What caring looks like

I think health care is more about love than about most other things. If there isn't at the core of this two human beings who have agreed to be in a relationship where one is trying to help relieve the suffering of another, which is love, you can't get to the right answer here.
~Donald Berwick

Yesterday my husband Ben went to a hospital for a procedure. We were under the impression that the staff would be masked up, but it turned out that they weren't. The majority of the masked people there were patients.

I know a cancer survivor who is COVID-cautious and has only had it once -- given to her by an unmasked doctor.

Should people we go to for our health care be making us sick? Why would that seem acceptable, that on the one hand they "care" about our health and on the other hand, they can't be bothered to protect it in the smallest of ways?

When I left the hospital yesterday, I thought to myself that the staff should hope they didn't give Ben COVID because if they did, I am perfectly happy to be a one-woman protest, just me with a sign, trying not to let them get away with it. Today, this article by Nate Bear landed in my in-box...many people are experiencing the same frustration I am.

Nate Bear:

Just this week the partner of Rhod Gilbert, a famous Welsh comedian undergoing treatment for stage 4 cancer, spoke out against the medical malpractice that leads to hospital-acquired covid infections...

How many cancer patients, transplant patients or critically-ill people have been infected in a hospital with the the world’s leading cause of death by infectious disease? How many ended up dead as a result?

We don’t know, since public health either gave up on monitoring or won’t tell us. We have to comb through social media to find out.

I can hardly believe that’s a line I’m writing in 2024...

Hospitals should be places of treatment, safety and comfort, especially for the most vulnerable in society.

They should not be places of danger...

Prior to the pandemic, whenever there were hospital outbreaks of the ‘superbug’ MRSA, or of the bacterium C. difficile, it made the news. Investigations were undertaken. When people died, legal actions were launched. Hospitals were sued. It only took a few hundred cases for the wheels to be set in motion.

This happened because there was an expectation that hospitals were places of safety. There was an expectation that no further harm should come to a person when seeking treatment for illness.

We agreed, culturally, that it was utterly negligent when this happened.

That expectation has died under a mountain of covid propaganda and a desire for normality so powerful that a form of cultural hegemony has arisen: from the political left to the right, covid has been disappeared. A collective vow of silence has been taken.

My mom had spinal surgery recently and has had physical therapists and occupational therapists coming to her house 2-3 times a week. Her therapists are wearing masks without being asked. Much appreciation for health care providers who protect their patients!