Hero to goat

Today three of my patients discharged to hospice. Another died in the hospital. I saw one person with a broken arm and dislocated shoulder. Finally back in my element, I was able to help someone; someone who is going to go home, get outpatient therapy, get better, go back to work. This is what I like about trauma and orthopedics – I have useful skills to offer and my patients get better.

It was only a few days ago that hospital workers were being hailed as heroes. Now we are surplus labor. Due to the uncertainties of the novel coronavirus and questionable planning by senior management, I will soon be out of work. The press release said that senior management would take a temporary 20% pay cut, middle management 10%, and hourly workers would see no cut. A nurse manager informed me that the CEO’s salary is $1.7 million. I am unable to verify this. If that is correct, his reduced salary for 8 weeks will be less than $210,000 – how anyone can be expected to live on that, I don’t know. What didn’t make the press release hit the fan the next day – a 33% cut in hours for hourly employees, with a “choice” of how to take the hit. Two and a half weeks without pay in the next eight weeks. (An update referred to this as “non-requested time off”.) (Like everything else COVID-related in the hospital these days, this could be inaccurate by the time you read it.) If my retirement funds hadn’t taken such a hit this winter, it would be Johnny Paycheck time:

One of my co-workers said she came down with “anal glaucoma – I can’t see my ass working here anymore.” The hall monitors asked the usual: “Self-monitoring? Any new symptoms?” I said, “Yes, I’ve come down with new symptoms – a deep disappointment in, and resentment of, senior management.” She checked the list and said that wasn’t on the list of symptoms, so I could go to work. My daughter in law pointed out that this was actually an acute exacerbation of a pre-existing condition – “he’s been presenting with disappointment in and resentment of upper management for quite some time”.

Another Modest Proposal

President Trump announced his desire to study the effect of injecting or ingesting bleach, rubbing alcohol, or other disinfectants to treat COVID-19.

He may be onto something here; he just didn’t think it through all the way. In related news, hundreds of people crowded onto the state capitol grounds in Madison WI (as they have at other state capitols this week) to protest the governor’s “Safer at Home” order and call for the immediate “re-opening” of the state. This seems like a natural population on which to test my hypothesis.

What if, instead of treating COVID-19, we were able to prevent it? My hypothesis is that 100% of people treated prophylactically with injected bleach will not contract COVID-19.

We would first have to test all of the protesters to ensure that no one is already infected. That would rule them out of the study. We could divide the remaining protesters into an experimental group, to be injected with bleach, and a control group, to be injected with normal saline. We would then measure the rate of infection with COVID-19 after 2 weeks and after a month. I hypothesize that none of the experimental group will be found to have COVID-19 on either of those tests. [Editor’s note: the author further hypothesizes that none of this group will live to the first follow-up, and will die of other causes, but that is not the dependent variable we are studying here.] Granted, this is a convenience sample and not necessarily representative of the general population, but some might argue that is actually the beauty of it.

To grandmother, with love

I drink from a cup labeled, “To Grandmother with love”. What’s up with that?

In 1984 I was the new kid in town, relocated from Wisconsin to Northern California. I was the backwoods rube to some and the whiz kid from the promised land to others. To Bonnie, I became “Mom”. (Need I say she was older than I?)

I grew up in Wisconsin and never thought I’d leave. Circumstances in 1983 changed all that. I went to a national conference that fall, resumes in hand, looking for work. I was offered a job as the Maintenance Director of a low-income housing co-op in Santa Clara, California. Seventy nine families jointly owned a sprawling townhouse project, complete with swimming pool. In 1963 someone had convinced HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) that even poor people needed swimming pools in the desert. Among new skills, I learned swimming pool maintenance.

I bought a beat-up 1975 GMC van to move my self and stuff to California. I hadn’t had a car for over 10 years (and even that one I’d only used for a year or so; it mostly sitting parked). Arriving in California, I quickly discovered how attached people were to their cars. Many felt sorry for me. I had planned to move out there and resell the van. It became apparent quickly that it had no resale value and that a car becomes a necessity in a place like that. When the van died, I almost bought a 1962 Jaguar (like that driven by Inspector Morse in the BBC series). Instead I bought a Toyota Corolla.

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1960 Jag/Inspector Morse from Shropshire Star, 1985 Toyota from Mecum Auctions

I was offered a scholarship to attend Co-op Camp Sierra, a training center in the mountains near Shaver Lake. I soon discovered that Wisconsin was seen as the center of the co-op world. We had had a vibrant co-op economy starting in the 1920s, when Finnish immigrants in the northwoods developed their own co-op label products.

Image from Finlandia University

Even the little co-op I had co-founded was known out there. We were seen as the vanguard. As my friend who worked as a management consultant said at the beginning of his seminars, “a consultant is an ordinary person far from home.” I discovered the truth of this in California. Ideas that nobody listened to here were seen as wisdom out there. Crackpot schemes here were paid for there. Folks seem to think that the more they pay for something, the more it is worth. If an employee you’re already paying has an idea, it is of no value. If the same sentiment is echoed by a high-priced consultant, it is now the word of god.

Another consultant friend was charging $250/day for his services. He was subcontracting Bay Area work to me so he could travel less. He decided he wanted to work less, so he raised his rate to $400/day. He had more work than he could handle. If he charged $400/day, he must be good! (Or so folks thought.)

So I got to camp and was soon put to work. From the shy backwoods kid who didn’t know anybody, I suddenly was thrust into the midst of running the camp, and was forced out of my shell. Bonnie, the Camp Manager, made me her Administrative Assistant. That’s fancy talk for what she really called me – “Mom”. My job was to make sure she got everywhere on time, that she had all of her stuff with her (a rolling suitcase on mountain trails isn’t the easiest thing to move around), and that no one stole her cigarette lighter to sell at the camp auction. I failed miserably at that last task one year, when it was I who stole it and ran up the bidding at the auction – as auctioneer and co-conspirator, I planted a few shills.

Bonnie had grown children and one year they gave me the pictured mug at camp to thank me for keeping their mom in line; and that’s how I became a grandmother before I turned 40.

Testifying before the Senate in support of the National Consumer Co-operative Bank Act, Bonnie said, “The co-op is my church.” [From National Consumer Cooperative Bank Act: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions…]

Bonnie died too young. One of the campers had once asked me to nominate her for a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius grant”) for her work at camp and in the co-op community. That’s how much my “daughter” was valued by those around her.

A Modest Proposal (with apologies to J. Swift)

US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has suggested that we keep COVID-19 in perspective: “We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die on the highways”; COVID-19 “isn’t a death sentence except to maybe no more than 3.4% of our population”.

Since 3.4% of our population is not ten thousand but more than ten million people, perhaps he is responding to what he sees as overpopulation. COVID-19 may be his way of thinning the herd, bringing our population down to a more acceptable level. If that is the case, perhaps we could just eliminate, for example, the Dallas and Seattle metropolitan areas with a couple of well-placed large bombs. This would lower the population and eliminate crumbling infrastructure. He may prefer other cities. Let us not quibble over details. Eliminating the entire state of Wisconsin would only get rid of half as many people and, besides, where would folks from Illinois go for vacations?