Tag Archives: RDP

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Under the weather

It is November and in the Pacific Northwest it’s hard not to feel under the weather because the clouds are right over our heads. Or some mornings I open the door and my house is in the cloud. In the weather. Is that a saying too? In the hurricane, in the cyclone, in a storm. Some days I feel like I can reach up and touch the underside of the low hanging cloud. Some days it feels heavy, but others it feels safe. Hiding, hidden, invisible.

For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: under the weather.

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apparition

We are fishing and playing a little and then we hear something. I stick my head up. Dad does too, and my sisters. What is it? It is making noises! There, on the beach. Something roaring in two tones!

There are two. The smaller one is doing most of the roaring. It is weird. Two tones, a low growly one and a higher one that sings.

It is creepy, that smaller one. I think it sees us. It has a mechanical eye. Dad says, “Dive.” We talk under water. Maybe it is trying to steal our souls or lure us to death on the beach.

We do have to come up for air though. Now they both roar. Dad barks: “STOP” and what do the horrors do? They try to imitate him! Are they making fun of him?

Now the smaller one is just making high song noises. Sort of like a creepy bird. It keeps going back to the double growl, though.

Dad says, “Come on.” We dive and head the other way along the beach. The appartitions are picking up things from the beach. I am very glad they didn’t get us. This time.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: apparition.

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Covid-19: working in healthcare

So, should healthcare workers be required to have Covid-19 vaccines?

Yes.

What is the precedent?

Take tuberculosis, for example. Airborne, very contagious. I was born in a Knoxville, Tennessee tuberculosis sanatorium, because my mother coughed blood a month before she was due and got quarantined for active tuberculosis. Yes, the state could quarantine my mother. I was removed immediately at birth because tuberculosis doesn’t cross the placenta. The antibodies do, but the infection doesn’t. However, newborns usually catch it and die very quickly. I was lucky. My father and grandparents took care of me for 5 months. Then my mother was allowed out (after 6 months total) but was not strong enough to take care of me. So I was taken to my maternal grandparents for the next four months, and did not touch my mother until I was 9 months old.

My mother was taking 36 pills a day at home, because you have to use multiple drugs to kill tuberculosis. It develops drug resistance very very quickly.

Well, so what, you say?

Healthcare workers in the United States are routinely checked with a ppd for tuberculosis. If it is positive, you cannot work until further testing. If you have latent tuberculosis, you are treated. If you have active tuberculosis, the treatment is longer and more complicated, here: https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/infectioncontrol/default.htm

My cousin then said, “Well, you don’t have to show the tuberculosis test to go in a restaurant!”

Well, not right NOW, because currently tuberculosis is under more or less reasonable control in the US. Remember that guy who came in to the US with active multi drug resistant tuberculosis and knowingly exposed everyone on that airplane? Great. I remember reading about that and thinking what a selfish jerk he was. And then the group of unimmunized people who went to India and all got measles. The US at that time did not bar anyone from returning, but asked them to finish a 3 week quarentine before returning to the US. One person did not do that. There was a measles outbreak in the midwest which cost the CDC (and therefore you and me because those is tax dollars) millions to trace, quarantine and clean up. So there was discussion at that time about whether the policy should be changed and we should not allow US citizens with known infectious diseases to come in on airplanes. We DON’T allow immigrants in with infectious diseases: they are tested for tuberculosis if coming from countries where it is endemic.

So, if we had a huge outbreak of tuberculosis, we WOULD have quarantines and shut downs.

I have tested a patient for tuberculosis, about two years ago. Her son had been diagnosed with active tuberculosis. We tested her with a blood test and then repeated it in three months. Negative, hooray. In residency I also saw a case of miliary tuberculosis. That is where the tuberculosis is growing so well in the lungs that it looks like little grains of rice in the lungs on imaging. Not a good thing.

My cousin: “You shouldn’t have to put something in your body to work.”

If you have tuberculosis, you do not get to work in healthcare, because you can kill your patients. I think that this is a good thing, to not kill our patients.

I am submitting this to the Ragtag Daily Prompt: starspangled. Keep America Healthy, how about that?

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Straddle this place

Straddle this place, where we look at history again and again, admit horror and mistakes and cruelty, and work together to build a future.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2021: Reflecting on Indigenous leadership in labor

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: straddle.

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Thank you for the music

I have been in Rainshadow Chorale since 2000. My father, Malcolm Ottaway, was one of the eight people who started it in 1997. He and my mother moved here in 1996. My mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, died of ovarian cancer on May 15, 2000. Rainshadow agreed to sing a Byrd Mass for my mother’s memorial. My father asked if my sister and I could sing in the chorale for the memorial. We were told yes. I had moved to Port Townsend at the end of 1999.

After the Memorial, I asked if I could stay in the chorale. The answer was yes and I have been in it ever since.

Our director, Rebecca Rottsolk, is retiring from the chorale after our next concert. She has picked favorite pieces. I have sung in nearly every concert since 2000, though I couldn’t sing in the one right after my father died in 2013. He followed my sister, who died in 2012. My throat wouldn’t let me sing that one.

So Rebecca, thank you for the music and thank you for being a wonderful director and forcing us to level up over and over. I am sending you peace and love and joy.

And everyone else, put this concert on your calendar.

Rainshadow Chorale practicing outdoors wearing masks in a fine rain. Dedication.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: thanks.