Monday
With the news full of alarm about this winter “tripledemia” – rising numbers of RSV, flu and covid cases, especially among children – when my daughter’s fever hits 103F on Monday night, I do something I hate: drag her around the corner to the living room ER, the 24-hour clinic where for $150 you can be seen immediately by a doctor who has never seen you before and will never see you again. It’s the fast food of health care, right down to the decor, which consists, disconcertingly, of wall-to-wall framed photos of TV doctors, as if the place is masquerading as medical aid and all the doctors have been hired by the government. core casting.
The truth is that the doctor is very kind, and after doing the tests he says it’s the flu. Remarkably, prescribing Tamiflu, through a combination of low efficacy in children, supply issues, and a requirement to take it within 48 hours of first symptom onset, has never been prescribed for us before, and it sends us home with the words: “She drives some kids crazy, so keep an eye on her.”
In fact, it’s not the drugs that are driving her crazy. One day home she becomes two, she becomes three, then four days inside, she mentally pushes us all back into lockdown. By the fifth day, anarchy reigns. One boy hides the other’s nine-day stash of the advent calendar and then claims that he can’t remember where he put it. The other instantly collapses, backs towards the Christmas tree, dislodges the elf, drawing my wrath, and before you know it someone has stepped on and activated the robot vacuum, plunging us into a complete Ayckbourn farce. I can’t help but think this is what you get for starting the week with a visit to the real world version of Thirty Rock’s Dr. Spaceman.
Tuesday
I don’t know if you’ve been following this story about the compulsive liar on the writing staff of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy. Briefly: Elisabeth Finch, a longtime writer on the medical drama who had spoken and written about using her experience as a cancer survivor to inform the show’s storylines, turns out that not only has she never had cancer, she has lied spectacularly about a lot of other things too.
Everyone loves a good joker unmasked story and this is a corker. Among the lies of the 44-year-old man, narrated in Peter Kiefer’s book box office interview with Finch for the Angler this week, where he had lost a kidney; her that she had been a regular worshiper at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where in 2018 an armed terrorist killed 11 people, one of whom she said she knew (no); that her brother had taken his own life (he is alive and well and lives in Florida); and, most importantly, that she had survived metastatic cancer after being diagnosed with a spinal tumor that, among other things, led her to show up at work with a dummy catheter attached to her arm and her head shaved to imitate someone who is undergoing chemotherapy. . “I miss my fellow writers,” Finch said in the interview. “It’s like a family and… one of the things that makes it so difficult is that they came together around a false narrative that I gave them.”
False narrative is certainly one way of putting it, and after explaining that his lying is itself a clinical condition, ironic! Finch absently wonders if she could be forgiven enough to get a seat in the Handmaid’s Tale writers’ room.
Wednesday
to Congress, and the sight of Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler breaking down in pain at the prospect of gay Americans having too many rights. The bipartisan Respect Marriage Act discussion was a dry affair until Hartzler spoke up, argued that the bill threatened the lives of decent, God-fearing Americans, and then began, unbelievably, mourn. In the strangest episode of political weeping since Matt Hancock wiped his eyes On Good Morning Britain, Hartzler concluded with a wobbly plea against “this misguided and dangerous bill.” Moments later, the approved billto loud applause, after the defection of 39 Republicans to the Democrats, although it should be added that while it requires each state to recognize another state’s legal marriage, it does not require all states to legalize same-sex marriage in the case that the supreme court strikes down, as Roe v Wade did, the federal law protecting that right.
Thursday
A difficult day in journalism as staff of the New York Times strike for better wages, begging us to boycott his website: a friend forgets, does a Wordle, then texts frantically “am I a strikebreaker?” – just when the world’s media stops to watch Meghan and Harry on Netflix. “We had an emergency video conference at 6 am about how to handle the revelations of the day,” says a friend in a tabloid.
I took a quick look, obviously, and unless I’m missing something: didn’t we know all this already? Didn’t Oprah already have this story? I sympathize with Harry and am inclined to side with anyone who might trigger a public meltdown in Kelvin MacKenzie. Similarly, I find it hard to believe, based on Meghan’s account, that she had never seen footage of someone curtsying to the Queen, heard the British national anthem, or understood that royalty could be a hierarchy-based system made up of people who are not the warmest or most welcoming in the world. Although the main takeaway is, obviously, what an embarrassing waste the series is from Liz Garbus, one of the greatest documentarians in American history, reduced to selling PR hogwash for this pair.
Friday
Honoring the digital picket line means I have to wait a day to catch up Diagnosis, my favorite New York Times column aka the weekly column I thought I had a cold but in fact I’m dying. Do you think you are tired and just need to eat a banana? Think again, fool. Here comes a man with exactly the symptoms of him who turned out to have orthostatic hypotension. Did you think you tripped on the street because of an uneven paving slab? See the story of this woman who thought the same thing and then she had to be taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. I dare not go through the archive in search of the doomsayer’s reading on hyperactivity in children.
