Shawn Whatley, Author at shawn whatley md

Nonplussed and Afraid for Medicine

A book offers an excuse for everything. You must start one soon.

Is it your turn to drive the kids? Sorry, I’m working on my book.

Can you fix the washing machine? Sorry, I’m editing.

Did you mow Mom’s lawn yet? Not yet. Book.

Most things pass in pretend deafness: absorbed, lost in thought. Actually, this happens without pretending.

I emerge from the office having sat for six hours. Family life rushes back. What did I miss? (Not much, it seems. Teens and twenty-year-olds rise at noon.)

But I cannot catch up with the world. It has gone mad — upside down — and I am nonplussed.

Nonplussed and Afraid

nonplussed

adjective

(of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.

INFORMAL · NORTH AMERICAN (of a person) non disconcerted; unperturbed.

Even nonplussed now means its opposite. Continue reading “Nonplussed and Afraid for Medicine”

Go Ahead, Celebrate Canada!

She lived in the bush outside of Thunder Bay. A single mom with twelve kids (one disabled) and no job.

Her late husband Sam had invested in boat tickets, packed their things in a small trunk, and sailed his family to claim free land west of the Lakehead, in Northern Ontario.

In 1904, he became the first farmer from a family of English fishmongers.

Stalwart Peasants

Parliament needed to settle Canada quickly or lose it to the Americans. Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior 1896-1905, advertised for sturdy immigrants.

Sifton thought that, “a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children, is a good quality.”

Sam, “a stalwart peasant,” claimed his land-locked plot of mosquito-infested swamp and softwood outside of what is now Thunder Bay. He moved his clan into a tiny shack and started ‘farming.’

Thunder Bay is Canadian shield. That means rocks, stunted trees, and very little topsoil. For a few years, Sam dragged, rolled, and piled enough rocks to create chest-high windrows around little plots of bare ground.

Then he died. Continue reading “Go Ahead, Celebrate Canada!”

Two Kinds of Suffering: Infectious and Portentous

It is hard to listen. We set out to stay quiet, but questions force into our mind.

Two kinds of suffering shout at us this week: individual and social; infectious and portentous. We face the first at the bedside; the second on the radio.

What do you say when a husband or wife just died? What words help brain cancer?

I talk too much. My inability to fix tightens my throat. So, I blab and reassure to prove I still have breath.

I think myself a listener, but I often cringe later. Blather and repetition. Did I just use logic to eliminate half of their lament?

Job’s friends always impressed me. They sat in silence. Talking ruined their credibility.

Isolated Suffering

The last few months have been hard to watch. Patients deteriorate at home, alone. Elderly who barely coped with a large social network before lockdown became islands during it. Aimed to avoid morbidity and death, social distancing did the opposite, too often.

Maybe hope left long ago. Infection and isolation lay in equal and opposite directions. Scylla and Charybdis.

They had survived on intangible surveillance: a neighbour’s glance, a daughter dropping by. A parade to the mailbox each morning proved they could still do it.

Little neighbourly irritations disappeared in lockdown. They used to show that Mrs. Smith was still feisty, bothersome, and alive.

Collective Suffering

The second suffering comes with the rest of our diet from America. Canada’s social class join in knelt solidarity. We act like a 51st state.

Racism is evil; senseless death worse. Jail seems too good for some. Continue reading “Two Kinds of Suffering: Infectious and Portentous”