Things I Think by Gary Tetz
With a pandemic continuing unabated, and now hurricanes, floods and wildfires ravaging large swaths of the nation, I don’t know how many more apocalyptic horsemen the long-term care profession is slated to face or can withstand.
How fondly I remember the old days, pre-2020, when Googling “long-term care news” yielded different results
There aren’t enough covers to pull over my head anymore.
Finding joy in the difference you make is perhaps all the inspiration any of us needs.
How are those masks working out for you? My glasses are as perpetually fogged as a car windshield after prom, and I do enjoy sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
I consider it an ominous omen. Yesterday on my walk, I was attacked by a crow — three times. Or it might have been a raven. I can’t tell the difference.
It turns out there might be one type of administrator who is more personally susceptible to this vile virus now plaguing humanity than any other.
For those of you seeking a different coping path through this pandemic, might I suggest walking, gardening, swimming or dancing. I say this because a new preliminary study suggests that people who do those things regularly have bigger brains.
Now that small respiratory droplets created by human speech have been found to hang out in the air for more than eight minutes, requiring masks in long-term care and any other setting where people congregate seems like a no-brainer.
While long-term care workers I’ve interviewed have been grateful and positive during the COVID-19 pandemic, my coping mechanisms could be considered somewhat less constructive and helpful.
To shake someone’s hand is to say, “I don’t know much about you, but I choose to embrace every bad hygienic choice you’ve made today.”
Facility staff have no idea if catching COVID-19 will be merely an annoyance or a life-threatening battle, a parking ticket or a death sentence. But still, they go.
Compared to shoppers tearing apart a pallet of toilet paper, our facility staff have been Buddhas in scrubs during the recent pandemic. But even they aren’t the most inspiring out of all of this.
Can you remember a public health directive than “don’t touch your face” that’s ever been more simple, clear and science-based, yet more difficult to execute? I can’t.
Love was in the air this Valentine’s Day, and in the days before and after. Let me tell you the ways.
Sometimes a writer has to take a principled stand no matter how oxymoronic that might sound. That’s why today, without fear of reprisal, I want to talk about typos.
Wakeful, wandering, grumpy and doomed. These precious words describe our faithful, bleary-eyed columnist most nights.
If you didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions, you better be prepared to explain why.
It would be one of those sympathy shows, I figured, the kind where you go home acknowledging the performer more as a historical artifact than as a still-vigorous artist. “How good could she really be at this age?” I even caught myself wondering.
The growing use of a lazy trend in text communications makes me weep for the future of real compassion and empathy.
