Mind Your Body

Hi! Ok, what day is it?  Friday?  Star date: March 27, 2020. How's everyone doing? Everyone "coping" ok? Yeah, it's perfectly fine if you're not. But I would prefer if you were, so I'm going to try to help. Before I get into it, it's time for the sakura (cherry blossoms) to spread their beauty in Japan. Unfortunately the traditional gatherings of friends underneath their blooms to meet for food and drink and good cheer (Hanami) is officially canceled due to COVID-19. But, we can still think about the meanings behind sakura and hanami. In Japan the Sakura represents a time of renewal and optimism at the end of winter and start of spring, and remind us that life is short and beautiful. And since life is short and beautiful, no matter what's going on on the CNN news ticker (turn it off....really.....just turn the news off), we should fill it with meaningful time. I'm going to first ask you to accept that shit sucks. It's going to suck f

Me again. This post is going to suck. On March 10, 2020 my gastroenterologist sounded the alarm to me about COVID-19. She told me to stop taking the train to work via a text conversation. I even tweeted about it, how I asked if she was blowing things out of proportion. Clearly she wasn't, but back then I hesitated and thought "what will others think if I do this now?" But I followed her advice. And now look where we are. Today is March 23, 2020. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who work in hospitals. A lot. Whether they're at the hospital I too work at but have the privilege to be "non-essential" and work from home or the people I've connected with at conferences or via Twitter. I know a lot of people in health care all over the world. My gastroenterologist, the one who sounded the alarm, is a close friend. Her husband, the head of pulmonology and intensive care at a major hospital in Chicago. In my own department, we have a video-meetin

Hey! What's going on? Been pretty boring over here in Chicago. Ok I don't need to elaborate on what the hell is going on in the world. We are being bombarded with information - some accurate, a lot inaccurate - about this pandemic. It's very easy to become completely overwhelmed by it all. We've been forced, pretty damn quickly, to completely overhaul our way of life for the greater good. To reduce the strain on our healthcare system of the sick and dying. And us humans are generally bad with rapid, monumental change that we really don't have a lot of say in. Our little reptilian brains do what they're supposed to do (prime us for fight or flight or freeze) but our advanced "thinking" parts of our brain have to interject with all sorts of unhelpful thoughts, thereby sending some of us off the rails. Before we start, turn off the news. Seriously. In the days following 9-11 we found people who consumed more 24-hour news channel information were mor