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I’ll get my booster, but I’ll continue to wear my mask too

I’ll get my booster, but I’ll continue to wear my mask too

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the bivalent COVID booster shots Wedensday – a reformulation split between the orginal mRNA vaccine formula and an updated version targeted to the most recent Omicron variants.

It’s a formulation long overdue. Afterall, Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 swept the world this summer. But it’s a formulation that offers no gauruntees since we don’t know what variant will come next; if it will be in the Omicron line or if it will escape the immunity provided by this booster; the previous vaccines and by previous infections. And that’s why I will continue to wear a good fitting mask that provides fine particle filtration such as an N95 or similar.

I won’t go so far as I did the first two and a half years of this pandemic. You see, I sat out the beginning of COVID as a reporter. In fact, I also sat out most of 2020, 2021 and 2022 from society.

I tend to get sick easily, and despite my strong belief in vaccinations, I don’t have a very good history of seroconversion. It often takes multiple boosters or full repetition of vaccine series for my body to show immunity from a vaccine.

My household took extreme cautions early in 2020 to protect me: good masking beginning in March 2020, isolating me as much as possible, etc.

In the last couple of years, we learned that while my risk for catching COVID isn’t necessarily higher because of my diagnosed disease, Ehlers Danlos, or its associated complications, I am at a higher risk of complications from COVID because of some of my complications such as multi-valvular regurgitation and aortic insufficiency; heritable thoracic aortic aneurysm and dissection (hTAAD); and gastroparesis and micro-deficiencies. Additionally, if I did catch COVID, I am not eligible for the drug Paxlovid due to a drug interaction with my cardiac medications.

My partner and I finally caught COVID in the first days of June 2022. We don’t know where we caught it. It could have been one of several appointments where I was the only masked person in the waiting room. It could have been one of his side gigs where he took off his mask to drink something.

The first day of symptoms I excused as just having an bad day; EDS and its complications can leave me feeling drained sometimes, and joint pains are common.

The second morning, I lost my voice. Vocal cord troubles are something that comes anytime I have a terrible upper respiratory infection. (Remember: connective tissues are everywhere, and if something such as a respiratory infection irritates or inflames my connective tissues such as those involve in my vocal cords, my voice is sure to be affected. I took a rapid antigen test (RAT), and it immediately turned positive. I woke up my partner who also took a RAT and got a positive result.

I phoned my internal medicine doctor, who said he’d need a few hours to figure out exactly how to get me some treatment; in the meantime, if any of my vital signs or symptoms worsened, I needed to get to the emergency room.

By 10 a.m. that day, despite my heart meds, my heart was racing and my blood pressure was sinking. My pain level was rising, and my chest hurt from my rising heart rate. My partner and I knew it was time to take me to the hospital. I grabbed my rapid test and my iPad (to work as my voice) and he drove me to hospital, where he dropped me off at the ER entrance at 11 a.m. not knowing when he would see me again.

When I made it to the nurse check-in desk, I showed my positive RAT, motioned to my chest to indicate chest pain and to my throat and mouth to indicate that I had lost my voice. She checked me in and led me back to a crowded triage area. I was called back, and showed the triage nurse a short SBAR — an old nursing acronym for situation, background, assessment and recommendation — that I had typed up about myself. The nurse took my vital signs, and I was sent for some blood work and an ECG. Then, I was told to go wait in a crowded, mostly unmasked waiting room. I pulled my mask tighter, not wanting to infect anyone.

As I waited hour after hour, my phone would occasionally ring: a nurse checking on me, letting me know they couldn’t have direct contact with me since I had an airborne infection; registration checking me in via phone from a room 10 feet away where they were checking in the other patients, apologizing because of “airborne precautions.” But there I sat, in the packed waiting room, where some patients were forced to stand while they waited.

As I waited, my headache grew worse, and my joints grew to a level of pain I had only felt once before – years earlier when I had been infected with H1N1. I began to wonder if I was finally feverish. I walked up to the front desk and asked the check-in nurse for acetaminophen. She called me a few minutes later and passed a medicine cup and small cup of water through the opening in the glass.

Sometime around 9 p.m., I was finally called back; an isolation room was ready for me. I showed the nurse, followed by the resident, then the attending my SBAR, and offered to type up answers as it was becoming extremely painful for me to try to use my raspy whisper of a voice. The resident asked me if I was certain I had COVID and not streptococcus. I showed the positive COVID RAT and used my remaining voice to explain that I’d had strep throat so many times — four times in a single year once — that I could assure her this was not strep simply by the way it felt. Still, she was unconvinced. She wanted to order a strep test.

Instead, they ordered another RAT and then asked me more about my current conditions. I carefully — my remaining voice barely audible — explained EDS, the cardiac complications and that ivabradine is contraindicated with Paxlovid. I said that my chest hurt and that this happens when my heart races for long periods of time, and I am on ivabradine to try to control inappropriate sinus tachycardia. I suggested that perhaps she or the attended consult with my congenital cardiologist or EDS specialist, either of whom would be happy to help in this situation. I said even my internal medicine doctor would not mind a page at this hour if it meant I get good care. I was told they didn’t need to page anyone because they are the ER.

Finally, after much discussion between the attending and the resident, a course of monoclonal antibodies (MAB) was chosen.

Shortly after midnight, after the shift-change for the doctors, I was given the MAB injections. “You’ll feel better in 3 days or so,” the nurse told me.

By this time, I was in so much pain, I could not sit still on the gurney. I had to pace and move around simply to keep from my joints freezing. The nurse re-checked my blood pressure, heart rate, pulse ox and around 3 a.m., I was released to go home.

When I returned home, I rechecked all my vitals, including my temperature: 103.9. I had already maxed out my acetaminophen for the day, so I cooled myself with a cold shower.

That’s the last thing I remember for about a week.

My partner recalls that there was much of the week where I was so sick that he thought I was dying, but he didn’t want to take me back to the ER because they had released me with a high temp, they didn’t know what to do with me when I was there, and he knew that per my wishes if I was going to die, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be in a hospital without him by my side.

For the first couple of days, he said I didn’t get out of bed at all. For the days after, I only got out of bed for broth. After that, I began trying to be out of bed more, but he tells me, I wasn’t very present.

My memory starts back in the second week of COVID. My partner was on the mend by this point and back to exercising. I was trying to get out by helping him walk the dogs around the block, but it was slow going. Things beyond that are a little spotty.

By the third week, my mind was active, but my body was a little sluggish. My brain was ready and raring to go, but I was still coughing, aching and tired. I was frustrated. My partner told me that I had told him, “As long as I don’t die, end up on a ventilator or get long COVID, the monoclonal antibodies did their jobs.” I don’t remember saying that but I’m fairly smart, so I can believe I said it.

I’m happy to say I survived COVID, and it seems that I have no long-term consequences. But I fear for another infection.

So while I don’t know how protective the new booster will be against any future infection, I do know I will get it because I’m taking the chance that it will help. But I’ll also be wearing a high quality good-fitting mask because I don’t want to struggle to survive COVID again.

It’s more than just a threat

It’s more than just a threat

As a health reporter, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in hospitals.

For the brief time that I practiced nursing, I took many days off my life in the hospital.

And I’ve spent too much time in the hospital as a patient.

When I read this morning about the bomb threat called in not even 24 hours ago on Aug 30 to Boston Children’s Hospital, I reacted viscerally.

The police identified the threat as being just that: a threat. Beyond that, neither the hospital nor law enforcement is saying much other than the investigation is continuing. There is much speculation that because of so much recent maligned attention from TikTok star and social media personality Chaya Raichik who goes by “Libs of TikTok,” conservative talkshow hosts, rightwing bloggers and even conservative Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green to Boston Children’s care for transgender patients, the threat could be retaliation for the hospital’s care for transgender patients.

The bomb threat was called in at 8:05 p.m., at a time when emergency rooms are bustling, night-shift nurses are doing their evening rounds, and families are saying goodnight to their loved ones who have inpatient stays. At Boston Children’s, the clinics are long closed by 8 p.m. and the visiting hours end by 8 p.m., so it was the staff, patients and guardians who were staying with patients overnight who bore the weight of that bomb threat, though I’m certain staff took great pains to put patients and families at ease. Local media reports streets around the hospital were closed off for nearly two hours while law enforcement investigated. Fortunately, no physical threat was found.

First, some facts: Boston Children’s provides trans affirmative care to trans youth under 18. This consists of puberty blockers, a reversible drug option; psychological and psychiatric care, and as the child enters late adolescence discussions on more options such as hormone therapy. The hospital provides genital surgical care for trans patients over 18 and will provide in rare cases consultation for patients 17 years old.

Rumors have swirled as to what kind of diabolical things the hospital might be doing to children, but there is nothing diabolical about saving children’s lives. Gender affirming care is the standard for children under 18 and that includes exactly what is listed above: therapy, allowing the child to come to terms with where they are on the gender spectrum (male, female, nonbinary or gender non-conforming), and providing puberty blockers if necessary. Then, as the child ages into late adolescence and turns 18, providing additional care as necessary: hormones, and top/bottom surgery. Not all trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming people choose hormones or surgery. Some choose one. Some choose both.

Not to minimize this part of Boston Children’s services, but this hospital also provides a spectrum of care from life-saving transplant surgeries to every day to treating cancer to treating childhood sleep disorders to working with children who experience chronic illness.

Still, last night and in the last few months, extremists haven’t cared about any of that. Or about the fact that gender affirming care – such as simply using a child’s proper name instead of their deadname – is life-saving care as studies have shown. Such care reduces suicidal ideation and suicidal behavior among trans youth.

No. Instead extremists have only cared about rumors that doctors are doing nefarious things that I don’t care to repeat here. And that brings us to last night when a place filled with doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists and pharmacists and aides and cooks and janitors all serving the tiniest and most vulnerable in our population was threatened because of one among many clinics they have, because of one type of care they offer among many – in a state where it is perfectly legal in a country where we speak of individual freedoms to live our lives the way we want to live our lives.

As a health reporter, I wonder if perhaps my profession has failed to properly report on what trans affirming care actually includes while allowing conspiracy theorists to let their imaginations run wild.

As a nurse, I’m angry. You threatened healthcare workers. These are my people. You threatened my people.

As a patient whose care team includes a few doctors who practice such specialized care that they see both children and adults, I am heartbroken because I worry: Will their facilities be next?

Mostly, what I want is for this to stop. There is no need for violence or threats. A children’s hospital is a place where the whole team does everything – and I do mean everything – possible to put patients at ease and to save children’s lives. To this staff, every child is a gift, and they will go to all lengths to do what is best for the child. You may not agree with that what or how the hospital does that, and that’s your right as an American. But when people start committing crimes – such as calling in a bomb threat or worse – we’ve crossed a line into into a dark place.

Where do we go from here?

We can save the small-town newspaper

We can save the small-town newspaper

Every time a hometown paper dies, a little piece of me dies too.

Perhaps that sounds a little melodramatic, but I cut my journalistic teeth at small town papers where high school sports can hold up a Friday night deadline, and subscribers read about their family, friends and neighbors.

My first college internship was at the Jackson Citizen Patriot in Jackson, Mich. To the locals, the Cit Pat, a local family-owned paper back then, ended the day like the sunset. You could count on a Cit Pat reporter to be at every Jackson event, whether it be the Hot Air Balloon Jubilee or the Jackson County Fair. Of course we covered the state penitentiary, which sat just north of downtown, the city government and the hospitals, which at the time numbered two to serve what was then a town of more than 36,000 and a county of more than 158,000. The Cit Pat building was at the southwest end of downtown in a beautiful two-story stone building, with the newsroom on the second floor. I don’t know if it’s still there. What I do knows is that now the Cit Pat is owned by MLive, a conglomerate of local Michigan papers owned by Advance Local, which is owned by Advance (owner of Condé Nast and a major shareholder in Charter Communications, Warner Bros. Discovery and Reddit).

My second internship was at the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Times. The H-T took on a shaved-headed college student reporter who had just left college with only a semester to go for a myriad of reasons but was certain she wanted to continue to pursue a career in journalism. That college student was me. In that semester-long features internship, I had the opportunity to join an all-hands-on-deck coverage of an Indiana University campus riot and do a piece that required me to make international calls to a local man who was recently detained in the West Bank for protesting Israeli settlement expansion. At the time, the newspaper was owned by the small communications company Schurz Communication, which started in the latter half of the 1800s with another Indiana paper, the South Bend Tribune. I’d love to tell you Schurz still owns both papers – or at least one of them – but it doesn’t. Somewhere along the way, as Gatehouse and Gannett swallowed up paper after paper, until they merged in 2020, both the H-T and the South Bend Tribune came under Gennett ownership.

In 2004, I landed at the Monroe (Mich.) Evening News as health editor and reporter. I pushed for the four-page health section to be filled by news written in-house instead of pulled from the wire and revamped the monthly section for children, Your Health for Kids. But after a year at the EEOC, the business side of the Monroe Publishing Company no longer saw the need for a health editor to oversee the section. I was offered the open role at the company’s weekly free paper that covered the community of Bedford Township, a growing suburb of Toledo, Ohio. I saw it as a way to step up to larger market media in the future. I unfortunately was running headlong into the Great Recession. Now, The Monroe News is owned by Gannett and runs on a skeleton staff, and Bedford Now is no longer published.

The recent round of layoffs at papers by Gannett, emptying out newsrooms, reignited an idea I’ve been mulling over for a long time: a nationwide network of individual newspapers in each community that works on donations. Think of it as your local public radio station but as a newspaper – or news site since most of us read our newspaper on a screen these days. I call it a “public newspaper.”

The first time I started to think about the concept of a “public newspaper,” I was sitting at a media professionals conference in Seattle.

It was 1998, I think. Maybe 1999. We were in a hotel downtown, maybe a 20-minute walk from the famed Public Market, discussing how the internet would change the future of journalism. Some said it would be the death of the newspaper industry while others said it would bring a resurgence of long-form journalism to newspapers both local and national.

I don’t think anyone had their eye on a nearly two decade-long slump that included venture capitalism firms buying up whatever small-town papers in the Midwest Gannett and Gatehouse Media didn’t buy first, followed by a merger that was used as an excuse for more newsroom cutbacks. No one discussed things like paywalls; declining readership and subscription rates; personals, sales and wanted ads moving to Craigslist; or ad buys dropping significantly and having a whole new rate model on the web.

As I listened to older, wiser editors and reporters conjure the future in their cracked crystal balls, I thought to myself, what if newspapers worked on the same model as public radio: a network of local news radio programing or stations that feed a national news organization, National Public Radio, that then provides national news programing in return – and the whole network works on donations?

Throughout my career as a reporter, as I’ve seen slight ups, big downs and what sometimes seems like the bottom falling out, the idea keeps coming back to me.

Local newspapers are the backbones of communities, and for too long we have seen them bought and sold, downsized then decimated. Every village and hamlet and town and small city should have a local newspaper with a newsroom of reporters who know the local business, the local principals, the local school board members, and the local city council members as well as the know the town elders who have regular seats at the diner and the parents at the playground. Every town has news, and every town needs someone to cover it, whether it’s the Friday night high school basketball game or the town parade.

Trust in our media comes from our local media. The better the local coverage and the more the reporters get to know the community, the more the community trusts the news.

Now imagine all these tiny towns, with their daily or semi-weekly papers, contribute to each other and national reporters contribute to the entire network of local papers. The best part? All the papers are free. You can choose to donate if you like, but you don’t have to pay.

Today, most people read their newspapers on an app or on the web site rather on the newsprint. The Washington Post has an app. The New York Times has an app. The Wall Street Journal has an app. Many newspapers have an app. Even NPR and many local public radio stations have an app for listening, reading, merchandise and more. This would be the way to deliver not only a newspaper in 2022, but also a nationwide network of newspapers – and additionally could be a great way to ask for donations a couple times a year.

Of course, I say all of this with the realization that I know very little about how a donation-driven news service such as public radio actually works as a business. My degrees are in the areas of health and science, not finance, business or management. I can manage a health section and a handful of reporters, but I certainly know (to use a colloquialism) bunk all about running a national network of news sites that run on donations, or about collecting  donations to run those news sites for that matter. Heck, I don’t even know how to build a news site.

What I do know is that of all the papers I interned or worked for full-time, only two are not currently owned by Gannett and even those are running on a skeleton staff at barely the quality of reporting they once did.

Journalism won’t be saved by “citizen journalists,” by venture capitalists buying out small papers and destroying them, or by less news from fewer reporters. Journalism and trust in journalism will only be saved by more professional, well done, strong local news in every town.

Every reporter needs an editor

Every reporter needs an editor

I am teh matter of tyos.

Oof. Let me try that again.

I am the master of typos.

That’s not to say that I don’t proofread my own work. Quite the opposite. I poofread. Make that proofread. And I use spellcheck. And I read it allowed. Correction: that should be aloud.

The problem is that I have a block when it comes to my own writing. I know what I meant to type. My brain is often able to substitute the correction for the mistake in my own writing. And I’m not the only writer who has this problem. This is actually quote — nope, quite — a common phenomenon. As our fingers work quickly on the keyboard, we make typos, but our brains substitute what we meant to write in for the mistake. Even when we go back to edit ourselves, we still see what we intended rather than what we actually typed.

Despite this, I’ve worked as an editor several times, and I’m fantastic at finding the errors in the writing of others. Why? Because it’s not my writing. I don’t know the words they intended to write; I only see what is in front of me on the page, so I can look at it without my brain substituting in the completed or corrected picture.

There’s actually a lot of brain science behind this, and was a much discussed topic in the media in 2014 when psychology researcher Dr. Tom Stafford of The University of Sheffield performed a typing experiment using 19 subjects who could see neither the keyboard nor the screen. He found the subjects slowed down just before they made typos.  In interview after interview — from Wired to Insider, he said over and over again that we can’t see our own typos because we type from a routine, and we know what we intended to say.

It’s essentially based upon the same principles of how we learn to read. First we learn letters; then we learn words. Eventually, we’re told to read a whole sentence for meaning, content and context. So we take a whole sentence at a time, not each individual word. In fact, often times, our brains skip over a word here or there and fill in the “blanks.”

When I took on a self-funded reporting project in 2011, the first thing I did was find an editor. I knew that if I was going to be writing the articles for “The Night Shift Project,” I couldn’t be my own editor. I hired author, journalist and editor Jeff Fleischer to edit the project because I knew that I was going to miss my own typos and my tense disagreements. I wanted a professional to get out the red pen and take a critical eye to my reporting, catch the errant comma and put it in its proper place.

The best newspapers actually have a wool — correction: whole — department within the newsroom set up just to make sure reporters are putting out clean copy. It’s called the copy desk, and it’s made of a special group of people called copy editors who know language, spelling and style guides better than anyone else in the newsroom. These gurus of grammar are the human dictionaries and thesauruses. And they wield a (often digital) red pen with no mercy.

So what does it really take to put out clean copy in a newspaper? It’s a team approach, of course. It’s the reporters who report and write the stories and self-edit; the copy editors who go through the articles letter by letter, word by word; and the editors who go through articles for readability, factuality, etc.

On that note, where’s my red pen? I think I sea a few mitakes in hear.

Leave them kids alone!

Leave them kids alone!

I’m not the voice of my generation, and I’ve never claimed to be.

I’m an anxious 40-something GenXer, and I certainly have no right to speak for anyone but myself. So I only speak for myself – not any other feminists, not my LGBQ+ friends and especially not my trans friends – when I bring up this little news nugget from the salty desert state of Utah: “Utah officials secretly investigated female athlete’s gender.”

Excuse me for a moment while I flash back to several really bad pre-pubescent “pixie” cuts that weren’t so pixie and more just a typical easy walk-in $8 boy’s cuts.

Give me another minute.

Nope, another minute please. I’m thinking about eight grade, where I tried to do an undercut with long asymmetrical bangs in “reverse bob” at the same time that I also tried to go natural with my hair but also maybe sometimes straighten it with a hot comb and it ended up something like a mushroom and a bowl cut had a baby.

Until I grew my hair long for high school, I was often misgendered. Granted, I was never that “girly girl” who loved sparkly things or dolls or frilly dresses, but every time someone thought I was a boy as a child, it made me more certain that I was a girl. Sure I preferred Tinker Toys to Barbie, but when I grew up, I wanted to wear a classy skirt suit or feminine pant suit as I investigated the future Spiro Agnews and Richard Nixons, not the boring basic brown suit of my male colleagues! I was far more Nina Totenberg than Walter Cronkite! But I digress.

Ok, I’m better.

What scares me of stories like this is how horribly invasive this is to young girls at their most vulnerable time – and when I say girls, I mean all girls, whether they are assigned female or male at birth. Girls in junior and high school are just trying to figure themselves out, who they are, what they are into, how to deal with puberty and all the feelings that come along with it.

In fact, isn’t that what we’re all doing in junior high and high school? We’re dealing with crushes, and pimples, and hormones, and hairs in really weird places. We’re learning to like music that our parents really hate. And maybe if we could stop a minute and remember that feeling that we all went through, then no one would file complaints that would then land others’ minor children in investigations that are questionably legal.

Moreover, I worry about states that have proposed checking the genitals of minor girls to assure that transgender children aren’t playing sports. In states like Ohio, where this has actually been discussed – even as the largest university still pays out settlements because of a former team doctor sexually assaulted young athletes – I am appalled that people are taking things this far.

These are children! For the most part, these are games that are intended to teach them teamwork and cooperation and the meaning of competition! Only a handful will earn college scholarships, and only a tiny percentage of those children will go on to a higher level of competition such as the Olympics or professional athletics. Get over it.

Here’s my advice, and it’s unsolicited and free: Stop. Just stop. Stop putting so much pressure on your kids that they accuse their teammates or competitors of cheating. Stop invading the privacy of girls – cis or trans. And that goes for boys too.

Here’s more advice: Let’s start being supportive of children. Let’s start talking about how we can best support our preteens and teens. Let’s start talking to our teens. Let’s give them a welcoming environment, especially at a time when teen suicide rates are on the rise (according to the CDC and other experts).

Stop worrying about who wins the damn race, and let’s make sure all the kids finish and finish well.

But like I said, I’m not the voice of my generation, nor do I speak for anyone else.