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My mother could have been a doctor Purdue, premed, 1938 but like so many women of her era, she got married, started a family, and became a de facto pediatrician for six unruly and often calamity-prone children. She was the one to take us to the doctor for our shots and the one who trooped us down to the emergency room conveniently just a block away from home when we did something really stupid.
Mothers have long been recognized as healthcare decision makers within the family, and that may well be the case when COVID-19 vaccinations become available to children and adolescents. Kaiser Health News reports that more women than men are getting their COVID-19 vaccines, even though more men than women are dying of the disease, and that is about par for the course for us guys.
Last April, I wrote a letter to my parents, who would have been 104 this year, in the form of an op-ed column in my hometown newspaper in Lancaster, PA. I expressed my hope that, in dealing with the upheaval of the pandemic, we could draw upon the examples they set in coping with the Great Depression as teenagers (without cell phones) and enduring World War II as young parents (without Internet access).
In closing, I promised to write again “to let you know that we rose to the occasion, came together (in mind, if not in body), rode out the COVID-19 storm… in our virtual tornado cellars, and minimized the amount of human suffering.”