COVID-19 More Tools: Separating
inconvenience from real problems:
Here is a short story that I've resurrected
from one of my Patient Newsletters from a
few years ago. It's from Robert Fulghum's
book Uh-Oh: Some
Observations from Both Sides of the
Refrigerator Door, and Fulghum refers to
it as the 'Wollman Test of Reality'.
"It was the summer of 1959. At a resort inn
in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California,
I had a job that combined being the night
desk clerk in the lodge and helping with the
horse-wrangling at the stables. The
owner-manager was Swiss, with European
notions about conditions of employment. He
and I did not get along. I thought he was a
fascist who wanted peasant employees who
knew their place. I was 22, just out of
college, and pretty free with my opinions.
One week the employees had been served the
same thing for lunch every single day. Two
wieners, a mound of sauerkraut and stale
rolls. To compound insult with injury, the
cost of the meals was deducted from our
paychecks. I was outraged.
On Friday night of that awful week, I was at
my desk job around 11 p.m., and the night
auditor had just come on duty. I went into
the kitchen and saw a note to the chef to
the effect that wieners and sauerkraut were
on the employee menu for two more days.
That tore it. For lack of any better
audience, I unloaded on the night auditor,
Sigmund Wollman.
I declared that I had had it up to here,
that I was going to get a plate of wieners
and sauerkraut and wake up the owner and
throw it at him. Nobody was going to make me
eat wieners and sauerkraut for a whole week
and make me pay for it and this was
un-American and I didn't like wieners and
sauerkraut enough to eat them one day for
God's sake and the whole hotel stunk and I
was packing my bags for Montana where they
never even heard of wieners and sauerkraut
and wouldn't feed that stuff to pigs.
Something like that.
I raved in this way for 20 minutes. My
monologue was delivered at the top of my
lungs, punctuated by blows on the front desk
with a fly swatter, the kicking of chairs
and much profanity.
As I pitched my fit, Sigmund Wollman sat
quietly on his stool, watching me with
sorrowful eyes. Put a bloodhound in a suit
and tie and you have Sigmund Wollman. He had
a good reason to look sorrowful. Survivor of
Auschwitz. Three years. German Jew. Thin,
coughed a lot. He liked being alone at the
night job. It gave him intellectual space,
peace and quiet, and, even more, he could go
into the kitchen and have a snack whenever
he wanted to - all the wieners and
sauerkraut he wished. To him, a feast. More
than that, there was nobody around to tell
him what to do. In Auschwitz he had dreamed
of such a time. The only person he saw at
work was me, the nightly disturber of his
dream. Our shifts overlapped an hour. And
here I was, a one-man war party at full cry.
"Lissen, Fulchum. Lissen me, lissen me. You
know what's wrong with you? It's not wieners
and 'kraut and it's not the boss and it's
not the chef and it's not the job."
"So what's wrong with me?"
"Fulchum, you think you know everything, but
you don't know the difference between an
inconvenience and a problem. If
you break your neck, if you have nothing to
eat, if your house is on fire - then you got
a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy."Learn
to separate the inconveniences from the real
problems. You will live longer. And will not
annoy people like me so much. Good night."
In a gesture combining dismissal and
blessing, he waved me off to bed.
Seldom in my life have I been hit between
the eyes so hard with truth. There in that
late-night darkness of a Sierra Nevada inn,
Sigmund Wollman simultaneously kicked my
butt and opened a window in my mind.
For 30 years now, in times of stress and
strain, when something has me backed against
the wall and I'm ready to do something
really stupid with my anger, a sorrowful
face appears in my mind and asks, "Fulchum.
Problem or inconvenience?"
I think of this as the Wollman Test of
Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the
oatmeal, and lump in the throat, and a lump
in the breast are not the same lump. One
should learn the difference. Good night,
Sig."
The numbers:
There are new hot spots and it is good that
we now have methods to recognize them and
take action. NYC continues to report
improving conditions.
US: 501,615 cases
18,777 deaths 3.7% fatality rate
(up)
Maryland: 7,694 cases
206 deaths 2.67% fatality rate
(up)
Locally, I spoke to the Emergency Department
at HCGH this morning. We are currently very
quiet; we remain ready, able and thankful
that our county continues to get an A+ for
good behavior (staying home!). We are doing
great in our marathon with at least 2 weeks
to go. It reminds me of a sign I saw once
when I was running a long race "it seems
impossible until it's done" (Nelson
Mandela).
Diagnostics and therapeutics:
-
Every day we get more information about
vaccines. A local company, Novavax, released
this promising information.
-
Ivermectin - a drug used for dogs and
humans, is interesting. I found this in
my research this AM: What is unknown to
most people is that an animal study had
already been conducted in early March
using mice and results were promising
while a human study underway in MD
involving 31 has to date yielded
positive result patients. The entity
does not want to make an official public
statement yet nor have the study
findings been made available just yet.
At least another four studies involving
Ivermectin are underway including in
Britain, Cuba and also in two other
South-East Asian countries.
-
More and more information is coming out
about the pathophysiology of the
COVID-19 induced cytokine storm which is
like a snowball rolling down a hill.
This is the situation that leads to
respiratory failure. Here
is an article that explains it.
On a musical note:
And on a lighter note with today being
National Pet Day:
