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.
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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.