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Prescription For Vexation

Vexation Everyone has occasional vexations. Here is one I experience twice a month. It surely vexes others too, particularly seniors and those in need of painkillers. My Situation I’m blessed with a good share of chronic conditions to which my doctors, to their great credit, have amassed effective palliatives. One of these is peripheral neuropathy in feet and hands; this started in the 1980s…

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Pandemic Angle

Introduction When “Mangle,” the seventh in a series on the 2020 pandemic, came out in December, I declared it the last with a proviso: “If a surprising new development were to pop up—say a coup or martial law or a tripling of the COVID-19 death rate—I could always extend the series on that angle later.” The coup and the tripling of the death rate happened, and the martial law idea got a thorough…

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Pandemic Mangle

Introduction With the end of the year, the arrival of vaccines, the resolution of the election, the devolution of President Trump into a not so private Hellamania, and the full flourishing of the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels like the right time to end this series on the pandemic. The subject matter has turned mushy. I feel like I’m mangling reality. So I call this last entry Pandemic Mangle. If a…

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Pandemic Tangle

Introduction

Tom Salomon and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University have found volume changes in the brain, most notably in the amygdala. This was found in a study of fifty healthy subjects whose brains were scanned before and after the coronavirus lockdown in Israel. Stress and anxiety from the lockdown are the suspected cause. While the finding is tentative, it reminds us that the pandemic is…

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