Saturday, February 12, 2022.
It’s been over a year since I’ve posted a blog—including two of the most consequential years of the last 100. The great Covid pandemic has transformed medicine, our society and our lives. Over 800,000 dead, in the US alone. Millions more now chronically ill. Millions put out of work, restaurants and other businesses devastated, And our society split in two by those who deny basic science and belief in base conspiracy theories about public health figures who have devoted their lives to helping saving others with common sense measures like quarantines, masks, and vaccines.
The damage to children has been overwhelming. Billions of children around the world lost a year of school— which is not only about education, but a chance for the crucial developmental tasks of socialization, learning new skills, getting out of the house and away from screens, and sometimes, to escape domestic discord and violence.
Our pediatric practice, like other out patient medical groups, has been on a roller-coaster. Not on the front lines, but in the reserves, we stayed open from day one, even though, for a while, no children were coming to see us. When they did, we shared PPP like the rest of the medical community, scrounging for N95 masks and cleaning wipes, taking out loans to stay open, and seeing the early retirement of staff and providers. Now we are super busy, as kids went back to school, and lately came down with Omicron in droves. Some of these young people have become quite sick, if they were not vaccinated.
Anxiety and depression, which were already epidemic in the pediatric population, became truly pandemic. Half of pediatric emergency room beds, or more, have been filled with kids awaiting psychiatric placement. Child psychiatrists remained as rare as Republicans who believe that Joe Biden actually was elected President. Therapists too remained hard to find, though Holyoke Pediatrics is very fortunate to have three excellent ones working for us.
For many children and adults, psychological pain emerged as physical discomfort—headaches, stomachaches, and so on.
The gratifying thing is that I have been able to help many of these children— thanks to my training in clinical hypnosis.
I remember one boy I shall call Derek. It was about 9 months into the pandemic. He caught Covid. We saw and still see most of these children virtually, though if they need to be seen in person, we will do that too. I was actually feeling ill myself, so I was staying home, awaiting the results of a PCR tests.
I said that I could see several patients at home, on my desk top computer.
Derek had a history of asthma, which was under good control. He also had a history of anxiety.
Now he was coughing, had a low grade fever, and felt lousy. But he was eating, and drinking, and with his shirt off, I could tell he was not working hard to breathe. Like the vast majority of children, I knew he would recover within a week, at home.
But Derek thought he was going to die. His mom agreed that he was about to have a panic attack.
I reassured Derek that Covid could be a bad infection, but for healthy children like him,
It was almost always a mild illness—that his own immune system, those millions of soldiers we have in our body called white blood cells— would do a great job defending him. He was going to get better. And he could help himself.
“How can I do that?” he asked, with a look of dread in his eyes.
“Start by simply filling your belly with air, breathing through your nose. Imagine there is a balloon down there.”
I directed him to do belly breathing, counting up to three bananas with each in breath, four with each out breath. He liked bananas, I said he could even imagine eating one, throwing the peel away and watching his big sister slip and fall. His body relaxed as he smiled and chuckled.
I’ve learned that laughter is the enemy of worry.