Death

Avoiding Care During the Pandemic Could Mean Life or Death

By Sandra R. Nicholson 4 days ago

These days, Los Angeles acting teacher Deryn Warren balances her pain with her fear. She’s a bladder cancer patient who broke her wrist in November. She still needs physical therapy for her wrist, and she’s months late for a cancer follow-up.

But Warren won’t go near a hospital, even though she says her wrist hurts every day.

“If I go back to the hospital, I’ll get COVID. Hospitals are full of COVID people,” says Warren, a former film director and author of the book “How to Make Your Audience Fall in Love With You.”

“Doctors say, ‘Come back for therapy,’ and my answer is, ‘No, thank you.’”

Many, many patients like Warren are shunning hospitals and clinics. The coronavirus has so diminished trust in the U.S. medical system that even people with obstructed bowels, chest pain and stroke symptoms are ignoring danger signs and staying out of the emergency room,

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Bingeing on Doom: Expert on the ‘Black Death’ Attracts Cult Following

By Sandra R. Nicholson 2 weeks ago

Before COVID-19, Purdue University English professor Dorsey Armstrong was well known in a way that only other enthusiasts of medieval literature and culture might appreciate.

That is to say, she once got a discount on a replica of an Anglo-Saxon drinking horn — made from an actual cattle horn — because a guy at a conference recognized her.

“That’s the only time I felt famous,” said Armstrong, an expert in medieval studies who heads the English department at Purdue in Indiana. “I got a really cool drinking horn. And whenever I teach ‘Beowulf,’ I bring it out and I pass it around.”

But since the start of the pandemic, Armstrong, 49, has gained a whole new level of acclaim for her Old World expertise. She’s the narrator of “The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague,” a video series that became must-see TV this spring when it aired on Amazon

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COVID Cuts A Lethal Path Through San Quentin’s Death Row

By Sandra R. Nicholson 4 weeks ago

The old men live in cramped spaces and breathe the same ventilated air. Many are frail, laboring with heart disease, liver and prostate cancer, tuberculosis, dementia. And now, with the coronavirus advancing through their ranks, they are falling one after the next.

This is not a nursing home, not in any traditional sense. It is California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco. Its 670 residents are serial killers, child murderers, men who killed for money and drugs, or shot their victims as part of their wasted gangster lives. Some have been there for decades, growing old behind bars. One is 90, and more than 100 are 65 or older.

Executions have been on hold in California since 2006, stalled by a series of legal challenges. And they won’t resume anytime soon: In 2019, two months after taking office, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium

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A Teen’s Death From COVID

By Sandra R. Nicholson 2 months ago

INDIANAPOLIS — It started as a normal day. Dawn Guest, 54, got up and headed out to her job as a nurse around 5 a.m. She heard her 16-year-old son, Andre, stirring in his room, but he had always been an earlier riser, even when his school was shut for COVID-19. Later that day she would get a call from her husband, telling her there was something wrong with their son.

That call would be the beginning of a 12-day journey that would end in tragedy.

“I can’t tell you how a perfectly healthy 16-year-old boy can be making his own peanut butter sandwich late Wednesday night, getting his own tea out the fridge, and head up to bed like any other teenager in the state or in the country is doing. And then within 24 hours is fighting for his life,” Dawn said.

The Marion County Northeast Special Olympics

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