My next theatrical endeavor is a play entitled ‘Love Scenes’ which is being rehearsed in a week and then performed for a four day run. It’s a half dozen two person scenes about love and relationships with a surrounding frame based on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Because no one has more than about fifteen minutes of stage time and it’s two person dialogue, it should be easy to learn and come together relatively quickly. I’ve started on lines this weekend and, as most of mine are one or two words long, it’s just a matter with responding with the right word to keep things on track. I’ll have more to say about this project as it develops. The weekend after this, I’m off to NYC for a long theater weekend with a friend, and then come back to do a concert of opera’s greatest hits entitled ‘Opera Unveiled’ where the Opera Birmingham chorus is singing Libiamo from La Traviata, the Habanera from Carmen, and the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore. I’ve sung all of them before so it shouldn’t be too difficult. And then it’s into rehearsal for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang so my next few months are pretty much laid out.
I’ve been trying to decide what I’m going to do for my big trip this year. I’m waiting to hear what the damage is going to be at tax time before making any final decisions. I got socked last year as I went up a tax bracket and, if that happens again, it’s going to have to be a cheaper trip and not a private car on the Orient Express. I’ll get hold of my travel agent once I have an approximate budget and we’ll start working it out. It’s going to be sometime between mid September and Halloween if there’s anyone out there who has plans and needs a fairly innocuous travel companion.
As part of my life planning, I made a decision regarding retirement. I am going to retire from the routine practice of clinical medicine summer of 2027. That gives everyone three years to figure out what to do around here if I’m not part of the day to day operations of either the clinic or the house call services. I’m tired and what has happened in the US health system over the last decade has not been good for either my physical or my mental health so I need to have an end game in sight. I’ll be happy to stick around in an emeritus faculty role, helping out with projects, doing some committee work, and providing sage advice to the younger folk but I’ll be able to pick and choose my own schedule and if I want to disappear for a few months here and there, I’ll be able to do it.
So now that everyone’s caught up with my basic life patterns, what shall we talk about? There’s not a whole lot new in Covidland. It’s still out there. It’s still killing people. It’s not going away. The best things we have to fight it these days are common sense and an annual fall booster (with an additional one in the spring for those with serious health conditions or significant frailty). More and more is being published regarding the significant issues with long Covid. Somewhere around 17% of US adults have had long Covid symptoms at some point in the last four years. About 6-7% of US adults have current long Covid symptoms and about 0.5% of US workers have had to leave the workforce due to long Covid symptoms (3/4 of these due to cognitive changes). As the chances of long Covid go up with each subsequent infection,, doing whatever you feel is necessary to keep from acquiring additional infections is generally a wise choice. And I am still waiting for some hidden time bomb to go off in the brains or hearts or lungs or kidneys of previously healthy adults in the next decade or so.
There’s another health issue that’s busy tearing apart local politics here in Alabama and that’s the aftermath of the Alabama supreme court declaring that the clumps of cells used in IVF are people under the law. This decision came about following the Alabama legislature putting forth a state constitutional amendment back in 2018 explicitly defining embryos and fetuses as ‘people’ and the supremes simply took a very expansive reading of the text of that amendment. The state legislature rapidly drafted a law this past month exempting IVF procedures from this so that these programs (popular with both conservative and liberal families trying to work around fertility issues) could continue. Now the state Republicans are busy cannibalizing themselves with the more conservative railing that this work around is damaging to the pro-life movement and should not have been passed and the more moderate trying to keep their appeal with middle of the road voters while fending off attacks from the right. Allowing religious zealotry to write laws covering subjects as complicated as medical procedures was always a bad idea and the whole mess is likely to get a lot worse with time.
And then we have the other bill recently signed banning DEI programs from state funded college campuses and preventing ‘divisive concepts’ from being taught and, for good measure, a ban on people using bathrooms that do not align with the sex on their birth certificate. The majority of the bathrooms in my work areas are unisex and everyone uses them and no one has had an issue. The majority of us were raised in households with unisex bathrooms without ill effect. I just wonder about the people who go peeping and then seek to file a complaint. Actually, I would like to organize a cadre of butch FTM transexuals and have them caravan to Montgomery to go use the ladies lounge while Kay Ivey is in there and see how fast she realizes that law is a huge mistake.
I am on my department’s DEI committee and have been for years. I’ve been committed to the concepts because of things that have happened to me over the years because policies and rules were not fairly applied. I will continue to do that kind of work and, if I get in trouble for it, I’ll just retire a little early and tell my patients (especially the ones with political clout and there are quite a number of them) exactly why and let them take it from there.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 