I’ve been watching the film clips of the flooding in Nepal with fascination. This son of an oceanographer has always had a healthy respect for the power of water. It can eat away cliffs, create deep canyons, carry boulders far from their origin. Our lives on this planet, nearly three quarters of which is covered in water, are continually shaped by where water is and isn’t. The geography that the movement of water has sculpted across land masses. The constant changes in weather patterns caused by the movement of water through the hydrologic cycle that produces storms and rain. Even our bodies remain those of water creatures with a heart pumping salt water through our vital organs and our kidneys regulating that balance of water and salt keeping our cells, the descendents of unicellular sea creatures, happy and productive.
What caused the disaster? Sudden glacial collapse down a steep mountainside which suddenly displaced millions of cubic feet of water out of glacial lake and into a nearby streambed. Gravity did the rest. At least some of the collapse was due to global warming and climate change and we’re likely to see more of these sorts of events in the future. Can it happen here? Of course it can and it has. Look up the Missoula Floods which shaped much of what is now Northern Idaho, Eastern Washington, and Central Oregon. We’ve even had manmade catastrophes such as The Johnstown Flood. The rather shoddy state of our infrastructure makes it only a matter of time before we have a dam failure somewhere helped along by either excess rainfall or seismic activity. I don’t know where the Amrican image as indelible as that of the Chinese/Nepal border crossing that was swiftly overcome by a deluge, scraping the area of everything down to bedrock is going to be. I just know that it’s out there somewhere awaiting us at some future date.
There are other less showy disasters of course. It’s been a while since I gave an update on covid but it has not and is not going away. Cases are on the rise throughout the US and, if it keeps to the pattern it’s shown the last few years, it will kill somewhere between 35,000 and 50,000 Americans over the winter cold and covid and flu season. It’s fallen out of the top ten causes of death but it’s still significant, running neck and neck with the flu. Covid causes about 1.5% of deaths and flu about 1.7%. Flu is deadlier as there are many more cases. Covid has a higher chance of killing you if you get it.
Keeping your vaccination status up to date remains the best protection short of isolation away from possible sources of infection. There is a new covid vaccine updated for the newer ciruclating strains such as XFG but you can’t get it yet. The FDA finally gave its approval for its use (long delayed for various political reasons) this past week and it will take a few more weeks for it to make its way through distribution channels to clinics and pharmacies. It should be easily available as of mid-September. Should you get one? If you have an immune problem, respiratory problems, or are getting older, it’s not a bad idea. I’m getting one because the data continue to show a consistent benefit in terms of preventing serious complications such as hospitalization and death and it significantly decreases the chance of long covid following an infection (and you can develop long covid after even mild disease). There are about 10 million cases of long covid in the US at the moment and their medical needs are one of the reasons why its so impossible to get a timely appointment with certain kinds of specialists these days. For those of you who remain dubious about the vaccine due to risks of side effects such as myocarditis, a recent meta-analysis in JAMA showed that cases of myocarditis were significantly higher in unvaccinated populations (due to the effects of the disease) than in vaccinated populations. I no longer argue with people about vaccines. I do my own research (which I’m pretty good at given thirteen years of higher education including medical school).
The news out of Washington DC this week is that the administration is busy uprooting the cherry trees on the Potomac in order to make room for a golf course that the president wishes to be built. Add that to the reflecting pool, the East Wing of the White House, the South Lawn, the Rose Garden, Lafayette Park, and the Kennedy Center in terms of mishandling of public property. I remain mystified at how the enablers, on both sides of the aisle – those with power to actually do something who either encourage bad behavior or wring their hands in public before abetting such behavior in private to keep their campaign dollars flowing are ultimately going to end up justifying their actions. There will be an accounting. I hope I am alive to see it.
I’ve been offered a role in a play that rehearses and performs late September/early October. I don’t know much about it yet but I think it’s a glorified cameo that will require little effort. It should keep me from becoming too bored before I head off on my next major travel trek in mid October. Still nothing penciled in after the first of the year other than opera chorus for Rigoletto in late April. Gonna get my Vendetta and Zitti Zittis ready. And if I’m going to talk about performing, I guess I have to mention Tim Curry who left us this past week at age 80. I’m of the Rocky Horror generation. The movie came out when I was in Middle School and became a midnight movie cultural phenomenon when I was in High School. I remember my first foray to it – It was after a Halloween party at Maren Beck‘s house and a bunch of us headed out to the Neptune Theatre and joined the line waiting to get in. I wasn’t sure what to expect but Tim Curry’s gleeful gender bending over the top performance made an enormous impression on my adolescent brain. I went back many more times during the next few years, even seeing a screening in NYC hosted by Sal Piro who started the phenomenon. I always had a fondness for Tim Curry in his later roles as he brought just an anarchic brio to everything he did from the butler in Clue to Pennywise to Long John Silver.
Monday marks the beginning of the six month count down until I retire from UAB Geriatrics Clinic. It’s becoming real. I’m not sure how to feel about that. I’ve been working in ambulatory clinics since 1984 and at UAB geriatrics since 1998. What a long strange trip it’s been
Life, The Universe, and Everything 