Tag Archives: Sarah Gibbens

On Not Getting the Memo

There’s a doctor north of Kingston, Ontario, Sabra Gibbens, who still masks and requires her patients to mask. She wrote about it in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Finding her article feels like finding some kind of rare bird or an exit sign in a corn maze.

Who is this doctor? Can I have one like her too? My GP “mask mirrors” now, which is better than nothing, but with this virus lingering in the air for nine hours, he’s not the only exhaler I’m concerned about.

Who is it that didn’t get the memo? Gibbens or her colleagues? Did she not get the memo to pretend SARS-CoV-2 is over or did her colleagues not get the memo that everyone is still getting sick and maybe part of their job is the prevention of contagious illness? Doctors are supposed to protect their patients, even when those measures bug some entitled cry-babies.

You know I’m losing my shit when I call anyone a cry-baby. But there it is.

I didn’t get the memo to stop caring about Covid. Or I got it and said, “Um, that doesn’t seem right.” At time of writing at least six people I know have had terrible bouts of it in the last two months.

Recently, I talked on the phone with an old friend coming out of six weeks of terrible illness. Too sick to call 911, at one point they were unable to breathe and certain they would die alone. But it never occurred to them that they may have had SARS-CoV-2. They report they are much diminished now. Others are sick but don’t test or even admit that what they have could be SARS-CoV-2. They have a mystery illness that lasts for weeks, and soon after post unmasked photos of themselves in restaurants or at events. I say nothing. Except here.

I remember many years ago when I lived in Calgary, there was an explosion a the Hub Oil Plant, which was not that far from where I lived. (Check out YouTube for some great video.) As the sky filled with black smoke, I started packing. Authorities were doing the “everything is fine” thing, but my eyes and lungs told my brain to flee and I popped the kiddo into the VW camper and off we went, far far away from the fire and the thick black smoke. As always, I was considered alarmist, even by my own partner, but sometimes you just have to listen to that little voice. Mine was screaming. Later that summer we were advised maybe not to eat our garden produce, but even that warning seemed to leak out without approval and was quickly expunged from the record. This was Alberta, after all. Absolutely nothing can be wrong with oil and gas.

Oil and gaslighting aside for now, (but do please read Sarah Kendzior’s excellent book, They Knew) I am similarly unsurprised by medical gaslighting.

It’s awfully difficult for a person like me, trying to live through an iatrogenic heart and lung disaster, to depend on the skill and support of as many doctors as I do, to trust their medical knowledge about my heart and lungs, while simultaneously acknowledging that they did not read the same memo as me.

Maybe I should print Gibbens’s article and tape it to my hospital door. For now, I’m simply grateful she wrote it. Thank you, Sabra Gibbens. Your patients have a real gem in you.