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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 22, 2022)
The BulleTin • SaTurday, January 22, 2022 B5 EDITORIALS & OPINIONS AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER Heidi Wright Gerry O’Brien Richard Coe Publisher Editor Editorial Page Editor Dear President Biden, about that invitation D ear Mr. President, We were listening to your news conference when you said you would seek more advice about what you should and shouldn’t be doing from a list of notables, including “editorial writers.” As certain as we are that an invita- tion to the White House is coming, we thought we should write, just in case. We would rather not go down in history as that editorial writer who suggested that the president not bring in editorial writers, but here goes: It may not be the best idea. Editorial writers already have plat- forms. You can easily access the best they can do. If they aren’t already giv- ing their best, we doubt they would do much better with a White House invitation. As an alternative, we recommend investing some time each day in a dif- ferent community newspaper from around the country. They are not per- fect reflections of the challenges and triumphs of their communities. The articles and letters to the editor don’t necessarily easily translate into policy. Regular reading, though, can provide a potent metric. It is all the more poi- gnant, because there are not so many anymore. Some communities no lon- ger have a watchdog to bark. If we had to pick something unique to The Bulletin’s coverage that might suggest what should be on the presi- dential to-do list, what immediately comes to mind is a kind of three-way tie. One of the high schools in the Bend-La Pine district had a gradu- ation rate last year of 59%. Appall- ing. Alarming. Worrying for the fu- ture. What else could or should the federal government do to help our schools? If you were to drive along Sec- ond Street in Bend or out on Hun- nell Road, it is inescapable that this community needs better solutions for people who are homeless. There’s debate within the community about what should be done. But there are not enough resources to provide housing and support to people who desperately need it. Third, take the Warm Springs challenge. Pledge as president to only drink water bottled from a kitchen faucet from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. Keep at that until the boil water notices go away. An absurd action for the president to take? No more absurd than the boil-water notices that have kept re- turning to Warm Springs. Yes, money for improvements may be on the way. That’s what we have heard for years. We’d hope that if a president can do anything, it’s ensure no American spends another year worrying about what comes from their tap. If you do end up inviting editorial writers to the White House, keep them away from the booze. And if you are interested, bet we can get you a deal on a subscription to The Bulletin. Historical editorial: Nolan’s deserved fate e Editor’s note: This historical editorial originally appeared in what was then called The Bend Bulletin on March 8, 1907. W hile the charges brought by Register Nolan against The Dalles land office were under investigation it was proper to suspend judgment. Now that the case has resulted in the re- moval of Mr. Nolan for making baseless charges the marks of des- perate politics, which The Bulle- tin spoke of at the time, seem to be clearer. Mr. Nolan’s arbitrary course had long lost him the confidence of the people who came in con- tact with the office and it brought much inconvenience and hardship to innocent persons. Before he had learned the business, he was an ar- rogant disaster. He had long sought to discredit his associate, Miss Anne Long. She, having almost been “brought up” in that land office, fa- miliar with every detail, jealous of its record, and being a clear-headed business woman, naturally chafed under the criticism which the regis- ter’s course brought upon the office. But she made no “roar.” She let No- lan dig a pit and fall into it.... Nolan seems to occupy the position of a man who, having set out to pull a house down, merely fell off the steps and broke his own neck. editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher heidi Wright, editor Gerry O’Brien and editorial Page editor richard Coe. They are written by richard Coe. Love letter to the regular pickup game BY JAMES BOYLE Special to The Washington Post I t’s mid-January, and our New Year’s resolutions are looking peaked, if they haven’t already perished. A lot of them involve get- ting more exercise, and for lots of us that exercise has a place: the regu- lar pickup game. Maybe you have a group that meets every weekend for volleyball or soccer or pickleball, or maybe there are folks you exercise with by running or biking or taking a yoga class. This is a love letter to those groups. They have been hit hard by the pan- demic. But they struggle along, and we need them. They foster a sense of fellowship, one where the normal hier- archies are made meaningless: Watch the investment banker preen after the insanely athletic landscaper, and star of the league, says, “Nice shot.” These games are suffused with de- nial and acceptance. Denial because we keep going back out there believ- ing, despite all the evidence, that we’re going to get back those six inches of vertical leap, that step of speed we lost along the way. Acceptance because, all around you, you can see others going through the same process: The players at my regular outdoor volleyball game are festooned with so many neoprene braces that we could assemble several credible wet suits. We buy ibuprofen by the tub. We laugh at ourselves and at one another. Then, when that wonderful game comes along, the one where every- thing goes right, we discard all ev- idence of decline and see it as clear proof of a positive trend. If you find the right group, there’s a curiously delicate kind- ness-from-strangers that emerges. People don’t associate pickup games with Brontë-level formal courtesy and consideration, but in a weird way they coexist. I have been told, with manifest and deeply appreciated dis- honesty, that my play in the last game was “fine” by people who from the outside look as though politesse or kindness were the last things on their minds. After you’ve single-handedly lost the game, your teammates are the only people who can cheer you. Not your spouse, not your best friend. There are dramas, of course, and even romances. What really happened between Courtney and the Bra- zilian outside hitter? You don’t ask, and we won’t tell. It’s a private and forgiving world. My volleyball group has been together for 20 years. Rules might have changed for every other volleyball game on the planet, but on our grass court, it’s still the 1980s, when many of us found the sport. Players wash in and out with the rhythms of the seasons. A player named Vu, originally from Vietnam, was quiet when he first joined our game. We couldn’t tell how good he was. Then he made an incredible play. Was it a flash in the pan? A couple of points later, he did it again and smiled modestly. “Deja ... Vu,” he said. Over those two decades in the Game That Time Forgot, marriages and hip joints have crumbled. Stal- warts move away and then fly back for a reunion game. We’ve suffered illnesses and professional reverses and had triumphs and recoveries. Any- one who plays in any regular pickup game in any sport could tell similar stories about their own game, their own group. These are trivial little rituals and communities, unnoticed by the rest of the world, unchronicled. Their lore is strictly oral, their culture ephemeral. It is a subject that would bore your col- leagues and friends in exactly the way that a dream that was deeply mean- ingful to you is unspeakably te- dious when you try to ex- plain why it mattered. But it does. It matters very much. Hence this love letter. These thoughts are prompted by the grief I feel about my departure from my own regu- lar pickup game. My immune system recently decided to start eating my nervous system, which was extremely impolite. If you were going to binge eat over the holidays, couldn’t you go for smoked pork butt and fried pota- toes, rather than myelin sheaths? But someday soon, I will hobble down to watch my friends play. Maybe Vu will even be back in town. And if he makes that shot, I’ll say, “Deja Vu,” and be comforted. e James Boyle is a law professor at Duke Law School. Letters policy Guest columns How to submit We welcome your letters. letters should be limited to one issue, contain no more than 250 words and include the writer’s phone number and address for verifica- tion. We edit letters for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject poetry, personal attacks, form letters, letters sub- mitted elsewhere and those appropriate for other sections of The Bulletin. Writers are limited to one letter or guest column every 30 days. your submissions should be between 550 and 650 words and must include the writer’s phone number and address for verification. We edit submissions for brevity, grammar, taste and legal reasons. We reject those submitted elsewhere. lo- cally submitted columns alternate with national columnists and commentaries. Writers are limited to one letter or guest column every 30 days. Please address your submission to either My nickel’s Worth or Guest Column and mail, fax or email it to The Bulletin. email submissions are preferred. email: letters@bendbulletin.com Write: My nickel’s Worth/Guest Column P.O. Box 6020 Bend, Or 97708 Fax: 541-385-5804 The ER is used to stress, but omicron made our jobs impossible BY MEGAN L. RANNEY Special to The Washington Post W alking into a shift in the emergency department these days feels a bit like en- tering a disaster zone. There are 50-odd patients in the waiting room needing to be seen. A number of beds are closed in the emergency department and across the rest of the hospital because of a lack of staffing. We’re holding a half- dozen acute mental health patients who desperately need care because there’s no room in psychiatric hos- pitals. A few bed-bound patients are ready to leave but don’t have a ride to wherever they’re going, so they’ll be spending the night with us; there’s no one to drive the ambulances to transport them. And a couple dozen more patients have been waiting on emergency department stretchers for hours after evaluation, until an in- tensive care unit, medical or surgical bed becomes available. Meanwhile, we can’t use these emergency depart- ment staff or beds to care for those sitting in the waiting room with yet- to-be-diagnosed problems. Instead, I’m scanning the waiting room list to try to find the “needle in the haystack” — someone with a life-threatening ill- ness that we haven’t identified yet. By the time the patients make it to me, I’m playing catch-up on their pain, their illness and their frustration. As an emergency physician, I thrive in challenging situations. In the best emergency care, I work with my team to quickly stabilize a sick patient, cre- ate trust with them and their family, and then come up with a clear diag- nosis and therapeutic plan. In pre-pandemic times, I was usu- ally able to do this. The system some- times worked against me, most often because a patient lacked the right in- surance to get the tests and treatments they needed. And sometimes we struggled with an acute surge of pa- tients. For example, on a rainy night, we’d get overwhelmed with folks who’d been in car crashes. During flu season, we’d be crowded with influ- enza patients for a week or two. These surges were frustrating but usually rel- atively short. Depending on how you count, though, we’re currently on our fourth or fifth surge of COVID-19 cases. As our health care system is pummeled by yet another wave, it’s just too much. We never recovered from the last wave. Across the country, emergency de- partments, intensive care units and ambulance services are overwhelmed. According to data from the Depart- ment of Health and Human Services, almost 80% of inpatient beds and 83% of intensive care unit beds are being used; other data sources suggest that these estimates do not fully account for staffing limitations and that even fewer staffed beds are available. Hos- pitals in almost half the states have paused or stopped nonemergency surgeries because of staffing shortages and hospital overcrowding, resulting in further stresses on the system, on patients and on providers. As the severe cases accumulate, the distress among providers does, too. It’s certainly because of the exhaustion of caring for horribly sick COVID-19 patients yet again — especially now that the disease is so preventable. But even more, it’s the moral harm from the other cases, the ones that have nothing to do with COVID-19 except that they’ve been overtaken by the pandemic. It’s knowing that an elderly man was on a stretcher for hours with a broken hip, lying in his own urine, because there was no one to care for him. It’s the emotional exhaustion from assuaging the understandable anger of families calling for updates, only to be told that their loved one has not been evaluated yet after many hours in the waiting room. “I just don’t think I can go back again tomorrow,” one friend texted me after a particularly demoralizing shift. And every staff member who leaves causes a domino effect. One small example: There are not enough emergency medical techni- cians. As a result, a patient might wait more than 12 hours for transportation after they are ready for discharge to a nursing facility or back home. That patient waits in a bed that could be used for someone with chest pain that might be a blood clot, belly pain that might be appendicitis or a broken arm that needs pain meds. Of course, this isn’t just about the coronavirus. Rather, the pandemic has laid bare the myriad inefficiencies and frank failures in our health care system that we had managed to paper over until a real crisis came along. Two years ago, I hoped the pan- demic would help us marshal re- sources and political will to finally fix this system. But now, I worry that the fixes are not going to come. It increas- ingly seems that after the pandemic we’ll be left with something far worse: scarcity, inaccessibility, compassion fatigue. So yes, I will celebrate like everyone else when the omicron wave passes. But I know there will be another one — probably another coronavirus vari- ant, but possibly something else. My colleagues and I will keep show- ing up for work. Because if we don’t, who will? But we have been changed — and not for the better. e Megan L. Ranney is an emergency physician and the academic dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University.
