Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

First, some background. My mother and my brother don’t believe in vaccines, or most medicine in general. Yes, she’s a nurse.

They both voted for Donald Trump twice, even when it was clear that he was grossly incompetent and telling his followers to literally commit suicide to try to boost his approval ratings going into the 2020 election.

Mom repeated pretty much all of the Trump/Republican propaganda about COVID-19. That it was overblown, that the Democrats were making it all up. That it would be gone by August of 2020. That the vaccines were dangerous, and “don’t work anyway” despite evidence to the contrary that they were at least a lot better than nothing.

Also, that the FDA was “involved in a conspiracy” to deny people Hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pack (despite the study where the people who got it had many more deaths than the placebo group) and then, later, Ivermectin of course.

I begged with her to get a vaccine, I pleaded with her. I even set up an appointment at an Indiana pop-up vaccine clinic, and she failed to appear after telling me she’d go, and said COVID wasn’t that big of a deal and the vaccines were “causing people to develop heart problems”.

(It has been proven that heart problems from the vaccines are very rare, and that COVID causes over 1,000 times more people who get it to develop heart inflammation than the vaccines, and now she and my brother have COVID instead of a COVID vaccine.)

She wasn’t having any of it. She’s a Christian, and it’s not mainline Protestantism where you just show up and there’s nothing radical going on and you bring a slow cooker full of meatballs every now and then, and everyone’s pretty level headed like most churches in Indiana were just 25 years ago when I was a kid and lived there.

In her church they believe some pretty far out stuff, like that if you grow long hair you can cast out demons and shit.

It’s….appalling, it’s hardly believable that in the 21st century that so many people like this exist, but they do. They’re out there. And they’re the reason why the United States of America has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the whole world.

And she doesn’t just attack COVID vaccines, she attacks ones that have been around for decades and prevent some pretty terrible stuff, like Hepatitis A and B, and Pneumococcal Pneumonia.

In fact, when she called me yesterday to say our vacation was off, leaving me with an expensive two bedroom condominium that I can’t get refunded, so I might as well go and enjoy it now with my spouse, she said that she also has the flu. I suppose it goes without saying that she never gets vaccinated for the flu either.

So after President Biden said that he was going to make it mandatory for healthcare workers, she became even more insistent that she’d just sign religious exemption forms at her employer and go around putting the health of herself and those around her at more risk than was ever necessary, pretty much because she didn’t like President Biden.

I even tried to mention that Trump himself (after he recovered from COVID-19), slinked off and took the vaccine himself, quietly.

In fact, by the time Trump came around and said at one of his rallies that his supporters should just get vaccinated and that there was nothing wrong with it, and they should just do it, they started booing him. He created a monster, and then he couldn’t escape that monster himself, and so after dipping his toe in the water, he never brought it up again.

So, then it gets worse, right? I asked my mom now that she was sick with nausea, vomiting, fatigue, headache, chills, and a temperature of 103 F, if she would go take the pills, and she said no, and then I had to get my cousins after her.

Then finally after I leaned on her and told her that the government pays for Paxlovid (the pills that keep most people who get COVID from going to the hospital, ending up on a ventilator, and dying) and that I didn’t want “two funerals” next week where I was in Indiana burying her and my brother (who has many underlying medical issues), she finally got up and went and got the Paxlovid, and the Nurse Practitioner is calling some in for my brother that he’s supposed to start taking tomorrow.

War breaks out over the telephone, between me in Illinois, and mom in Indiana, because some people would almost rather die than eat crow and admit that they were so horribly wrong and they need to do something now before this really turns into an emergency.

My spouse and I have both gotten our flu shots every year, and we’ve been vaccinated and boosted with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

I had a small argument with him that we were going to the pharmacy to get the booster, but it wasn’t anything like what I’m going through with my mom and brother. I don’t hate them. I just wish they’d knock this off and admit, finally, that their blind political devotion to a failed politician and Facebook conspiracy kooks nearly cost them their lives and that if they somehow pull through having COVID and the flu, they have the scientists and doctors that they were ridiculing throughout the past few years who created the antivirals and prescribed them to thank for this.

Their church didn’t seem to help them. Everyone in church shamed her for watching their livestream while COVID was raging on hard for the first few waves. Then she even admits you go there and someone is always sick with something and wants to hug you anyway.

Very nearly everyone in her church has had COVID, sometimes three times.

A friend of hers there and her husband, who are both a couple of real dimwits, said they’d never get tested again because “the health department was asking all of those nosy questions”.

We need higher standards for healthcare in America, sure.

The fact that you have nurses who don’t believe in medicine and so many doctors who are incompetent and with the bedside manner of a tarantula who just don’t care is frightening.

The only reason I have hesitancy to get medical attention is because there are so many errors, and so many doctors with no skin in the game, who keep the cash register running while they say “We’ll wait and see if this thing that’s bad today while you’re here gets worse before we begin to think about prescribing medicine.”.

In fact, last Christmas, we went to see mom and my brother and eat dinner with them. My spouse was vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and I wasn’t (although I did get Prevnar-13 the next month and plan to get Pneumovax-23 in January). I was around mom who insisted she just had a post-viral cough.

Then I got back to Illinois and came down with Pneumococcal Pneumonia. I spent a month with it, on the couch, blowing my nose, wheezing, hacking up green stuff, running a fever, and trying to find a doctor that would give me antibiotics, and finally one gave me azithromycin and it went away. (Negative for strep, flu, and COVID of course, which I told the doctor at the Urgent Care right away.)

My spouse, vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia, never got it. That was the one vaccine I did not have, and it’s not because I’m a nutcase, but rather because the CDC didn’t recommend it for my age group.

So I went to the pharmacy when I got better and started the series. I lied and said my doctor told me that I have risk factors for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and that I should get the vaccines.

Most of the doctors I ran into at the Lake County Illinois Health Department should lose their license, honestly. And with walk-in clinics it’s hit or miss.

I have decent insurance, so I’m lucky in that I can just try again until I get a doctor that knows what they’re doing and agrees to treat the problem.

Luckier than a lot of people in this country.

It’s easier to tell a little white lie to get the Pneumonia vaccine in your 30s than it is to get Pneumonia, run into a stack of doctors who don’t want to help you and tell you to go to the ER if it gets worse, and then end up with a $12,000 ambulance bill and $50,000 to the hospital when the doctor could have treated you with $15 worth of antibiotics and chose not to.

What blew my mind this week is my mother has Medicare starting yesterday and my brother has totally free healthcare (Medicaid), and they admitted that the plan was to wait around for this thing that’s killing everybody like them to mop the floor with them and then end up in the hospital where it’s a coin toss rather than to take some free medication that’s actually quite good at shutting down severe illness.

As for the vacation, hopefully things turn around by next week. I mean, it ruined their trip to the state park, which I was paying for, but hopefully it won’t get a hell of a lot worse for them than that and my spouse and I will be hiking in the park and watching the bald eagles while mom and my brother just have a shitty month instead of dying.

I’ll let you know.

But for the record, please take your vaccines, or at least don’t wait to start the antiviral medications if you get it.

You’re someone’s family member, and very few people really have to die of COVID-19 at this point. If you choose to die of COVID-19 simply to prove a point, it’s like putting your family members through a suicide.

It’s a choice you make that’s selfish and it’s wrong of you.

As for my family, it seems like every time we plan something, mom and my brother are sick. They even got me with Pneumonia last year. I guess we’ll still go and visit, but I’ll be up to date on my shots this time around.

The really sad thing about my mom and brother and Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that if they absolutely insisted on dying over Donald Trump’s lies, Joe Biden wouldn’t know, and they’d be victims of the 2020 election conspiracies that Trump was engaged in, like the last Japanese soldier on the island who refused to admit that World War II was over, and kept shooting at people until 1973.

Trump sees his supporters as pawns. If he gets them killed, he doesn’t care. He’s an immoral person to say the least.

Thanks to Donald Trump and various Facebook cranks, my life traded paint this week with the possibility of burying my mom and brother.

He doesn’t care that people like my mom, who couldn’t answer half the questions on the practice citizenship test, didn’t really, honestly, and truly believe in COVID despite the fact that she’s a nurse and has seen it wipe out nursing homes,, and even when she got it herself, she was still in this state of denial while the hourglass was running on doing something about it.

This country really went wrong when people like her and my dad let a failed businessman take hold of the highest office because they made decisions based on emotions and prejudices instead of the facts at hand.

They’ll always be my family, and I love them. I just wish they could see that when they give in to fear, and ignorance, and hatred…they suffer for it as well.

As for whether religion is to blame?

Religion is crazy stuff, but it’s the result of of all of these things, not the cause. Even if we were lucky enough to have religion disappear tomorrow, we’d still have bigots.

There’s plenty of bigots who don’t believe in God, I’m sorry to say, but the truly disgusting thing is that most of the bigots are religious because it makes it easier to play it off as “It’s not me, man….It’s all here in the book, yo!”.

Religion is a problem in the family that I’ve been dealing with since a long time before COVID came around and is a completely different subject entirely. But one of the problems is that it really messes with people’s heads, and then they think they can just, like, pray, and stuff will get better on its own without medication, or effort, or work, or a drive to improve themselves.

Self-improvement is the only way people grow. Religion is truly evil because it stops people from growing and makes them fine with how things are and should not be.

I’ve never been happy with the way my life was, and I suspect most people aren’t. Some turn to drugs and alcohol, others to sex and gambling or cutting themselves, but religion is in that group. And they hate it when you say that, but it’s there.

I liked how Rick Sanchez put it. If I recall correctly, “Passively accepting that horrible things are happening is a quality I admire in my food animals. When I don’t like how things are, I change them!”.

Every day above ground is a small victory.