Captain Tom Moore died on Tuesday. Ironically, the 100-year-old succumbed to the coronavirus that made him famous. Last April, Moore set out to do 100 laps of his back yard, pushing his walker, to raise funds for the British medical system struggling to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Captain Sir Thomas Moore, as he is more officially known, raised some $43 million and earned a knighthood.
It’s hard to realize that the first COVID-19 case showed up in Canada barely more than a year ago. A patient came to Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital after returning from Wuhan, China, where the disease apparently originated.
COVID-19 was a brand new disease. We didn’t know how it started, how it was transmitted, or how to treat it.
We learned as we went.
Initially, we feared the virus was transmitted by physical contact. So disinfect, disinfect, disinfect. No handshakes, no doorknobs, no handrails.
And, of course, no sex.
Masks were only for medical staff. Masks might encourage ordinary people to touch their faces with un-sanitized fingers.
Then we learned the virus is transmitted by breathing. By invisible micro-droplets, floating in the air. Masks became the first line of defence. (Presumably, sex was now safe, if neither of you breathed.)
Then become mandatory. And now double-masking is recommended.
Postural drainage
Initially, too, we saw ICU patients propped up in beds. Now I sometimes see then lying face down. It looks awkward, but apparently it helps to drain the fluid building up in their lungs.
At that point, I wondered if anyone in the COVID-19 camp had contacted the cystic fibrosis community about postural drainage.
Because nobody, but nobody, knows more about getting fluid out of lungs than the people who treat cystic fibrosis.
Granted, the fluid in CF lungs is thicker, more sticky, than the fluid in COVID-19 lungs. But it’s still a fluid, and the face down posture implies that there are ways of helping it drain, safely.
I write from personal experience. Our son had CF. When he was diagnosed, we received a posture board which could be adjusted to, I think, three different positions. We did “clapping” -- slapping our cupped hands on his bare chest as he lay on the posture board, mostly head down -- to jiggle the mucus clogging the tiny airways in his lungs so that it would drip into larger passages where he could cough it out.
It was a primitive process. But it worked. Therapy gave him 20 years of life that he wouldn’t have had otherwise.
No consultation
Postural drainage techniques have changed since then. We used to do 20 minutes, in each of six positions, every day. I gather that five or six minutes can now accomplish as much. Also that there are new -- and very expensive -- vests that can deliver something like ultrasound impulses to produce the same effect as clapping.
But it is still all about draining those fluids.
So naturally I wondered if COVID-19 treatment centres had utilized any of the knowledge that CF doctors had accumulated over the last half-century.
Apparently not. Off the record, I was told that the CF community has had no connections with the infectious disease physicians treating COVID-19 cases.
None.
I don’t claim any medical expertise, just experience. But I fear that people may be dying because specialists are unwilling to think outside their professional silos.
I can understand that people dealing with the pandemic are being run ragged. By stress. By overwork. By despair.
And I can understand that their specialty is infectious disease, which CF is not. It’s genetic.
The silo mentality
But I still argue that the silo mentality may be costing lives.
A silo is, of course, a vertical cylinder. In agriculture, it holds a single kind of cattle feed -- not to be mixed or adulterated with anything else.
The same principle holds for ideas. Within their own silo, professionals share information willingly. But they rarely venture into anyone else’s silo.
As a writer and a journalist, I’ve seen too many silos. In mining, in forestry, in social work -- even in churches that lock out anything related to evolution.
An examination of COVID-19 treatment in long term care homes in B.C., by Ernst & Young, specifically identified the silo mentality as leading to unnecessary deaths.
The Canadian Press report referred to “long-standing staffing shortages and … issues surrounding information being kept in silos and not shared with the wider community.”
When lives are at stake, no potential source of information should be excluded. No matter whose silo it’s in.
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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YOUR TURN
In last week’s column, I tried to distinguish between my admiration for Amanda Gorman’s poetry as a message of hope, and my analysis of it as poetry. James West called it “the literary criticism class I didn’t have. Thank you.”
Apparently it sent several of you to check the original more fully.
Cliff Boldt wrote, “I appreciated your review of Gorman. Helped to enjoy the message again.”
And David Gilchrist commented, “My hearing means that I missed too many of her words to get the full meaning of her message). Your column sent me back to look again, and I found it!
“For me, ‘poetry’ still implies rhyme, meter, and accent, etc. Though I have written poetry since my early teens, and would still consider myself an ‘amateur’, I don’t consider my favourite poets amateurs -- though they mostly use those devises. I tend to read their poetry out loud, and take pleasure in their musical cadences. Amanda Gorman’s lovely work would be called ‘Poetic Prose’ in my school days.
“The Hebrew concept of ‘poetry’, I understand, was a balance of ideas, saying the same things in slightly different words, etc. -- rather than making words rhyme.”
Ruth Shaver also referred to Hebrew poetry: “Maybe it's because I'm not a lover of traditional poetry (some hymn texts excepted), but I prefer Amanda Gorman's form to all else. Her style reminds me of well-rendered English versions of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms and the Prophets, that don't force the English to conform to the tricks and devices of the Hebrew poets but use English words precisely to convey the deep meaning of the poetry for an audience in a different time and place.”
Valentine Young also saw the column as aa learning experience: “a very interesting review of Amanda’s poem The Hill We Climb in your article on Saturday. The other facts from different poets gave the synopsis depth and clarity. Thank you for sharing it with us. I learned from it and no doubt it is an encouragement to other young poets in our area.”
But some did not agree with my analysis. Laurna Tallman asked, “Ms. Gorman’s poem had Barack Obama and millions of other listeners in tears. What makes you impervious to these measures of the ‘ecstatic high’ to which her poetry moved so many people?
“The fact that you want poetry to give you a highly personal ecstatic high is a sign that you write poetry of a certain genre and rate other poets against that subjective yardstick. Ranking emotive qualities over rational matters in poetry limits the types of poetry you can appreciate. That philosophical position is just one of many objections I have to the so-called ‘New Criticism’ that became popular in the mid- to late-1960s. New Criticism places the value of poetry in the individual’s response to it, however singular, benighted, and ignorant that response might be. The critic is not encouraged to consider the person of the poet, the social circumstances in which the poet lived and wrote, or the literature of the poet’s time. The poet is diminished and the listener is elevated.
“Rhyme is much more than an aid to memory. It is one of the musical elements of poetry, creating beat and tempo. It makes points and creates emphasis. It organizes patterns of sound. It evokes particular rhythms of the day, as Gorman’s The Hill We Climb has overtones of hip-hop, which resonates importantly on who she is and who her audience is on this Inaugural occasion and in our time.”
Helen Reid also didn’t agree with my criticism of generalized abstractions: “In a badly fractured country, I think Amanda's generalizations were meant to include as many people as possible.”
Steve Roney, on the other hand, did: “I agree entirely on your evaluation of Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem. Not bad, but too abstract; mostly bland truisms. This is a problem for poets laureate. Wordsworth’s poetry as laureate was similarly bland.”
Bob Rollwagen wrote, “Amanda hit a chord in a place and time when everyone was listening. Everyone needed that vision and coming from a citizen who was not an elected official put it over the top. I use numbers when many use words. She did not need numbers. Her words captured the truth and I am sure very few people have judged it in any other way.”
My title gave Amanda Gorman four stars. Isabel Gibson asked, “Out of a possible five? Pretty good for 22. I hear her poem more as preaching, without any pejorative intended for a word we often take negatively. I can imagine Martin Luther King Jr. declaiming something similar.”
Finally John Heinrichs hoist me with my own petard. He cited several examples from my column, of the pattern, "Every line didn't have four beats".
That means, he pointed out, that “There wasn't a single line that had four beats! You should say: ‘Not every line had four beats’.”
He’s right. I was sloppy.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns