David J. Danto

Business travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD

My Personal Message

As those of you who’ve followed my blogs over the years know, I write about travel and technology and life experiences that can benefit other people. For this week I’m giving myself the license to put those subjects aside and give you a brief glimpse of what’s going on in my life.

Over the last two or so years I’ve been working with healthcare professionals to figure out what’s been not quite right with my health. Finally, a few months ago, it was definitively diagnosed to be something in my body that shouldn’t be there. The specifics and details are not relevant to the story that I’m telling, so I will omit them, but suffice to say I was told the “100% cure” for my issues was to remove the part and get on with life. I was told it is a robotically performed surgical procedure that is extremely easy, requiring a two night stay in a hospital, and needing only about a week’s recovery.

I had the surgery about two weeks ago as you read this. It was a 100% successful procedure. I was very sore in the hospital for two nights, went home on the third day, and have been recovering to the point that I no longer feel the soreness anywhere except the incisions.

I have nothing but respect for the tremendous healthcare professionals that took what would have been a much more difficult and complex issue a decade or two ago and made everything seem simple.

While I was in the hospital however, I was unable to wear my N95 mask 100% of the time. It was just too hard to do under some of the circumstances. I had it off maybe 30% of the time. That was enough. Three days after coming home to recover I started to feel very run-down, and five days after coming home I had a fever and tested positive for a breakthrough case of COVID-19.

I’m fully vaccinated and I received my booster shot last August, so for me COVID is an annoyance but not a death sentence – something the anti-vax crowd just refuses to understand. My fever lasted less than 24 hours, and now I’m dealing with what is acting just like a bad cold. I’m sure I’ll survive. My biggest problem is recovering from surgery at home but needing to isolate from my family. Isolation in one’s own home is difficult enough, but needing to tell your after surgery caregivers to stay-away from you makes life more difficult than it needed to be.

Why am I telling you all this? Damn good question.

One of the particular dysfunctions I grew up with in my family was a need to find something or someone to blame for everything. “Your stomach hurts? It must have been the fish you had yesterday.” “Caught a cold? You never should have went outside without your jacket.” Now, many years later, I understand how broken that kind of thinking is, but it is still an automatic place for my head to go. So as I lie here and recover, my mind just slips into the natural slot of trying to find the culprit. I could blame the initial, underlying cause of the hospitalization, but there seems to be no point to doing that. I could blame the healthcare staff at the hospital for working while either sick or not fully recovered, but then if they didn’t do that during a pandemic I never would have been able to get the lifesaving care I needed.

After much useless contemplation, I seem to be coming back to one conclusion. I blame the same COVIDiots I’ve been writing about for two years. If everyone had stayed-home those initial few months when this all started the pandemic would be over by now. If everyone had received their vaccinations when eligible then the virus would not still be propagating and mutating and we would never have seen this latest variant become so widespread. If people had worn their masks religiously then the spread of this disease would have been far diminished. If the issue of beating a deadly pandemic had not become so politicized by assholes seeking personal power and political office, our lives would be back to normal much more so than they are today.

As the US approaches a million dead from this disease I contemplate not just how many of those might have lived if the ‘give me my horse-dewormer’ crowd had just listened to the science, but I can now add to that thought how much less suffering I personally would have had to go through this last and next week as I recover from now two simultaneous hits.

In closing, I’ll say again what I’ve been saying for 2+ years. PLEASE stay vigilant against this disease to stay safe:

· Wear N95 or KN95 masks when outside of your home.

· Don’t eat in indoor restaurants unless they have fresh air / great ventilation.

· Get vaccinated and boosted ASAP!

If you don’t want to do it for yourself then please do it for the next person who might need medical care and either can’t get into a hospital because they’re full, or goes in only to leave with a worse disease than they went in with. Please don’t be a COVIDiot.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.

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As always, feel free to write and comment, question or disagree. Hearing from the traveling community is always a highlight for me. Thanks!