We have survived the winter. Here in Denver, it snowed off and on in February and got bitterly cold. In early March, the sun finally emerged. The temperatures warmed up and the spring flowers decided to come up.  We survived not just the weather, but also the COVID-19 surge that started in late autumn 2021.… Continue reading Call of the wild: Returning to travel

After a 12-day odyssey of my husband being sick with symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 and being unable to access the most accurate testing for COVID-19, I posted my last blog borne out of frustration. The next day,  I read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on Rapid Diagnostic Testing for SARS-CoV-2. An updated… Continue reading When should you get a COVID-19 test?

My husband got sick on January 6, 2022. He is 71 years old. He has been triple-vaccinated. His health is good. He does not leave the house a whole lot. We are unaware of any possible exposures to COVID-19, but we worry.  This has been quite a roller coaster over the last 12 days. On… Continue reading Is it Omicron variant or a cold?

During the past two years, I have had enough time on my hands to read books and to watch moves. I have naturally drifted towards stories about pandemic as we go through the COVID-19 pandemic in real time. Here is a summary review of two books and three movies about pandemics.  A frequent theme is a… Continue reading Blame it on the mad scientist: Pandemic books and movies

The following is a tour of  “doctor speak” – the terms that doctors routinely use. Often, doctor language is obscure. Sometimes the obscurity is intentional. See the expression “surgical misadventure” Sometimes the obscurity is hard-baked into medicine, as the profession continues to use Greek and Latin names for body parts and for diseases. Finally, doctor… Continue reading How to speak like a doctor

"Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History" by Peter Furtado examines pandemics through the ages.

Last month, I took the train from Denver to Emeryville, Calif. The trip was quite an experience, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. My husband and I are retired. We have been waiting for an opportunity to take a trip out to California to visit our son in Berkeley. At one point, California restricted travel. Once… Continue reading California Zephyr train crosses the West

Last weekend, I took a  trip with my daughter and grandkids to see Aspen trees turn yellow in Frisco, Colo. We’ve taken this trip several other times with good success. The trick is to go at the beginning of October before the first frost, before the leaves fall, before one is left with stands of… Continue reading Frisco Trip – Stray Thoughts and Anxieties

The newspaper tells me we are again in a surge of COVID19; that the ICU’s are perilously full-up, that we may yet need to return to mandatory masking and social distancing. That the numbers, here in Denver, are as high as they were during the height of the winter surge last December. Yet when we… Continue reading Cognitive Dissonance

I started writing this memoir a few years ago, once I moved to Denver and had more time on my hands. I felt driven to write down some of the stories I heard when I was a doctor in a small town in Kentucky. Some of the patients I took care of left a deep… Continue reading A Yankee Doctor In the Bible Belt: A Memoir