Skip to main content

We all have Covid-19 #mycoviddiary

No I don't have it yet. No cough, no fever, just the expected occasional sneeze as spring is coming on. But Washington has closed all the restaurants and bars and I realize today that we all have Covid-19 as the community that is the world is connected, each person to every other person in ways we now are just starting to understand.

A couple of ER doctors have been tweeting their lung ultrasounds daily as they go through coronavirus infections. I have been watching eagerly, hoping they will get better soon which will reassure me (for no good reason, but hey.) They use the hashtag #mycoviddiary. I'm thinking I will blog-journal the top thoughts and ideas that come to mind in the next weeks. Why not? I'll have time, until I won't have time anymore. Then I can journal that, too.

Thoughts today:

1. We should forgive ourselves and everybody else for being stupid about this. Nobody has ever done this before. Only a few of us are global pandemic experts. Hoarding toilet paper, buying the wrong type of food for your two week supply, thinking your allergies are coronavirus, not knowing when to stop going to the gym...all of these things are us being human. We're not going to know except in hindsight which of our ideas was genius. Canned sardines? Mac and cheese? Frozen vegetables?

2. Many of the things that will be really painful about this are going to surprise us.

3. It's important to wear supportive shoes when dancing around the house for exercise. Plantar fasciitis is real and has nothing to do with heel spurs and everything to do with jumping up and down to boppy music in bare feet trying to get your heartrate up.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to make your own ultrasound gel (which is also sterile and edible and environmentally friendly) **UPDATED--NEW RECIPE**

I have been doing lots of bedside ultrasound lately and realized how useful it would be in areas far off the beaten track like Haiti, for instance. With a bedside ultrasound (mine fits in my pocket) I could diagnose heart disease, kidney and gallbladder problems, various cancers as well as lung and intestinal diseases. Then I realized that I would have to take a whole bunch of ultrasound gel with me which would mean that I would have to check luggage, which is a real pain when traveling light to a place where luggage disappears. I heard that you can use water, or spit, in a pinch, or even lotion, though oil based coupling media apparently break down the surface of the transducer. Or, of course, you can just use ultrasound gel. Ultrasound requires an aqueous interface between the transducer and the skin or else all you see is black. Ultrasound gel is a clear goo, looks like hair gel or aloe vera, and is made by several companies out of various combinations of propylene glycol, glyce

Ivermectin for Covid--Does it work? We don't know.

  Lately there has been quite a heated controversy about whether to use ivermectin for Covid-19.  The FDA , a US federal agency responsible for providing unbiased information to protect people from harmful drugs, foods, even tobacco products, has said that there is not good evidence of ivermectin's safety and effectiveness in treating Covid 19, and that just about sums up what we truly know about ivermectin in the context of Covid. The CDC, Centers for Disease Control, a branch of the department of Health and Human Services, tasked with preventing and treating disease and injury, also recently warned  people not to use ivermectin to treat Covid outside of actual clinical trials. Certain highly qualified physicians, including ones who practice critical care medicine and manage many patients with severe Covid infections in the intensive care unit vocally support the use of ivermectin to treat Covid and have published dosing schedules and reviews of the literature supporting it for tr

Old Fangak, South Sudan--Bedside Ultrasound and other stuff

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Old Fangak, a community of people living by the Zaraf River in South Sudan. It's normally a small community, with an open market and people who live by raising cows, trading on the river, fishing and gardening. Now there are tens of thousands of people there, still displaced from their homes by the civil war which has gone on intermittently for decades. There are even more people now than there were last year. There is a hospital in Old Fangak, which is run by Jill Seaman, one of the founders of Sudan Medical relief and a fierce advocate for treatment of various horrible and neglected tropical diseases, along with some very skilled and committed local clinical officers and nurses and a contingent of doctors, nurses and support staff from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF) who have been helping out for a little over a year. The hospital attempts to do a lot with a little, and treats all who present ther