we have a significant population of under 21s who have serious medical and physical challenges. We have done fairly good job with diabetes since the addition of insulin to treatment (around 1926) such that we have thousands upon thousands now alive with increased susceptibility to both infection and a nasty tendency to have their disease spiral out of control with any illness. There are all of us who are cancer survivors. Then add in everyone who is on various immune suppressive therapies for arthritis, connective tissue disease, auto-immune disorders.

In the developing world, there are just as many challenges, but of a different sort. Intercurrent diseases, like malaria and other parasites as well as malnutrition, We have seen huge demographic changes in most sub-Saharan African countries where HIV took out huge swaths of adults, leaving children to be raised by grandparents. Those elders who have survived to this point are now at risk in countries where 45+% of the population is aged 16 and below. Take a look at this site where you can see age distributions in the population.

Compare Western Africa to Western Europe. As an aside, looking at this also may provide some understanding about the lack of teachers, health care providers, and other what we might consider essential personnel. There are simply too many young people and not enough people & resources to train their replacements, much less the ability to expand the ranks.

And for another look at reality – as everyone panicked in mid-March at the thought of 18k deaths world wide – the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) alone had 6000 deaths from measles in 2019 – almost all young children and over 480,000 deaths from malaria.

Are we reacting as NIMBY?

Or have the US numbers of over 42,000 deaths finally struck home? The world is not the same as it was last fall. The developed world, for all its conveniences, medical access, clean water, and abundant power – is facing the grief, loss, and out of control that characterizes much of the developing world on a daily basis.

What each of us does, affects everyone else as well as having long ranging effect on society, the environment and potentially, all of our survival.

For those in the US

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

If you are not in the US – you might not be aware of the US Census which was supposed to be conducted starting 1 April. In past years, this has involved a huge hiring effort and a massive door-to-door inventory of “everyone in the country.” As for why the census? Not only is it mandated by the US Constitution, but the census forms the basis for allocation of a huge number of things – from Congress representation to funding of various programs.

Starting last year, there wound up being a massive mess in the courts because certain people in the US Administration wanted to add a “are you a citizen” question to the census. Now, there is nothing in the constitution that requires someone to be a citizen to be counted. In fact, the ugly truth is that the compromise at the time it was written was that slaves would count as 3/5 of a person. And those numbers would be included in determining the Congressional Representation. Note also that there was no gender definition. One can easily say then – if slaves counted, then citizenship didn’t matter since they also were counting all family members, even though women and children had absolutely no rights, say, etc.

So why would we need a citizenship question? Other than the fact that certain people do not understand what immigrants contribute to the country. And that they are looking for yet another way that the Immigration and Naturalization Service can track down and deport more individuals.

It is all stupid – California had a significant problem last year in obtaining enough workers to handle the harvest. Also true in other states. I don’t know many US raised children who are willing to do the backbreaking work that is required in farming or agriculture. (Colin,Jan, Rebecca, you are the exceptions).

But anyway – follow this link to a new version of Annie’s Song (John Denver)…

Alive, well, and bored

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

As are most of you, I am spending the majority of my time at home.

If any of you think this is a short term state of affairs, you are sadly mistaken. The positive side of flattening out an epidemic curve is that the medical system doesn’t get overwhelmed. The downside is that, by flattening the curve, the epidemic is prolonged for months. Expect that, with bad luck, we are looking at a minimum of six months and probably more realistically a dozen months before any semblance of normality returns.

At that point, there is going to be little left of the developing world as the health care system there is not robust, to say the least. Similar to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, we will never have an accurate picture of the number of lives lost in many areas as neither birth nor deaths are accurately recorded. Many areas and countries have a fragile logistical system which is constantly disrupted by conflict, militias, and environmental disasters.

Most of the more developed world will be in severe economic straits with our more vulnerable populations decimated as individuals and families no longer have the ability to pay for shelter, food, clothing or health care. Those countries with good health care systems that cover everyone will fare far better than the US. I honestly expect that Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Finland will come out of this crisis with large portions of their population and economies intact. Australia may be able to do the same. Western and Central Europe will have major challenges as they are so interdependent for food and energy.

and all of this is gloomy.

I think I will go back to my cross-stitch….

Shelter in Place – 1

Holly Doyne Posted on by

Do any of you remember that wonderful story that floated around the internet years ago about dog vs cat in their outlook in life?

The one that presented a day in the life of – the dog –

0700 – my people are up – just the best!

0730 – food – the best time of day!

0830 – walkies! – just the best!

etc

As apposed to the cat –

0700 – this is the 436th day of my captivity

0730 – perhaps I will lie on the stairs and trip one of my captors….

Well – this is the first day of our captivity in the SF Bay Area. It is not like I was going much of anywhere in the last couple of week. Well, other than running errands for just about everyone in the family. But still – I could run errands for myself which meant stops at important places like JoAnns and Micheals. And the Dublin Sewing Center, Stone Mountain and Daughters, and book stores and…. you get the idea

Now, I am not at all adverse to reasonable attempts to slow down Corona Virus (which, the US President aside – has absolutely NOTHING to do with Mexican Beer). Flattening the curve will spread out the burden on the health care system. That is reality.

What is also reality is that this a virus that spreads just like a common cold through a fall kindergarten class. It is going to spread. Most people are going to get it sooner or later, What we are trying to do is make that “later” happen as far in the future as possible.

The other part of the reality is the economic devastation. If you are someone who enjoys history, perhaps tries to learn from history and is wondering if this virus is going to be comparable to one of the ten plagues visited on Egypt from the Passover Story  – I direct you to Dorothy Armstrong’s The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague.  It is one of the Great Courses, available through Audible, several other sources, and perhaps your public library. It was a US public TV series in 2016 (available through Amazon Prime) and on DvD. More than just talk about the medical and health aspects – she looks at the economic, social, and political changes that were the result disease spread, lives lost, fear, hate, and complete societal changes. The entirety of Europe, as well as most of the Far East permanently changed.

Perhaps you would also like to think about the 1917-18 Influenza pandemic which helped bring WWI to a close. Or the 1956 or 1968 Pandemics.. Oh, wait! Most of us were fairly young then and lived through them with little bump in our lives.

What is going to be important about this epidemic is, in the final accounting – not going to be the virus, but how we, as a society respond and recover. It is going to take years to decades to come back from what has already happened. Every week that shut downs continue, millions more will be economically devastated in the “Western” world.  Every month adds at least a year to that recovery period. We are so used to expecting medical “miracles” that being locked down for 18+ months just stuns everyone. And, if we do that – lock down time after time, there will be little left at the end.

Only one of our “chicks” is out of area right now – Noah is finishing his exams at UCSan Diego on Thurs and will be home on Friday. The rest are now all local. Everyone is healthy, bored. I now have three off work (two daughters, one SIL), one headed to work everyone morning, and one working from home.  George can continue, as he has for over a year now, to work over phone and internet. We are lucky. The house is paid for. My income is assured unless the US government completely fails (in which case there will be more serious problems than the local government demanding property taxes.

I would appreciate knowing that you are all right and safe as you have time.

I have a number of essays written over the last month which I will take off private in the next couple of days.

 

Hair Length

Holly Doyne Posted on by 8

There was, what I charitably will presume was a well meaning woman about a year ago who made a comment about my shorter hair making me look much younger. I blew it off at the time rather than get into a discussion but there are just so many things wrong with that statement. The first is that I want to look younger than I am. Considering the source (my age with obviously bleach blond hair) such things are quite important to her.

It isn’t to me. Appearing younger is what I can do in my head as long as I don’t look in the mirror. But mirrors lie – after all – everything is reversed so why not sneak in a bit of aging change? Mirror, Mirror on the Wall and all of that. The same reason applies for why I don’t add hair color to cover my grey. I have earned those gray hairs. And, since they have grown back following chemo – every single last one of them is precious to me.

Part of what triggered off this chain of thought was George making the remark this morning that he was finally feeling hair bristling on his head. The chemo that they use for stem cell transplants for some reason has a much more devastating affect on hair follicles than the R-CHOP that was inflicted on me. I had hair starting back within about three weeks after my last dose of chemo and was willing to wander around without a scarf on my head by the time we took our Phoenix cruise to Iceland & Greenland in Aug/Sept of 2017. OTOH, my hair departed my head, covered my pillow and clogged the drain within 10 days of the first course of chemo. It was actually a when George was leaving the hospital–so 4-5 weeks later–when all of his exited stage left.

What the (hopefully) well meaning woman also didn’t get is that I really, really don’t like hair around my face. Not after spending 30 years in uniform where my choices were short or long and pulled back. Short takes a lot of care. Taking the time to get a trim every 3-6 weeks is just nuts, at least for me. For others, it is how they think of themselves. But there is absolutely nothing easier for me than grabbing a scrunchie and I am done. Out of the way, least likely to pull out or damage hair and easy to remove.

Also in the back of my mind is every old, blue haired lady that I ever saw. They had short hair, often permed. I am so not interested in turning into one of them. Accepting the “as you get older your hair should be shorter” idea that society seems to place on aging white women. I am not familiar enough with other cultures to be sure that it is the same. But at least in the SF Asian community, that seems to be the case. At the same time – mixed grey and brown hair straggling around one’s face isn’t terribly attractive either. And yesterday, when I was in the check-out lane at Costco (long, long story) I noticed that on the woman ahead of me in line. And when my first thought was – she is too old to wear her hair that way – I realized, that I too, might well have drunk the koolaide.

Examining one’s attitudes isn’t always that fun. But it might actually result in an improvement in behavior. And it certainly would have kept me from thinking–Old? You, who are bleached blond and wearing too tight clothes designed for someone in their teens is commenting on my appearance?

Order and discipline

Holly Doyne Posted on by

are key underpinnings of the military. Without them, the team doesn’t function. In high risk situations, people can die. And not the enemy, but your own.

This is a rant. Skip it, if for some reason you think a president pardoning someone for posing with a person as a hunting trophy is all right.

In which case, I am afraid you and I don’t have much in common. I thoroughly believe that all of us have a responsibility to leave this world a better place than we found it. That involves creating all people with dignity and respect. You and I may not agree on a lot of things, but I firmly believe you have a right to your opinion. If that opinion makes you my enemy, then I will shoot back if you shoot at me. I spent too many years as a military officer not to defend myself. But still, you are a person acting on your beliefs. Treating your enemy’s corpse with disrespect is not done. Not only is it outside the law of war, it is the act of animal (and most scavengers eat the remains).

I always thought the US was better than that. We prosecuted Mai Lai. We don’t shoot unarmed civilians, in fact we are even starting to hold police officers who do that accountable for their actions. We still have the shame of Gitmo which may well be a blight on our country and history for decades.

When fellow team members turn in a Seal for going beyond the limits, for acting unprofessionally, for posing an enemy corpse as a trophy, we need to respect their request for the military justice system to investigate, act, and disciple if appropriate. That courts martial found reason to reduce the petty office. That should stand; the judgement, like all others of that severity due to rank and years of service will be reviewed as per regulation. It should not be flippantly over turned because “it isn’t fair.”

What that man did was a disgrace to his fellow Seals, the Navy, and all of us in uniform. We have to be able to count on the system. Our allies have to be able to count on us to police our own. Commanders have to have the ability to count on order and disciple in the ranks in order to accomplish any assigned mission and bring everyone home safely.

Seriously, I thought we, the US, were better than that: that someone with power but no military background would do something so awful. An act, trigged by who knows what, that will have far and long reaching consequences.

Think about it at the next election. Is this a person you would trust with your life, your child’s life, your grandchild’s life if they can so blithely do what seems to be politically expedient without any understanding of the long term implications. Or, as one of George’s colleagues said – if this man was the preacher on the pulpit – are his morals those of yours? Would you attend?

There is a second side

Holly Doyne Posted on by 4

Pat brought up a point in response to my post about friends around the world that I really think merits further thought. So many people have become dependent on social media for their relationships that we forget that social media is not always a bad thing, that it may not serve to isolate rather than bring together. It can be a way for those who are isolated, house-bound, disabled to be able to connect with others.

If you haven’t read Tom Standage’s “The Victorian Internet”* I might suggest you borrow it from your local public library and peruse it. He makes the point that our methods of written communication have changed, but Western Society as a whole had a long standing history of communicating in written format. For anyone who reads any fiction at all set in Edwardian, Georgian, or Victorian England, sending notes and letters was just as common a task as managing household accounts. Because of distance, most wrote letters. Your friend from school? You communicated by letter with them over holidays and vacation periods. Announcements? They went by post. Invitations? The same.

We seem to have a natural inclination to want to share thoughts, feelings, and knowledge with others. Mostly by the written word, as it isn’t time dependent on reaching the other person at the exact moment we have the thought. It will be there, waiting for them when they have time. But that element of time has changed as well. When communication was routinely by letter and post, unless you lived city center in a major metropolis (read NYC, London, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt) you did not expect a reply back the same day. If the distances were greater, you automatically added in round trip postal transport time for your letter.

Now? It seems like everyone wants an instant response to whatever method of communication is attempted. Rarely, anymore does anyone pick up the phone. Rather, send off a text or email. I am discounting snapchat, twitter, instagram and Facebook for the moment since those are “toss it out there and see if anyone responds” methods of attempting communication. Personally, I don’t view those as communication methods since they are not really targeted and an answer is optional.

All those years of radio and television which occupied the intervening years between the development of more instant methods of communication and the present did change everyone’s mind set. Rather than actively controlling one’s time, increasingly people became passive consumers of whatever was put out. Watching is not the same as reading. Seeing is not the same as creating character voices and actions in one’s own mind when reading Agatha Christie vs. watching a BBC production.

But those intervening years were hard on those home bound. Yes, entertainment came to them via radio and TV, but it did not come with human interaction. People would pick up a telephone rather than send a note or an invitation. At first this change could be viewed simply as an economic barrier, but it rapidly expanded to the point where, if you could not communicate on a phone, you were going to be excluded. Think of everyone with hearing or speaking impairment, those with mobility challenges such that reaching that phone in a reasonable time was not an achievable accomplishment.

Fast forward (see, a VCR term) to today. There are those who are unable to handle direct human interactions and might well have functioned much better in a society with strict structural behavior norms and codes. But I honestly believe that those individuals are a rarity. Rather, the modern, although occasionally annoyingly immediate forms of electronic communication, while perhaps bombarding us to the point of overload, also provide for some individuals in our society, their only window on the world. The only method by which they may become a productive and self-valued member of society. Amazon (Amazon, Audible) no matter some of their faults, provides a significant amount of customer service through individuals, who by working out of their homes, can have gainful employment. You don’t have to hear to be able to answer a chat, resolve a request for a return of an electronic book or audiobook.

So Pat’s point is well taken. The same methodologies which bombard us with trivia and may push people into superficial relationships also offer others a chance to have friends, to connect, and to live full lives even without the ability to leave home, drive a car, or travel the world.

 

*I referenced a book of his about this time last year when I went on a rant about lawyers, and the total misappropriation of words and misuse in the English Language. Should you be a native speaker of a different language, I am sure that you would be able to find parallels. Not sure why you would try, but there it is

old school typos

Holly Doyne Posted on by 19

long ago, and far away. Ok – more than 50 years and in the middle of the country. Does that sound better than saying….”once upon a time” or “in a galaxy far, far away” or any of the other expressions that seem to lead you to the conclusion that you are about to hear a story. Perhaps a fairy tale, maybe a tall tail, or just a blearily remembered version of a long ago event.

But this is not a story, it is real and many of you may remember exactly the same thing. I am talking about the era before computers, before word procesasors. Back to the days when a terrific high school graduation present was a portable typewriter for anyone headed off to college. Obviously, when you had to write a paper, it was written long hand by one method or another, then typed ONCE. Preferably without error….

[and you wondered where “typo” came from? No, you didn’t because you remember typing and typewriters. You remember typing as an elective that could be taken in secondary school. And, for the lawyers in the group – you are more than familiar with those yellow legal pads and might even remember the days when lawyer wrote things out and there were actually secretaries that typed them for you.]

There was this funky stuff that came in a small bottle resembling a thickened nail polish. It was called white-out (or correction fluid). If you made a typing error, you carefully rolled the paper up, painted over the error, blew it dry, rolled it down and tried again. Most faculty accepted neither handwritten papers by 1968, nor once that suffered from a serious case of white measles. Several years later a type-over tape was developed. Even later, with the advent of typewriters with a double ribbon (one portion of which was for erasure).

I had one of those portable typewriters. Other than my undergrad thesis which was subject to a number of really strict formatting guidelines, I typed all my own papers.  Hitting return involved not my little finger but a hand/arm motion to move a lever which in turn actually retuned the whole roller carriage to the start point on the right side of the paper. (I imagine that the Mid-Eastern typewriters of their day worked in reverse for the left->right written languages.)

I have no clue as to what happened to that type writer. It must have been given away, lost, forgotten somewhere along my journey after the mid 1970s. I obtained my first computer in 1984 when we moved back to the US from my first Germany tour to attend grad school at John’s Hopkins.  I know it was gone by then.

And what started this whole chain of thought was actually not typewriters, but 3×5 cards. But I will save that for another day.

In other news, for the sixth morning in a row, George has actually had detectable platelets and is now producing white blood cells. None of it is at “going home levels” yes, but that looks like a possibility in the next 7-10 days if this stem cell transplant continues to take hold.

 

Ordering ahead

Holly Doyne Posted on by 11

I remember the old days of shopping. If you didn’t ‘t want to go in person, then you spent hours pouring over pictures in a catalog before filling out a form and mailing it off with payment. And then you would wait. And wait. And wait. It all depending on the store, the shipping warehouse and USPS. Even more so for those of us shopping from APO addresses. The alternative was calling in an order over the phone in the days when most call centers were in country, staffed primarily by unhappy women and strongly resembled this PDX Broadsides Song. But then, I worked as a an answering service switchboard operator on evening shift while an undergrad back in the days of answering services (which was also prior to the days of beepers.)

The development first of the USENET mailing lists and then open lists brought about a change in ordering. Interest groups could pass along information, recommendations, as well as challenges. With the onset of the first website – the whole institution of on-line ordering began.

Over the last thirty years I have watched the change from Penny’s, Sear’s, Vermont Country Store, Herschner’s, Land’s End and other catalog merchants move (or not move and go under) from a sales plan based off printed catalogs to one where a brick and mortar store was really optional and the important points became order fulfillment and managing shipping. This new era includes individuals who can now find countrywide and world wide customers through websites like Amazon, Etsy, and Ebay.

And then we moved on to smart phones and Apps.

I grew up in Minnesota. For any of you who ever listened to the old “Prairie Home Companion” (the link is to Wiki) you may understand that where I grew up, coffee was made on the stove, in a percolator without any of those new fangled electrical connections. The addition of eggshells was +/- and viewed as personal preference (mostly related to whether or not you had Scandinavians in your family.) As the article notes, drip coffee makes had started to spread from the industrial/restaurant sectors (that always tastes burned brew served in every truck stop across the US) to the home.

Fast forward to today. Many of us have become coffee snobs. Perked coffee isn’t good enough, neither is drip. No, it needs to be French Press, or an Americano (take expresso, dilute with boiling water). We buy coffee from Peet’s, Starbuck’s, small neighborhood coffee shops and develop a preference while ignoring exactly how much money we are spending on designer coffee.

I mentioned the Apps, right? Now why would you stand in line when you can order ahead? Not only do you easily specify all those quirks which makes it special to you (frappa, crappa, no whip, skim, extra hot, with a drizzle of…..) but no human interaction required. Just like the old catalog days, only providing even more immediate gratification and less personal contact. And it is different than calling your local pizza parlor for take-away, something that hasn’t changed in decades.

I like the idea of shopping locally. Supporting local businesses rather huge chains. But I have to admit I like Peet’s coffee and have gotten suckered in. It is so much easier to order off the app as the N-Judah passes UCSF Parnassus. The Peet’s at Carl & Cole is only two minutes (supposedly) further. By the time I get off the tram and walk ½ way down the block, my beverage is waiting for me. It is labeled. I don’t have to try and get the QRF reader to recognize my phone, nor are there any communication issues with the staff in this tiny, noisy, and extremely busy coffee shop.

As I hike up Parnassus to UCSF, I enjoy my latte. It certainly isn’t the evil brew I remember from childhood, nor the sludge I served in the diner where I worked while in high school. Have I gone over to the dark side? Or am I leveraging modern technology?

Close the door

Holly Doyne Posted on by 8

It was about 0720 and I had my morning all planned. Walk over the SFVA, figure out where to get my flu shot. Get my flu shot. Get coffee if I had time. Catch the shuttle bus to UCSF. Said bus only runs once an hour (at xx36) so if I timed it just right I arrive to spend the day with George right about 0900.

Headed back into Jessica’s downstairs guest room, I pulled the door shut behind me just in case there was a cat lurking. It isn’t that I don’t care for cats. I like cats. But I really didn’t want this particular scaredy cat stuck in with my stuff the whole day. So I closed the door. Gathering up my things, I went to open the door.

It didn’t open. There is no lock on the door, there was no reason for the door not to open. The knob turned, but the mechanism didn’t disengage. Being a modern woman, I sent Jessica a txt to see if she was still home and could open the door from outside.

No. The credit card trick failed, as did wiggling, jiggling, or turning the knob from either side of the door.

Now, this is San Francisco. Of course there was a metal guard over the window as it was ground level. Also being savvy people, there was a padlock on the grate. It took a few minutes, but I managed to pop out the screens, and traded the padlock key to Jessica who was apologizing from her back garden for a screwdriver and hammer. The door hinges were on my side, so it looked like, if we couldn’t get the quite rusty padlock open, I could pop the pins off the hinges and remove the door.

I had just loosened up the second pin when Jessica managed to open the padlock. One side of the metal frame opened. I climbed out the window after passing over my bag and phone. The door should be fixed today.

And, I jogged over the SFVA (1.7 miles – old system) across the park. We will not mention the fact that the hospital is on top of a hill (345 feet = 105 meters according to archived documents I found on line). Nor that going across this small section of Golden Gate Park means that first I drop down a few meters in elevation (to essentially sea level) before starting the grind up the hill. Of course, 2/3 of the trip is up hill. The lovey people at the information desk said that the general medical clinic on the 1st Floor (note, this building is old enough to have a ground floor) was my desired location. I headed up the stairs. After all, what is a bit more climbing? Checking in, the Flu Shot clinic started at 0830. Ok, I would have plenty of time to wait and knit.

No sooner had I turned around than one of the nursing staff called me in. No sense in waiting, she said. I asked about the Walgreen’s agreement to provide flu shots free of charge to Veteran’s. It is working well, she said, but they haven’t included the high dose version (which is exactly what all of us over 65 need). Having just enough time to grab a latte from the lobby’s stand, I caught the 0836 shuttle bus.
For anyone else who is old enough to remember the Stargazers (1995) – and this song – which starts with the words that were running through my head

Close the door, they’re comin’ in the window
Close the door, they’re runnin’ up the stairs
Close the door, They’re hangin’ off the ceiling
Those (Bah-dah-bah-dah-bah-dah) are everywhere

I am providing you two links –

The original recording – Close the Door, they’re comin’ in the window….

And an updated, much funnier version Close the Door, they’re comin’ in the window

words in my head

Holly Doyne Posted on by 11

don’t do me anywhere near as much good as words on paper (which, in today’s world translates to words in an electronic document). I have come to acknowledge that putting off finishing the requirements for the two outstanding incompletes from grad school is not doing me any good. In fact, it more resembles the garbage left too long under the sink. The longer it sits, the more it smells. The more it smells, the less you want to deal with it. At some point, the nose is held (clothespin optional) and the stinking container is emptied, washed, and put back with all good intentions to avoid this cycle in the future.

Then the future rolls around again.

Please understand – I don’t give a flip about grades, all I want it is “met enough work to warrant a pass.” Having said that – it is hard to imagine putting in hours of work researching and writing for no good reason if the end results could possibly be of benefit.

It is the old Tikkun olam. Build the world a better place.

So… the background to today’s public health challenges include the following:

  1. San Francisco is an extremely expensive place to live
  2. The tech boom has resulted in an increase of 100k jobs over the last decade and the loss of 30k in housing in just the last few years
  3. The weather in California is not as bad as many of the other parts of the country
  4. changing demographics have resulted in marginalization of portions of the population.
  5. San Francisco became the mecca for a number of lifestyles starting in the 1960s

 

Now, back tracking to 2008-2009, there were several medical publications that discussed Hepatitis A infections and risks in homeless populations. Those discussions centered, of course due to the standard medical tunnel visions, on immunizing everyone to avoid disease.

So why was everyone in both city governments and public health circles so stunned when an epidemic of Hepatitis A started sweeping through homeless & IV drug user communities (and yes, there can be an overlap between the two). I fail to understand why anyone was surprised. Or, even more stunned to be in a situation where a normally mild disease most often seen in childhood in most of the developing world, various institutions was causing hospitalizations and death. This epidemic was recognized, not because of the obvious failure of the city, the infrastructure and public health to recognize the failure to provide for a vulnerable population but that hospitalization costs were skyrocketing.

The solution? According to the CDC – we should adopt the 2009 recommendations (hello, this is now 2017….) to add homelessness, IV drug use or MSM* to the list of peoples needing HepA immunization.

For those of you who don’t remember the history of Hepatitis A – this was the food/water borne version of hepatitis for which you (as a citizen of a developed country) received a large shot of gamma globulin in a major muscle group (usually gluteus maximus). 5cc is a significant volume, trust me. In 1995, the first versions of HepA vaccine became available. Every military member with a brain in his/her head was more than willing to get immunized. One shot with maybe a booster vs large/painful shot every 3-6 months while deployed? Other than the military, most of the other developed world citizens at risk of HepA were tourists indulging in street food while visiting developing countries. With the usual transmission being the fecal-oral route, it was obvious to everyone concerned that sanitation was as important to breaking the infection cycle as immunization.

We seem to have forgotten that bit of intelligence. It doesn’t matter if you immunize the whole world against a disease. That is one disease. As anyone who has every had noro-virus, salmonella food poisoning or one of the hundreds of other possibilities, the key to not getting diarrheal disease is availability of toilet facilities accompanied by strict adherence to hand washing. Which takes us to a city where there are no 24 hour public toilets, hand washing facilities are limited, no one wants homeless encampments, there is not enough shelter space for those who need it, and serious money is spent on a daily basis on power washing human excrement off the sidewalks.

Yes, we can immunize everyone. But it is not going to solve the sanitation issue.

I am making some basic assumptions. The first is that most people do not chose to be homeless. That they don’t set out to be vulnerable, dirty, and hungry. That, if they had the money to have food and shelter, they would. But San Francisco has teachers in their schools living in cars because they can’t afford a place to live.  I also make the assumption that mental health, substance abuse issues, and physical health issues impact lives to the point where many become homeless. And those problems don’t become better by being without a home.

<two hour break in which I spent digging through PubMed. Surprise, surprise, all the public health people, when discussing issues related to the HepA outbreak mentioned and repeatedly mentioned that sanitation was a serious issue and one of the most difficult to resolve. Having said that – it is no where in any of the CDC guidance. Just immunizations. Go figure>

I finished off the draft memo – sent it on its way, and spent sometime working on a Hitchhiker variation in a lovely yarn color called – magic unicorn.

 

*MSM= men who have sex with men…

 

today? or 18 years

Holly Doyne Posted on by

My children at home were 8, 10, 12 when the Twin Towers fell, when the Pentagon was plane bombed, when I lost friends and colleagues. The repercussions are still with us today. In the Xenophobia & anti-immigrant policies that are being espoused by a certain group that is scared of losing its grip on what it considers its “rightful superiority.” By people who can say, with a straight face (and believe it) that the words on the Statue of Liberty only apply to those with wealth who are coming from white Europe and were never meant to include any other group.

By those who have never served, as I have, in the military along side individuals from multiple nations, from multiple backgrounds, all united for a common cause. Along side those who feel an obligation to the country which gave them opportunity, not those who take for granted that their background and privilege exempt them from the service shown by the military, the fire fighters, the police. All those who risk their lives on a daily basis.

By those who have a problem recognizing that the majority of whites in the US don’t have ties going back centuries, only decades. Who ignore the fact that Spanish were here hundreds of years before most Northern Europeans. That every last person immigrating from Central and South America can trace ancestry in the Western Hemisphere back thousands of years.

I spent more than a minute of silence and reflection. Noting as I was driving George too and from UCSF, that there were flags not at half-mast. I don’t know the custom overall, but when I think of the lives immediately lost, all those who died that day in rescue attempts whether NYC or Pentagon, those who sacrificed their lives which ended in a field in Pennsylvania, and all those who have died since then as a result of their involvement – it is the least we can do for respect.

Be grateful on a daily basis for those in uniform, be it fire, police, military. They all serve our country, putting their lives on the line on a daily, weekly,  monthly basis. They do it out of honor, responsibility, personal obligation.

You could just thank all of them for their service, in remembrance.

Flamingos? I can explain

Holly Doyne Posted on by 5

the whole flamingo thing started in 2003 when this particular set of wind chimes, seen hanging from an internal second floor window here in Berkeley, arrived in the mail while I was serving in Kuwait

flamingo wind chimes

I still don’t have a clue as to why Carmen thought I needed a wind chime. No one ever spent time outside except in transit between trailer, office, mess hall, meetings. I arrived just as we were headed into the warmest part of spring where temperatures often hit 40*C by lunch. It definitely severed  served as a conversation starter, hanging from my ceiling light in the middle of the room.

A bit later in the year, the flamingo was joined by a menagerie of origami animals courtesy of Pat. Unfortunately, I can’t offer a picture as they hid from packing when getting for my move back to Germany in summer of 2004.

Since that time, I have been gifted the occasional flamingo ornamented item, such as birthday candles, dish towels and a pair of leggings. I have, on occasion, also purchased the occasional flamingo decorated socks. Additionally, I have accumulated a number of machine embroidery files, should I really, really need to add a flamingo to something.

If I want to be honest, the whole flamingo thing started in 1978 when George and I received a couple of pink plastic flamingo lawn ornaments for a wedding present. We included them in our house hold goods for years, but some time in one of those transAtlantic moves they were lost.

The single metal flamingo that was standing guard over the lemon tree when we purchased the house is still in its location atop the retaining wall. Looking down, it can see my own flamboyance of flamingos, four with solar collectors to light the night and the other two anchoring both ends of the small area between the patio and front door.

 

D-Day

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

the day (June 6, 1944) in World War II on which Allied forces invaded northern France by means of beach landings in Normandy. Today is the 75th Anniversary. All who served in that war, no matter which side, are now in their 90s. Our memories are short; the further we get from that conflict the easier it is to revise history. To discount the burden on those involved at the time, respect for all those who died, and the impact of post war on the future of more than just the countries directly involved with fighting on their lands. It isn’t just the Holocaust survivors of whom I speak, it is all who underestimate the impact on our politics today. That war, and the follow on Korean Conflict (War) had a huge impact on all of my generation as we grew up in the aftermath with the Cold War. The influence on our parents in turn affected us. And a large number of “us” are today’s politicians.

I headed back to the hotel early last night. Exhausted would have been a polite way of describing my staggering in the door and landing face down on the bed. At 0700 I was back at the hotel, meeting with the rest of the leadership of our working group. (ISTM provided breakfast, so there was a reward for being at a meeting when my body was clearly sure it was 0400). End result, we have a fairly good plan for the next meeting and a potential for joint symposium with a couple of the other special interest working groups. If any of can make a commitment to the regional meetings in 2020, there is a possibility (ick, how German can I get in sentence construction translated into English) of symposium at those meetings as well.

Our Coin

(and a thanks to Miriam. Her logo for our working group has been turned into a very nice coin. Military are all about coins.)

There were a number of absolutely excellent presentations today covering a range of topics from the expected malaria presentation through the handling of emergencies. I should have stayed for some of the evening meetings. Instead, I went back to the Courtyard Marriott to sleep.

(Word from George is that he is stable. Bored out of his mind, but stable).