Op-Ed: The pandemic, Hurricane Ian and me — a doctor whose friends say I have PTSD
With the pandemic now over, we have been busy preparing the nation for what comes next.
And it has been particularly difficult to make sense of a devastating health and economic crisis in which millions of people have fallen ill and millions more have lost their jobs or had to work from home.
One of the lessons learned is that while it is very difficult to see and hear the “drama” around every news story coming out of the country as a nation, it can also be difficult to see people — and their stories — in the context of the broader reality.
And that is what we are left with after all this time.
The pandemic is only a part of our lives and yet it has been so long.
After a year and a half of being home with my wife, now wife, and our newborn, I had begun to realize something important: I needed to find my footing. To find a new way of living, to find a new way of “going on” — whatever the reality of that may be.
I started therapy, I took a break from my career as a physician, I started writing — and I was able to do it as a freelancer.
And I had a second epiphany as well: That my experiences over the last several years — with my own parents in particular, and with their struggles with depression and PTSD — were part of my story.
I have now been writing my medical column for my hometown newspaper, and for the community’s newspaper, for the past two years. I wrote the article about my relationship with cancer called “The Last Days of Joe Wicks, aka Doctor Joe,” which appeared in the April 2020 issue of the Daily Mountain Journal.
My column, “The Last Days of Joe Wicks, aka Doctor Joe,” published in the April 23, 2020, edition of