Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out On How Corporate PR is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans, by Wendell Potter.
Maybe you’re thinking, why in the world would I want to read a book with a title like THAT during a pandemic?!
Well, here’s why.
Something different happened this past weekend. Lockdown could be summarized as weeks of mental torpor and fatigue, wishing I was inspired to be creative while I was stuck at home. With few exceptions, I crept through the occasional project with little enthusiasm.
Friday came. Finally, I had the energy and inspiration to start a sewing project – one I’d been planning for a long time but hadn’t had the bandwidth to get started on. It came out just as I’d hoped.
The next day, I tackled a wall mural that I’d been planning for months. It was a group project with the kids. We had our moments – like when I hit my head on the door frame while doing some of the detail work on the mural, but somehow, every kid (except my oldest, who didn’t care) got to help paint a section of the mural or consult on color choice.
When you live in a house with others, sometimes when another person experiences a mental shift, it’s like the wind has changed direction and everyone can feel it.
I’m a homebody and an introvert, but being home all day, every day with my kids during lockdown with no breaks and almost no adult interaction beyond the Chaplain has been a hit to my mental health. Through it all, though, there have been little things that pepped me up when I was falling apart. Here are five of my favorites from the last week or so:
Last night the Chaplain and I were catching up on John Oliver and Trevor Noah, and saw a clip of an Amazon worker, pleading for non-essential items to stop being sold. He is risking his life, he said, to package and ship dildos.
How are employees having to work at a time like this in order to package the unnecessary stress purchases of others? I am anxious and afraid, and I’m a nurse. I cannot imagine being told I was an essential worker, showing up for work, and then having to do something like taking care of patients who had had elective surgery to get horn implants. Or a tail.
We celebrated Women’s History Month in March. If you’re like me, you might have missed it (along with St. Patrick’s Day, the first day of spring, and my sister’s birthday) with everything else that’s been going on.
The last day we visited our local library before it closed, there was a display by the registration desk full of books by women, and I picked up two. Oftentimes, when I “impulse buy” at the library, I have to return the books before I get to read them. These days are not like other days, and I am stuck indefinitely with the books I picked up on that last visit. I’ve slowly been making my way through them.
