I feel compelled to comment about your recent episode with COVID and the loss of your husband's brother to this horrible disease. Yesterday, I started reading Sea of Tranquility a novel by Emily St. John Mandel. (I purchased it a couple of months ago when I read it was on Barack Obama's summer reading list.) It was so engaging I stayed up until the wee hours this morning to finish it, something I have not done in a long while. Here is the quote I wish to share (hardcover page 83):
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
I feel compelled to comment about your recent episode with COVID and the loss of your husband's brother to this horrible disease. Yesterday, I started reading Sea of Tranquility a novel by Emily St. John Mandel. (I purchased it a couple of months ago when I read it was on Barack Obama's summer reading list.) It was so engaging I stayed up until the wee hours this morning to finish it, something I have not done in a long while. Here is the quote I wish to share (hardcover page 83):
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
Thanks so much for sharing this, Kevin. I will put that book on my to-read list.
As a nurse I experienced and pondered the “awful randomness” of illness.