Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Dr. Pfister reflects on space, time, and COVID-19.
Wow, what do you think about this amazing weather in October in Northern Ohio?
To have eighty degree temps really makes it hard to believe we could have shovable precipitation in several weeks! I feel we’ve been very fortunate this Summer with weather that is just begging us to get outside and explore the metro parks and our Great Lake to the north.
And if you don’t turn on the local news, or read a newspaper, or catch CNN, one could really get lulled into feeling that life is great and the future is so bright you will have to wear shades (borrowed song title from the band Timbuk3).
Unfortunately, the reality of our current life is a bit different, which is troubling me. I have many patients who come from a wide and diverse background of careers, who enjoy chatting about how they and their families have been affected by Covid…
All with school-aged children have endured setbacks and frustrations to say the least. Shortages, lines, and improvising has become our new way of life. As they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention!”
But where and when will we find or feel normalcy?
Considering the amount of change that we have endured over the last eighteen months, will normal look normal… or have we so morphed our lives that we won’t recognize it?! Or worse, we don’t accept it as normal and keep searching for our Holy Grail of American Life.
April of 2020, we shut our doors and went into quarantine. We reopened our doors on June 1st and I truly felt by August the students would be going back to school and this Covid scare would be behind us!
Yesterday, I was talking to an RN at Medina Hospital and we got onto this topic. She said the hospital administration felt Covid would run its course by Fall! As we now know, nobody knows how long this will take and…
Time keeps marching on.
Dr. David Kimberly, Past President of the Ohio Dental Association, wrote an article last Spring in our Ohio Today dental publication on Einstein’s Special Relativity and our ability to affect time. Dr. Kimberly is a fine oral surgeon in Akron, who I have personally had the pleasure of working with. He is quite intelligent and has a very humorous and non-conventional take on life.
Albert Einstein, in the early 20th century, developed the theory of special relativity to explain the relationship between space and time. Dr. Kimberly, being a physics student, summarized the theory by stating: “Time is relative to the speed at which one is traveling, relative to whatever object is emitting the photon one is observing.” This is quite a mouthful, so he went on in simpler terms. He stated that we experience time sometimes, seemingly standing still, as we wait for the light to change or Uber to deliver dinner. Or we can experience time at warp speed (like when we are on vacation). Dr. Kimberly goes on to say that time is condensed. When we retrospectively look at our past, it seems like just yesterday that we only wore masks at Halloween!
I enjoy reading about space. And growing up, I read quite a bit about space travel and I especially enjoyed books by Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist and astrophysicist, in the mid 80s, wrote a book on time travel with several Caltech scientists, trying to find short cuts to go back or forth in time using wormholes in space. Wormholes are theoretical short cuts in space, allowing one to go from one galaxy to another. Theoretically, according to Sagan using Einstein’s theories on gravitation, inside a wormhole gravity is eliminated and travel can be faster than time, allowing one to go into the past or into the future.
Today, even NASA has a hard time trying to believe that time travel, going back or forward in time, can exist anywhere but on the blackboards of theorists!
So Pfister, where are you going with this train of thought and how does it relate to our current Covid pandemic?
I’m glad you asked. (And I’m glad you’re still with me.)
Since the vaccine was first available, I have been humbled by patients who so trusted me that they wanted me to tell them if I thought the vaccine was safe. And going one step further, they wanted to know, did I think it was a good idea for them to get it?
Now, this puts this middle-aged wire bender in a bit of an educational medical dilemma. I went to my cardiologist, urologist, and family physician of the mother ship, Cleveland Clinic… they had various responses. None negative… sort of cautious… but in the end, they felt the good outweighed the bad.
I understand messenger RNA from my research days, and that this vaccine is unique with its messenger RNA dictating protein antibodies from the nucleus of our cells. However, there is still no way for me to say with complete assurance that nothing will go wrong in the future if one gets the vaccine.
But we must look at the facts. Covid is not going away! This Summer was to be the winding down of the Covid spread, as the vaccine acceptance would protect us with a 70% acceptance rate for herd immunity. We are currently, according to Mayo Clinic’s September data, under 65% acceptance in the United States. And the numbers are as bad (and in some areas worse) as they were in 2020, due in part to the emergence of the delta strain.
Knowing that time-travel is not possible, Dr. Kimberly ended his paper suggesting we need to make the best out of every day.
Going a step further, I’d like to add that since we cannot go back to 2019 and contain the virus at its origin, nor go to 2023 and come back with a super duper booster with zero side effects, we must analyze the current data, discuss our personal health conditions with our physicians, and then discuss it with our families to make an educated decision that makes sense…
Now, I’ll tell you my main reason for writing this blog.
In the past two weeks, we have had two families who did not receive the vaccine. Both families came down with Covid and currently both fathers are clinging to life on ventilators! Please don’t make the vaccine a political issue or a cultural issue - make it a medical issue that makes sense!
Time moves at an insidious pace. Remember, if the yesterdays go by too quickly, and we know that today will be yesterday when the sun rises tomorrow, can you really afford to wait another day to get the vaccine?
It seems like just yesterday… I was 15… and my dad died in my arms of a heart attack. I’ve missed him for a lifetime!
In the end, you can be living wrong or you can be dead right! Which would your spouse or children prefer?
All the best,
Dr. Pfister