Showing 1 - 10 of 13 annotations tagged with the keyword "COVID-19"

Stuck

Larson, Heidi J.

Last Updated: Sep-20-2022
Annotated by:
Coulehan, Jack

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Medical Anthropology

Summary:

Stuck was published shortly before the Covid pandemic when the American vaccine wars, with all their hostility, misinformation, and political baggage, lay more than a year in the future. In Stuck, Heidi J. Larson, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, approaches vaccine rejection as a complex moral and cultural phenomenon, rather than as a simple issue of ignorance or a marginal point-of-view. In a sense, anti-vaccine rumors are the tip of an iceberg, reflecting and perpetuated by deep underlying concerns, like perceived threats to personal or cultural values, distrust of government, misperception of risks and benefits, or a combination of these. The claim that compulsory immunization violates personal freedom is especially prominent today.  

Rumor is a major source of vaccine rejection. The author discusses in detail the case of Andrew Wakefield and his contention that MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine causes autism. This belief, based on a 1998 paper in The Lancet (later retracted) has been shown to be false by numerous large-scale studies, but is accepted by perhaps millions of people throughout the world.  

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Summary:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of curators and clinicians from the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Slought Foundation, and Penn Medicine started the Rx/Museum project with the goal of creating an online medical humanities experience to support healthcare providers. The project championed the role of art in the training and wellbeing of clinicians, and aimed to foster connection, reflection, and humanistic learning during a time of immense trauma and isolation. Rx/Museum began as a series of essays that were originally emailed on a weekly basis from July 2020 to June 2021. These 52 essays were later published together in a book.

The Rx/Museum book features a foreword and afterword by the editors describing the philosophy of the project and explaining the importance of art in medical education, along with the 52 essays published in chronological order. Each essay focuses on an individual artwork including paintings, photographs, and film stills. The essays are structured in a uniform manner, starting with a thematic quote, followed by a description of the artwork that provides an historical context and highlights visual features, then a print of the artwork, and finally a series of reflections which connect the artwork with issues in healthcare.

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My Borrowed Face

Nigliazzo, Stacy

Last Updated: Jun-06-2022
Annotated by:
Davis, Cortney

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Summary:

"My Borrowed Face," Stacy Nigliazzo's third full-length poetry collection, contains 55 poems, presented as a continuous flow without division into sections. Once again, Nigliazzo's poems are spare, often only phrases or words scattered on the white page, a form that leads the reader's eye from one image to the next. (For a brief discussion of how this poet uses white space, see the annotation of her second collection, “Sky the Oar” on this database.)  The poems in this collection were written during the Covid pandemic; they speak of the toll the virus has taken and continues to take not only on patients but, in these poems, on the caregivers--specifically the poet.  Nigliazzo, an emergency room nurse who has worked through five pandemic surges, is the perfect narrator to take us along on her rounds.

The book's early poems look back before the pandemic ("5920 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 11) and then they come closer ("30 Days Pre-Pandemic," p. 12), until they begin to chart, with stark imagery, the beginning and the continuation of the pandemic.  We walk with the poet / nurse as she ticks off the days from "First Sunday on the Ward, Pandemic," p. 15, through "575 Days Out," p. 41. 

The 16 poems that close the book are a rest, in a sense, from the pandemic.  These poems are individual reflections, like quick photographs, that capture a variety of observations both personal and professional. "Self-Portrait as the Pink Moon," p. 42, and "Blue Book," p. 43, hark back first to Nigliazzo's mother, pregnant with the poet, then to her mother's death.  In a way, circling this collection back to the beginning, birth and death, the never ending turning.

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The First Wave

Heineman, Matthew

Last Updated: Apr-18-2022
Annotated by:
Bruell , Lucy

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

First Wave documents the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic at Long Island Jewish Medical Center (LIJ) in New York from March through June of 2020.  It opens with a graphic scene of a rapid response team trying to save a patient with COVID whose heart has stopped.  Despite their efforts, the patient dies.  After the team pauses for a minute of silence at the bedside, the grueling work of saving lives continues. 

The film follows Dr. Nathalie Dougé, an internist who was born in the Bronx to Haitian parents. Most of her patients are Black, Hispanic or immigrant.  Two patients with COVID are essential workers: Brussels Jabon, a Filipino nurse who undergoes an emergency C-section after she is brought to the emergency room, and Ahmed Ellis, a school safety officer with the NYPD.  Both have young children and supportive families.

Nurses hold up IPads so families can Facetime with the patients.  It’s terrifying and sad for the families to see the patients on screen and not to be present when they are needed the most. It’s emotionally difficult for the healthcare team as well who are the only ones to hold a patient’s hand during these encounters.  One nurse describes the effect of holding the phone while family members have five minutes to Facetime with patients, “You become the family member, and it seems like you’re losing your family.”

The emotional toll of losing so many patients, while fearing that they too may contract the virus and bring it home to their own families, weighs heavily on the healthcare teams.  They are trained to compartmentalize, to separate work from personal life but their empathetic response to their patients follows them home.  “I think about him every night when I go home,” nurse Kelli Wunsch says of Ahmed. “I just want him to do well.”

Scene after scene of teams rushing to resuscitate a patient who has coded are interspersed with more hopeful moments of a reunion between husband and wife, the sound of the song “Here Comes the Sun” when a patient is taken off the ventilator, and the cheerful encouragement of a physical therapist working to help a patient regain enough strength and mobility to be discharged. At times the camera moves outside the confines of the hospital to the outside world:  Dr. Dougé alone at home with her dog celebrating her birthday with friends over zoom, eerily empty streets during the lockdown, and families anxiously awaiting news from the hospital.  We see bodies taken to refrigerated trucks and people cheering the health workers at 7pm from windows across the city.

In May, when protests erupt following George Floyd’s murder, Dr. Dougé, joins the protest with other frontline workers carrying a sign, “Racism is a Public Health Issue” and ”I Can’t Breathe” scrawled on her surgical mask.  Amid the “I Can’t Breathe” cries of the protestors, she relives the myriad times she has heard her patients gasping those words to her just before they are placed on ventilators. 

Both Brussel and Ahmed become stable enough to be taken off the ventilator and released from the hospital to return home to their families.  Despite their recovery from the acute phase of the illness, it is clear their health remains severely compromised.  As the cheers of the staff in the hospital lobby fade, tough work lies ahead for these patients and their families.    

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Fauci

Hoffman, John; Tobias, Janet

Last Updated: Mar-14-2022
Annotated by:
Yin, Ellen
Salman, Akbar

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video — Secondary Category: Performing Arts /

Genre: Film

Summary:

“The Jesuit philosophy is ‘Men for Others,’” states Dr. Fauci, the titular subject of the documentary Fauci, as he explains how his public school experiences informed his medical career. Indeed, it sets the tone for the rest of a film that traces the beginning of Dr. Fauci’s career as an infectious disease physician through to his role in the creation of PEPFAR, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and his present day responsibilities in the current pandemic. The documentary bounces primarily between the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In both, we see that Dr. Fauci stands as a figure of great controversy, and we are shown his thought process in navigating the court of public opinion.

The film starts off interviewing Dr. Fauci about his childhood in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn where he was exposed to the Jesuit philosophy that would dovetail with his choice to go into public health service when he was drafted into the Vietnam War. Though he began his medical career with aspirations for a private practice on Park Avenue, Dr. Fauci realized that his true calling lay in “trying to figure out diseases that people were dying from” at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases where he soon faced one of the greatest public health challenges of the 1980s – piecing together a way to combat a mysterious new disease that was killing more and more Americans. 

This, of course, sounds very familiar to the intended audience of the documentary. It is a parallel that Dr. Fauci himself is well aware of, stating that COVID-19 feels like a “diabolical repeat” of his experiences in the 1980s but that “the difference is [the] divisiveness dominating COVID-19 . . . we’re going to get through it in spite of this divisiveness and this politicization. We’re not going to get through it because of it.” The film leans heavily into this contrast, showcasing the evolving attitudes of many AIDS activists as Dr. Fauci went from “the enemy” to a man sitting in on ACT UP meetings and engaging in a dialogue that would culminate in a historic address at the 1990 International AIDS Conference – an address that highlighted the need for physician-scientists to incorporate the feedback of the individuals they were trying to help and reminded activists of the compassion that physician-scientists have for their patients. 

In the scenes taking place in 2020, we see an explosion of both positive and negative press coverage of Dr. Fauci as the COVID pandemic kicks into high gear. His inconsistencies regarding mask guidance, his direct challenging of President Trump, and his struggle to deal with increasing death threats against himself and his family are put on full display. The documentary does not shy away from showcasing Dr. Fauci’s vulnerability with multiple instances of a tearful Fauci recounting the deterioration of many of his AIDS patients and the “post-traumatic stress” that those experiences induced. These moments of vulnerability are threaded in with images of and commentary from his wife Christine Grady and his daughter Jennifer, a clear attempt to give us a sense of Anthony Fauci the human being and not just Dr. Fauci the public servant. 

As the film draws to a close, Fauci and his wife take a walk through the COVID-19 Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC. “When you're involved in a race to stop a horrible disease, you always feel like you’re not doing things quickly enough, or well enough,” he reflects. “One of the most mysterious aspects of our universe is how viruses have transformed our civilization . . . And the one thing I can hope for . . . is that emerging infections do not inevitably become pandemics . . . I am optimistic that the lessons that we’ve learned will prevent that from happening.” After watching this documentary, it is an optimism that is easy to share. 

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Daughter

Davis, Cortney

Last Updated: Jan-17-2022
Annotated by:
Shafer, Audrey

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Davis, a nurse practitioner, chronicles her daughter’s life, illness and death at age 54 from cancer. The book consists of three sections, with poems unevenly divided such that of the 30 poems, only one rests in section II. Titled Windmill, this poem forms a fulcrum between the relationship of mother and daughter to one of mother and ill daughter. The windmill is a small gift from her daughter – a reminder of Kansas where the daughter, her husband and children live, thousands of miles from Davis. The collection begins with her ‘soon-to-be born daughter’ (page 15) and ends with The Sacrament of Time, dated months before her daughter’s death from, at this point, a widely metastatic breast cancer. The final poem holds within it an entire world – the birth of the daughter, the fraught frantic mother-to-be pleading for help, the birth of a healthy baby girl, the wonder of the new addition to their family, the travel with the newborn to home, and a reflection on what poems can and cannot do. “Poems cannot // save us, Amichai said, but all I have are these poems” (page 58).  

If the first section details the many ways unconditional love for a child unfolds, through wonders of babyhood, delights of childhood, the harsh lessons of adolescence, and the successful launch, the final section underscores how deep that love runs. As the cancer illness progressed during the pandemic, issues of separation became more acute. Davis marks the numbers affected (illness and death) by coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) during the pandemic, as her poems follow her daughter’s cancer. These numbers, along with brief quotations from her daughter’s scans and reports, lend a contrast to the evocative imagery and experience of illness in a loved one. Medical mistakes are chronicled as well (see What a Terrible Mistake).  

The collection is dedicated to Davis’ daughter and her daughter’s children. Even the title, Daughter, calls to her, as if addressing her daughter directly. The title also serves to universalize the parenting of a daughter, even as the particulars of this family are detailed.

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Pandemic Haiku

Bordowitz, Gregg

Last Updated: Dec-06-2021
Annotated by:
Zander, Devon

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Collection (Poems)

Summary:

Pandemic Haiku is a collection of 52 haiku poems written by Gregg Bordowitz during the COVID-19 pandemic.  In this collection, he attempts to encapsulate some of what his experience was like during the events of 2020 in the traditional 5-7-5 syllable format.  

Bordowitz is best known as an artist and activist devoted to documenting the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic.  His voice in this collection is amplified by his long-term work devoted to understanding contagion, illness, and identity, and he uses the reflections formulated over his three-decade career to inform how to process, survive, and reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Joji

Pothan, Dileesh

Last Updated: Jun-13-2021
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

“Grandpa is in quarantine,” Popy tells the delivery man through his face mask in the opening scene. His grandfather was not in quarantine; Popy had ordered an air gun using his account and now needed to conceal it from him. But, because the movie is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, the delivery man could easily believe Popy’s story and hands over the package with the gun.  

Popy is a teenager living in a multigenerational household in India, which in addition to his grandfather, Kuttappan PK Panachel, includes his father, Jomon, two uncles, Jaison and Joji, and Jaison’s wife, Bincy. They live on a sprawling and prosperous plantation Kuttappan owns near Kerala. Imperious and parsimonious, Kuttappan keeps tight control over his domain and family. As the movie begins, we see cracks forming in the family from the continuous pressure he exerts. The pressure affects Joji most.

Though he dropped out of an engineering college, Joji seeks wealth and independence, but his attempts to attain riches yield little until Kuttappan suffers a stroke. From the time of his father’s struggle for survival until his death, Joji plots to hasten his father’s demise and secure the family fortune for himself. Lives are lost, and so are Joji’s aspirations. 

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Annotated by:
Clark, Mark

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Memoir

Summary:

The title of this memoir derives from the Native American custom of bending a tree’s growth in order to indicate a direction of safe passage.  The custom represents a reverent cooperation with nature through which a compassionate communication is accomplished: a message to other journeying souls as to how they might find a way to their flourishing.  The title is exquisitely apt for this memoir, which echoes the gesture of the arrow tree, testifying to a safe passage through the wilderness of COVID.  The author, a first-rate, published Victorian scholar, contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 upon her return from a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, which was cut short as a result of the pandemic. 

Weliver has suffered from symptoms ever since: hers is the experience of living with long COVID.  The condition warrants her taking a leave from her university, and she returns to her childhood home of Interlochen, in northern Michigan.  Her living in and engaging with the natural world there encourages her to undertake meditations about that world and her place in it as she lives with her illness.  The writing—the foundational means of her healing—inclines her, crucially, to think with the stories of the Odawa (Ottawa) and the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Anishinaabek ("Original Man") of the region, which she researches as a means of deepening her understanding of her home, her origins, and the nature of her identity.  Her quest for understanding turns not only to these stories, but to an integration of them with the wisdom of other guides in her life: authors of the Romantic and Victorian periods, poets and thinkers of Taoism and other ancient Eastern philosophies, mentors in her rich journey of studying both literature and music (she attended Interlochen Center for the Arts, Oberlin, where she double-degreed in English Literature and Voice (Music), Cambridge, and the University of Sussex), and her own family, particularly her mother.  Her prose is accessible and welcoming, not at all the erudite sort one might anticipate from a reputable scholar: it invites curiosity and encourages insight that is, at times, breathtaking and joyous.  This “arrow tree” memoir points its readers in the direction of a safe passage to the home of our natural world, where, in finding union with that world, we may experience healing not only from COVID but from habits of the heart that have left us more broken than we know.

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Annotated by:
Zander, Devon

Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

Genre: Treatise

Summary:

Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds is Paul Farmer’s latest work exploring the connection between health and the social and historical structures that surround it.  Focusing on how and why Ebola spread in West Africa in 2014, the book is difficult to categorize — it is not only temporally expansive, ranging from the late 15th century to the present day, but it also combines elements of a memoir, an anthropological treatise, and an abbreviated historical text with powerful calls to action in over 500 pages.   

Stemming partially from a desire to fulfill a “personal penance for inaction” during the early days of the outbreak, Farmer chooses to learn about Ebola from “the personal histories of the Ebola dead, of survivors, and of their caregivers.”  Harking back to his days as a college anthropology major, many of the book’s themes, embodied in its title, are introduced via these in-depth interviews.  His two main subjects, Ibrahim and Yabom, are Ebola survivors who, after initially recovering from their illness, make it their work to support other Ebola survivors.  Through their words and narratives, we witness some of what it was like to experience the civil strife that predated the outbreak, see how Ebola expanded from isolated cases to clusters and communities, how family members sick with the disease were cared for, what it meant to survive Ebola, and now what it means to live with its sequelae.  Translation for Farmer was provided by Dr. Bailor Barrie, one of his former students, whose story as a medical student in Sierra Leone during its civil war soon becomes part of the narrative, as well.  Through the words of these three people, pieced together over many extensive conversations, a narrative is developed, allowing those most impacted by Ebola to tell its story. 

Farmer interweaves his first-person perspective with their stories, emphasizing his role in 2014 and how Partners in Health became involved in assisting in the outbreak.  While working in West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, late one night, Farmer mixes up Liberia and Sierra Leone.  Realizing how different their histories are, he vows to “make amends for my ignorance” and transitions from storytelling on the personal level to history-telling on the country level.  To ensure that he, and we, never mix them up again, Farmer traces the histories of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea in four chapters.  During this section, he refers back to the book’s title, taking on the effects of the rise of imperialism, colonization, the use of sanitation/Pasteurian principles, the impact of resource extraction, and much more on each of these nation’s stories and relationships with Ebola.  As he describes it, “if you want to understand the magnitude and dynamics of this Ebola epidemic, in other words, think in terms of fevers, feuds, and diamonds.” 

Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds is bookended with reflections on COVID-19 in the introduction and epilogue.  In the introduction, he reflects on the book’s “obvious implications for our response to COVID-19” and how COVID-19, though different in many ways, shares certain similarities with Ebola — among them, the speculative nature of its origins and the fact that it is a zoonosis.  Most importantly, according to Farmer, treating and managing it will require understanding many of the same “cultural complexities and... challenges” that treating Ebola required.  After taking us on a journey through West Africa and up to 2014, Farmer writes an epilogue reflecting on how the central crisis of Ebola was the prioritization of “containment over care” whereas COVID-19 has become a crisis of containment.  To him, writing this on April 10th, 2020, and to the reader reading it a year later, COVID-19 is seen as partially a disease of healthcare workers’ exposure, and partially a disease of social inequity, but completely a disease whose management, treatment, and eventual control will be defined by the “staff and stuff and spaces and systems” in place and who has access to them.  Even with this pandemic at the forefront of our minds, Farmer reminds us that Ebola should not be off our radar just because a new disease is on it— there continue to be outbreaks of Ebola in the Congo.  Ultimately, Farmer’s words leave you thinking — about this pandemic, about the past, and about the connections between them.  If only to prompt more thought, one of Farmer’s last comments is also his most powerful: “If there’s indeed a lesson to be learned from Ebola, it may be this one:  for everything we do, or say, in pandemic time, let’s keep asking the same question.  Might this help?







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