I left medicine long ago (immediately after I returned to the USA, subsequent to spending about a most rewarding 15 years in cardiovascular surgeries overseas), principally because the fulfillment and satisfaction of working with patients had been so grievously eroded by the present-day HMO ‘bean-counters’. I fondly look back today on many wonderful years of health care work, but the game has changed rather radically; the present SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic is merely the frosting on the multi-layered Bavarian Schwartzwalderkuche that was formerly medicine.

What is particularly frustrating (with regard to the 2020 outbreak) is that, as a specialist in CBRN medical treatment (a parallel area of work), my colleagues and I had been predicting another major pandemic for decades…a Cassandra-like forecast that largely fell on deaf ears. Despite the prior experiences in 2005–2007 with viral epidemics, the potentially catastrophic possibilities of a new pandemic incident fell entirely through the cracks of prudent, prophylactic epidemiology until we were suddenly gob-smacked into the middle of next week by the SARS-CoV-2 crisis.

When I was a lad, a wise elder once advised me that if I wished to have assured, lifelong job security, I should consider a career as either a physician or an undertaker, since birth and death are the sole fixed certainties of the human life experience. It was certainly good advice…up until recently. Now I wish I had instead become a lighthouse keeper on some remote and rugged pinnacle of rock, sticking up out of the Tasmanian Sea!

I still occasionally gaze wistfully at my 3M Littmann Master Cardiology Stethoscope that hangs on the wall of my study (gathering dust), recalling the wonderful experiences I had as a medical expat, but a quick viewing of the semi-controlled hysterical hype on TV that takes the form of broadcast media coverage on the pandemic immediately disabuses me of THAT longing.

Anyone know of a remote lighthouse anywhere that needs a tender? ;)