Seeing Hope

We all want to.

 

No amount of sophisticated technology can do what health professionals have done these past few months — offered care with uncertain evidence, sat with the dying, comforted family members from afar, held one another in fear and grief, celebrated unexpected recoveries, and simply showed up… No one has been trained how to keep regular life afloat at home and anxiety at bay, while working day after day with a little known bio-hazard.” ~ Dr. Christine Runyan

We, as a community, owe never-ending gratitude to healthcare workers.

As the Delta variant ravages the unvaccinated and hospitalizations surge again across our nation, some of us want to shut out the images of patients on ventilators; we don’t want to keep hearing the stories of unnecessary loss.

Nationwide, more than 99 percent of recent deaths have occurred among unvaccinated people, and more than 97 percent of recent hospitalizations have occurred among the unvaccinated, according to the C.D.C.” (NY Times)

We thought we’d made it through to the other side of this pandemic. We were seeing Hope for the first time in over a year.

But our work is not yet done.

And that means those everyday heroes who staff our hospitals are back in the thick of illness and dying.

You and I cannot imagine what their days are like.

But that shouldn’t stop us from expressing our gratitude for what they do every day.

Some of us may pretend that Covid isn’t that big a deal, but they — the nurses and staff who sit with our husbands and wives, with our fathers and mothers and children, who hold their hands as they die, alone, don’t have that option.

We all owe them, and we will for the rest of our lives.