Editorial
Traditions to Keep Deval (Reshma) Paranjpe, MD, MBA, FACS
T
he pandemic isn’t quite over, but the media coverage has ebbed. Most people are either vaccinated or have been infected once or multiple times. Some people have long COVID-19.
We may not be entering “the after” yet, but it seems that we are entering “the aftermath”. What lessons have we learned, and what traditions will we keep because of what we’ve just lived through? I remember learning second-hand lessons as a child through wary adults who had lived through Watergate and Vietnam: question everything. Don’t blindly trust politicians or the media. These same lessons have echoed through the pandemic, along with a few new corollaries which will no doubt be explored in business and public health graduate schools for decades to come. The best interests of the economy don’t always align with the best interests of public health, health care workers, and individual patients. The best economic interest of an individual may not be aligned with the best health interest of that individual. Government institutions, including the CDC, are more vulnerable to political influence than we thought or 6
hoped. In many ways these have been rude but necessary awakenings to snap us all out of complacency. The children who came of intellectual age in these few years will in turn carry these lessons into their adulthood. But think about the positive side. What good traditions arose from these few years that we can carry forward? One small, beautiful, powerful tradition that arose from this pandemic is the friends and family check-in. At first, friends and family checked in on each other regularly to ascertain: “Are you sick? Are you well? Are you alive? Are you vaccinated?” Now, the checkins may grow a little sparser and less intense, but no less loving. We don’t take good health or recovery for granted anymore. We don’t take each other for granted anymore. Another tradition to carry forwardRediscovering and strengthening old bonds. Many of us reconnected with old friends from high school, college, medical school, and training during quarantine. We suddenly discovered that we have a long-neglected network of trusted physicians in various specialties at our disposal from medical school and residency/fellowship. We trust them clinically because we remember who wasn’t a slacker and who had the best scores and who was the good egg who’d go the extra mile.
We trust them personally as friends because we remember who was there when we needed someone to lean on and ask for help. Many stories of reconnection with old friends have emerged—from 2 am curbsides and impromptu zoom reunions - to sharing vital new medical knowledge from different areas of the country and tips on how to stay safe and protect our patients, our families and ourselves. Then there’s the tradition of Random Acts of Kindness. The pandemic has taken a toll on everyone’s mental health, and some people have made a point of lifting each other up. I have a friend who started sending me the most beautiful little gifts during the pandemic in the form of texting me music out of the blue in the middle of the workweek or weekend. Sometimes as a hello, sometimes as a thank you, sometimes just as an expression of joy, always as a desire to share something beautiful in the middle of a humdrum day. I never realized in all these years how much we had in common in terms of our musical taste. Sometimes we’ll have entire conversations which consist of: “have you heard this artist yet? You need to!”, “this is my favorite cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah,” and snippets of everything from bluegrass to opera to doo-wop to jazz. www.acms.org
