Portraits in COVID-19

NEW CAP SCAN SERIES: "PORTRAITS IN COVID-19" – PLEASE SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE the changes happening in healthcare and our personal lives due to COVID-19 as experienced by physicians and laypeople. These stories can be about your experiences treating COVIDpositive patients, supporting patients and coping with families during “no visitation,” entering the world of telehealth, concerns about PPE shortages, distancing from your own families, family celebrations by social distancing, newfound time with family, newbie ZOOM meeting experiences worthy of an SNL skit, staycations extraordinaire, or schooling from home. You get the idea. Please try to stay within 800 words, include a photo if it makes sense, and Capital Medical Society is accepting stories for experience. Please send by email to Shannon its Cap Scan magazine from CMS and CMSA Boyle at sboyle@capmed.org. All submissions members as part of a new occasional series are reviewed by the Cap Scan editor prior to called “Portraits in COVID-19,” to capture publication. be mindful of HIPAA, if writing about a patient

TALLAHASSEE NEUROLOGICAL CLINIC

WELCOMES

Matthew Davis, MD, MPH

Neurosurgeon, subspecializing in: • Functional neurosurgery • Epilepsy surgery

The Most Comprehensive Neurosurgical Care in the South Georgia and North Florida Region

1401 Centerville Road Suite 300 | Tallahassee, FL 32308

TNC-Neuro.com | (850) 877-5115

It was eight years ago when Tallahassee Dentist Dr. James Walton realized the frustration of his patients not knowing what medications they were taking and why. He began working on materializing his concept of revolutionizing the way medical information is managed. So, he assembled a team of experts and together, they created a simple to use, secure, and HIPAA compliant software system that allows individuals to control their personal medical information. This solution is aptly named CONTROL Your Health Record ® .

Having your personal medical information with you at all times is a concept supported by all medically related companies and associations. In May of 2019, the Federal Government announced they wanted individuals to take more control over their medical information.

Preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States with as many as 440,000 per year. Dr. Walton’s solution has proven to save lives and reduce medical errors through technology.

In March of 2019, Dean Massey, the company’s president, was admitted to the hospital for a follow-up on his heart stint placement procedure. The surgeon responsible for his care needed to know which medications Dean was taking and was unable to retrieve the information from the hospital’s medical database. So, Dean, using the doctors cell phone, logged into his CONTROL ® account, and the doctor was able to see Dean’s medications and move forward with the procedure.

Another case involved a Georgia high school band member with epilepsy who had a seizure while on a band trip to New York. Because the band director had a CONTROL ® profile for each of the band members, he was able to inform the EMT’s of the young man’s condition and medications. Also, the director was able to forward this information to the hospital ahead of the young man’s arrival, so the medical team was able to provide appropriate care. These actions helped to save the young man’s life.

On another occasion, a man was having dinner in North Carolina when he activated the emergency alert feature on his app. A message was sent to a triage center in Miami which dispatched a locally based EMT team to the restaurant within minutes. This immediate action demonstrates the value of being able to get medical assistance wherever you are within or outside of the United States.

These are just three examples from the hundreds where CONTROL ® has been instrumental in helping to save an individual’s life. CONTROL ® has been beta tested in partnership with American Medical Response in a South Florida retirement community serving 14,000 residents where it has helped to save lives and improve the outcome of numerous medical emergencies. Currently it is being expanded to other communities in the region. In addition, over 5000 individuals have been testing CONTROL ® with incredibly positive feedback. Presently, EMTeLINK, the parent company, is exploring expansion and launch with organizations and companies in the Southeast and across the country.

Learn more about CONTROL ® at https://www.control.health.

“I HAD NOT THOUGHT DEATH HAD UNDONE SO MANY…” AS SHARED BY FRANK SKILLING, M.D.:

As the death toll from COVID-19 in the United States surpassed one-hundred-thirtythousand at the beginning of July, I have been remembering the words from T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land,” in which he recalls the dead English youths after the Great War: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” He envisions them as a crowd that flows over London Bridge “and each man fixed his eyes before his feet.” I first read “The Waste Land” when I was eighteen and an English major at Spring Hill College. I had no knowledge of the Great War, London, or even Eliot, who died that year. Now as I follow the numbers of those stricken in our own pandemic, the words come back as if summoned by the toll of death. I confess that I had no conception of a pandemic, other than that it was an ordeal that scourged the world in the past, but I truly thought that we were more likely to be engaged in a nuclear war than see another pandemic occur in our lifetimes. Asia, I thought, would have one, but not us. I am disabused and chastened of that belief now. There is talk of “fighting the virus” or “engaging the unseen enemy” or “doing battle with the invisible,” but these are metaphors that don’t reflect what COVID-19 is doing to the entire world. I was as unacquainted with a pandemic as I was for understanding “The Waste Land” as an eighteen-year-old.

What is impressive to me is that the response of people today is reliably predicted by what has previously occurred. Initially for some, there is a denial that it is happening; then a fear of the unknown takes hold before a fatalism develops which is expressed in frenetic social activity; and finally shaming of those who do or do not adhere to recommended preventive guidelines, especially wearing face masks. The search for a cause uncovers supernatural as well as natural reasons, most of them wrong. Daniel Defoe described these explanations in “Journal of a Year of the Plague” wherein he creates an account of the Great Plague of London in 1665-66. Then as now, an actual biological etiology seems unfathomable for the average mind: how can a thing be deadly if it’s not even living? Are we really being hunted by a microscopic entity? A lack of trust in neighbors leading to fear begins to spread incrementally. Our government shows mixed signals about concern for public health and restarting the economy. As the death toll mounts, a numbness with the anticipation of death sweeps in.

In reading “The Great Influenza of 1918” by John Barry, I realize that the U.S. was enveloped in a matter of weeks before anyone in the medical profession or the government was able to respond. Because it was war time, the government suppressed all information about the pandemic in an attempt not to damage morale and support the war effort by American citizens. Even with the current announcements emanating from the CDC and the Department of HHS, many are still denying the lethality of the disease. It’s as if human nature in its primitive state of denial takes over, and all the knowledge and preparation are thrown to the wayside. Scientific explanations are suspect. Despite the constant barrage of TV coverage which documents its march across the world, many people are acting as if it’s not happening. And, unfortunately, it has now become a marker of

the political divide which we are living with. Those who wear masks in public must be of a certain tribe; those who don’t are of another. “The best all lack conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity,” was W.B. Yeats assessment of the post-WWI landscape in “The Second Coming,” published in 1919. (His pregnant wife nearly died during the pandemic.) I see its echoes a hundred years later in our country’s reaction to our pandemic. Human nature doesn’t change, even in a “post-modern” society, and once we’re truly scared or desperately ill, we tend to regress in our behaviors. Only the survivors and their saviors truly know the human ordeal; statistics can’t express emotion.

As the child of parents who both served in uniform and met during World War II, I had always envisioned that conflict as the major defining event of their lives. But I now realize that they were both alive during the Great Influenza which may have been even more important. My father finished high school in 1918 in Baltimore, and had he been a year older, he most likely would have been drafted into the Army that summer. When the pandemic occurred, the death rate in military cantonments and troop ships was astronomical because of the crowded living conditions. During his later studies, he received a master’s degree in bacteriology before entering Harvard Medical School, and I now wonder how much his choice of subject was influenced by living through the Great Influenza. That pandemic was an inspiration for many young men who pursued careers in microbiology and public health. At the same time my mother was living as a child in her native Italy, which suffered an exceedingly high mortality rate. Her arrival in the U.S. was delayed at least several years until she finally disembarked at Ellis Island in 1921 at the age of ten.

My parents never talked about what it was like to be alive during the years of the socalled Spanish Flu, but I would love to hear their memories at a time when we are reliving the tragedy. Apparently, their silence on the pandemic was not unusual. After it was over, most people wanted to get on with their lives, and the memory of apocalyptic waves of death was too great to recount. And thus, we are condemned to repeat what we didn’t learn at that time. The last great pandemic claimed over fifty million lives worldwide. The outcome of our century’s plague, while still uncertain, will certainly be tragic. Onehundred-thirty-thousand casualties in the USA will seem mild within the next year.