Yesterday was an odd day for me. I started it off semi-euphoric. We had solved a complex scheduling conundrum and it will likely improve the lives of all our department Post-Covid19, and that made me euphoric. I composed a third of a Hopeful Wednesday post early morning in that euphoric mood, but did not finish. I have learned with this blog to let the rhythms of life and nature lead me what to write, what to publish and when to just leave things. Since there is no other motive to this blog other than documenting plastic-picking adventures and really giving me an outlet to journal, it is very freeing. So I will leave that post and see if by next Wednesday it can be completed, or needs to go to the half-written blog post graveyard.
I did write one non-Covid 19 post this weekend about parrots, which was very fun https://drplasticpicker.com/parrots-of-pacific-beach/. But even that post was tangentially related to Covid 19 because I only noticed the parrots because the single-use plastic gloves were around our neighborhood. That got me thinking about all the things that I have done only because of this quarantine. It’s almost the 6th week of our self quarantine, although Mr. Plastic Picker and I are still going to work.
Palm Tree in our neighborhood. Parrots nestled there! They are a near threatened species!
April 18, 2020
by drplasticpicker
It was almost a month since I did any serious litter picking, and the ocean is closed. As you well know, we are still in statewide COVID-19 quarantine. The quarantine is a good thing because we all need to #flattenthecurve. I also was not sure if I was exposing my patients and my family to unnecessary risk if I litter picked. But yesterday I saw a purple single-use disposable glove on the street in front of our neighbor’s house, and that just is not right. I was masked, used gloves and a metal grabber and picked up a small bag of litter. I washed my hands also and showered afterwards. I felt so much better after picking up those few pieces, and am confident I did not catch anything. More importantly, I think I am preventing social unrest because trash like that will push people to the brink. Maybe that is why there are protestors now at various state capitals. I bet you they live on littered streets, but really they should just pick it up. So I will litter pick in the early mornings now with a metal grabber, mask and gloves.
Twenty-five years ago this month, I was seventeen and would lie on a hammock in our back yard that overlooked the winding road that led to our mailbox. My father always complained about that road because it was asphalt and technically private, so all the neighbors had to agree and contribute money anytime the road needed repairs. It’s a windy road that is shaded by a canopy of non-native eucalyptus trees. I remember seeing those same trees in Austalia with koalas. I saw these same trees in Peru last year up high in the Andes during a medical mission trip. They are non-native to Peru, encouraged by the government in the 1970s as a fast growing cheap source of fuel-wood. Those trees have contributed to the disruption of the water cycle there. In Australia and Peru, I oddly felt at home because I knew those trees despite their invasive nature.
Twenty-five years ago the teenage me was laying on the backyard hammock with one foot slowly pushing off to power the rhythmic motions. I would just quietly watch the windy road below . I loved hammocks as a child. As a mother, a few years ago I had this moment of determination and marched to Home Depot with my skeptcal non-hammock- loving husband. That weekend, I taught my half-grown children how to correctly use one. Seeing them try to sit and subsequently fall onto the ground, dazed and laughing as the hammock continually flipped over was wonderful. Laying correctly on a hammock is an artform that I mastered as a child. When you lay on a hammock you have to move with it, and somewhat let go of control which is difficult for uptight people.
Did you know there is an app that can identify plants???!!! This is a cabbage!
April 15, 2020
by drplasticpicker
We are in the middle of unprecedented times, when much of the world is in quarantine and COVID-19 is a menacing danger. I am sitting at home in Southern California, and most of my department are not doing any heroics. Most outpatient pediatrics is doing virtual visits. As Dr. Plastic Picker, I don’t know when I can return to the beach to start picking up plastic again. As Pediatricians, we don’t know when we will return to seeing face to face patients or what medicine will be like after this is all over. We are blessed that for the most part children are doing okay. Rates of respiratory illnesses are down because kids are not swapping germs anymore, a side effect of quarantining. Even with New York City still in the midst of a true crisis and the rest of the country is anxiously watching to see if the curve truly flattening – I still have hope.
It’s easy for me to have hope, because I have not been asked to do much. I have tried to help as much as I can but it seems woefully inadequate in comparison to the sacrifice others are making. I have helped distribute a few thousand masks, tried to make sure my little corner of the medical world is flattening the curve, and continued to have the environment on my mind. But I have hope because from great hardship the world can change. It sometimes takes momentous challenges for us to reach our true potential. Personally for me, the greatest times of personal growth have been after great personal and professional failures. So I am hopeful that we will make a better world post COVID-19.
This is definitely one of those topics that Dr. Plastic Picker is a much better pediatrician now than I was at the beginning of my career. It helps that I myself have gone through puberty, completed a clinical year of pediatric endocrinology, and am semi-successfully guiding my own two children through this process.
This can be both a stressful and wonderful time in life. There is a sense of loss for the littleness of your children. I had this profound sense of loss because I worked so much when they were little. I miss the warmth of those young bodies snuggling up to me at night. The promise of that time would often get me through the long overnight calls or urgent care shifts. Our daughter had a profound sense of loss as well. When her body began changing she said that she did not want to grow up. Our son was very nonchalant about the whole thing, which is true to his easy going personality.
But as I tell my children and my patients, puberty is a wonderful thing because it means the body is working! It means that your hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis is functioning as it should and you’ve reached this milestone. If you didn’t go through puberty by a certain time, it would be a medical problem. I would have to start getting blood work, radiographs and maybe MRI your brain. As a pediatrician, I am aware of the dangers of being little as well. You are more susceptible to diseases which is why there are more vaccines when you are young. Little children can’t physically protect themselves as well. So I look at puberty, as a wonderful time that children are gaining bodily strength. They are developing themselves to be adult people. Because in the end the purpose of raising children and protected them while they are young is to get adults, and then they can protect and fend for themselves. And now my own teenagers can get things I need from the upper shelves that I can’t reach! Score!
Gardening is a great way to establish a sense of progression.
It is the 5th week of essential lock-down for our family. We started social distancing prior to the general order in California and our city. I had been following the COVID-19 MD Facebook groups closely. Before most were social distancing, we had cancelled our early March vacation and cancelled Mr. Plastic Picker’s parents trip to New York. Thank goodness, as New York is now the epicenter of COVID-19. California has done remarkably well, but even with hundres of thousands of cases averted and thousands of deaths prevented – we have many dissenters. Probably there are not many, but they are taking up a sizeable share of the blogsphere. I had a high school friend post on facebook COVID-19 misinformation. I replied but didn’t have the energy to have a prolonged facebook discussion. I ended it with let’s just be grateful that we in California are doing okay.
It has been a wet spring in Southern California, and our rain barrels have been overflowing. The country is still under COVID-19 quarantine orders, but I have been gratified that this blog has seen an uptick in traffic – hopefully providing everyone with some entertainment. This has motivated me to keep on writing. Anyway, our rain barrel makeshift collection system caught 395 gallons of water yesterday. My mother-in-law will use it over the course of the next few weeks to water her garden. Her garden is truly a work of wonder where in the normal sized front yard she is able to yield enormous amounts of lettuce, kale, onions, tomatoes, lemons, and different varieties of squash.
I’ll be blunt here. Physicians are not for the large part good stewards of their own money. Physicians often think other fields are easier than our own work. I hear this a lot. Some of my colleagues think there is easy money in real estate investing, yet rarely do those same people have actual real estate outside of their primary home. It’s kind of a minor insult to true real estate professionals, just like a parent telling you they could drain an abscess better than you could with a sewing needle and exacto knife.
To actually support a middle-class or upper-middle-class family solely through the real estate boom and bust cycles of the market is not easy. Like performinig surgery, real estate investing requires a very specific skill set. It requires negotiating, managerial skills interacting with skilled laborers and tenants, having good accounting skills and being able to take on financial risks. You need to know about the specific tax laws, termite inspections, cost by the square footage of decking material and on and on. It also requires time and focus and attention to detail.
There is much to be hopeful for Wednesday. In the end we will never know what the death toll would have been if we had not #flattenthecurve and #stayhome. But as an outpatient MD following along, I do believe it would have been in the order of 500,000 to 1,000,000 lives lost. We still have at least a month left of mandatory quarantine, but we should recognize that the community accomplished many hundreds of thousands of lives saved by pulling together already. I thank our state and local leadership for putting in shelter in place orders early. It has been a remarkable thing to see how well California has done. Still a lot of work to do, but this Golden State, that embraced our immigrant family even before my birth and formed me as a person, has made me so proud. I have always and continue to be even more so proud to be from California!
With that, there is hopeful news for the environment. I wanted to highlight today how the practice of medicine can be more sustainable after COVID-19. We have learned that we can practice effective medicine and environmental stewardship. I apologize for skipping last week’s Hopeful Wednesday post. I was feeling down last Wednesday, but today I am happy.
