Post 208 - October 5, 2020

Day 208…

Quarantine - Day 8

I’ve decided to grow a beard.

Well, to be fair, I should say that I’ve decided to TRY and grow a beard.

The last time that I actually tried to grow one I was in my twenties. It ended up more of a goatee than a beard. The area just below my sideburns is somewhat follicly-challenged so I didn’t really have a choice.

At the time I was the assistant stage manager on the Broadway musical, The Secret Garden. Howard McGillin, who was playing Mary Lennox’s father, Archibald Craven, had a goatee as well.

My having a goatee, made it slightly hard to tell us apart and audience members would often ask me to sign their playbills thinking I was him. One day, a woman got so angry with me when I tried to convince her that I wasn’t Howard, that I just signed it for her. After that, it was easier to just sign than get into the discussion that I wasn’t the person they thought I was. I signed with my own signature which is messy and abstract enough that it could have been anybody’s.

To this day, I am sure that there are people out there who think that they have Howard’s autograph when, in reality, they just have mine.

The President took a joy ride outside of the hospital yesterday. Not since OJ Simpson’s low-speed chase in the white Bronco has an SUV out on the road gotten so much coverage.

The reports about his condition have gotten more and more murky and contradictory with each passing hour. The worst part of that is the realization that the White House is so disorganized that it cannot even control the messaging from its own staffers.

There is a long history of Presidents hiding the truth about their medical statuses in the United States. This President is hardly the first.

When Woodrow Wilson was elected to the Presidency in 1912, a prominent military physician predicted that he wouldn’t last through his first term because of his poor health. He did make it through his first term, but in the middle of his second term, he suffered a series of strokes that ultimately left him partially paralyzed.

Rather than tell the public about his condition, Edith Wilson, his wife, essentially assumed the Presidency behind closed doors and ran the country for the final two years of his term. They managed to keep his true condition a secret. He survived for another three years after the end of his second term before finally passing away.

At the point he was incapacitated, the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution that provides for either the permanent or temporary transfer of power to the Vice President had not been ratified. It wouldn’t be put into place until 1967.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was stricken by what was probably polio, in 1921. He became the Governor of New York eight years later and then in 1933 began serving the first of what ended up being three terms as the President of the United States.

Remarkably, from 1921 on, Roosevelt did not have use of his legs. He was a paraplegic.

He was confined to a wheelchair but still managed to figure out a way to appear to be able to walk. Using specially designed leg-braces and relying on a cane and the support of a companion, he could give the appearance of being mobile. He did not want to seem weak to the public. The press, amazingly enough, largely went along with it. His Secret Service remained on the lookout for anybody who might try to photograph him struggling and stopped them. The overwhelming majority of the country remained unaware of FDR’s condition throughout the course of his Presidency.

President Eisenhower, who served two terms beginning in 1952, had a whole list of medical issues, the severity of which was kept hidden.

He suffered from painful abdominal adhesions that were the result of an appendectomy. During his first term he suffered a heart attack that was severe enough that his cardiologist tried to keep him from running for a second term. He ignored that advise and ran anyway. During his second term he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, a gastrointestinal condition that required surgery. Shortly after that he suffered a stroke. Almost all of that was hidden from the American public.

President John F. Kennedy suffered from chronic back pain from the time that he was a student at Harvard. It was severe enough that it disqualified him from military service. His powerful father, however, pulled some strings and got him into the Naval reserves. The back pain stayed with him throughout his life.

He also suffered from a painful gastrointestinal condition that was finally diagnosed as being Addison’s disease. His perpetual tan could be traced to being one of the side-effects of the steroids used to treat it.

Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 led Congress to start drafting what ultimately became the 25th amendment four years later.

President Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years after he left office, but his son claims to have seen signs of it while he was still serving as President. There were rumors of his dementia throughout his terms in office. He had multiple cancer scares while he was in office. He had multiple polyps removed from his colon, one of which was found to be cancerous.

After he was shot and survived an assassination attempt, he publicly claimed to be fully recovered from the wound when, in reality, he suffered debilitating effects from it for many years. Most of that only came to light years after it happened.

Our current President, like some of those who came before him, is also trying to hide the truth about his condition. Unlike his predecessors, however, he is hampered by both by an inability to control a completely disorganized circle of supporters around him as well as by his own inability to control himself.

In the years between Regan’s time in office and the current time, the internet has also made it increasingly difficult for anybody to pull off a cover-up in the way some of those earlier Presidents were able to do. Everybody is watching all day every day.

The White House released two different pictures of the President working in two different areas of the hospital. He is wearing a jacket in one and not in the other. They were purported to be from two different days, but the meta-data contained in the digital images confirmed that they were actually taken only ten minutes apart. It is also apparent that the important papers that he is supposed to be signing are actually blank pieces of paper. Clearly, they were staged.

It seems, reading between the lines from what various doctors and staffers have said, that the President has been given supplemental oxygen at least twice, meaning that his oxygen levels have dropped precipitously at least two times.

His own Chief of Staff announced that the President was in the most critical phase of this disease.

He has been administered two experimental drugs, one of which has up to now only been available for compassionate care - meaning that the patient is facing such serious problems that there are no other options.

The other, a steroid he was given, dexamethasone, can have side effects which include mania, impulsivity and grandiosity. With someone who already has these things it can amp it up. It is typically administered only when there is an acute respiratory crisis.

This could help explain the President’s ill-conceived ride out to wave at his supporters.

Obviously, this isn’t the first time the President has put other people in harm’s way for a photo op. Clearing peaceful protestors out of Lafayette Square using tear gas so that he could pose for pictures holding a bible comes to mind. This photo-op, however, was even more absurd.

The SUV that the President was driven in is armored and hermetically sealed against a possible chemical attack.

An attending physician at Walter Reed, Dr. James Phillips tweeted that the risk of the agents contracting the virus inside that car is, “as high as it gets outside of medical procedures… Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

The Secret Service can stop the President from doing something or going somewhere if it puts HIM in danger, but they are not allowed to stop him if it puts THEM in danger.

There are some agents who are now speaking up, off the record. One told a reporter for the Washington Post, “He’s not even pretending to care now.” Another told a CNN reporter, “That should never have happened. The frustration with how we're treated when it comes to decisions on this illness goes back before this though. We're not disposable."

Yesterday, the President tweeted, “It has been a very interesting journey. I’ve learned a lot about Covid.”

This from the man that has ostensibly been leading us through this global pandemic.

This from the man who should have been attending coronavirus briefings in the White House by the nation’s top health Officials for every. single. day. of the last six months. Any other person in this man’s position would now be among the most informed people on the planet in terms of what is known about this virus.

He’s only learning about it now because it is directly affecting him.

7,423,328 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19.

209,857 Americans have now lost their lives to the virus or complications that arose from having contracted it.

Two hundred and nine thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven people dead and only NOW he starts to pay attention and begin to learn about it?

Wow, do we deserve better. We deserve better from him and we deserve honesty from the people around him.

His Press Secretary, one of his most loyal mouthpieces did not quarantine despite knowing that she’d come into contact with people who have tested positive. She has just announced this morning that she, too, has now tested positive for the coronavirus. Two of her deputies now have it as well.

The Attorney General, after all the footage of him interacting at the Rose Garden event with Kellyanne Conway has said that he is quarantining, “for now”.

Will any of these people follow their own guidelines which state that everyone MUST isolate for ten days either after first exposure or after the last of their symptoms have stopped.

Health officials and state mandates put the duration at fourteen days, but it seems unlikely that any of these politicians and their supporters will even be willing to do the ten. The President is actually hoping to go back to the White House TODAY which will put every single person who works there directly in harm’s way.

I had no idea when I went into quarantine last week, what this would be like. I have to say that I have no complaints whatsoever. Zero.

Would I like to go for a walk? Of course. Doing this, however, is the right thing to do. And, honestly, it just isn’t that much of a hardship at all.

I have a nice place to shelter in. I have a husband who I love who is taking excellent care of me by bringing me things I need as well as the occasional thing I don’t. I have the on and off company of my cat and one of the most extraordinary news cycles I have ever been witness to, is unfolding in front of me on a daily basis. If I can do this, so can all of those idiots in Washington.

Wear a mask. Maintain a minimum distance of six feet between you and anyone else. Use common sense. We are in the middle of a global pandemic - ALL of us.

And I have a beard to monitor, now, too.

I will say that it’s coming in much whiter than it did back in the day. I fear it is heading towards Tom Hanks’s in Castaway, but time will tell.

I have a week left inside.

Plenty of time to watch and see what unfolds.