I caught a cold after Thanksgiving. Twenty-one family members had gathered, mostly outside, and two small children brought runny noses with them. Little stinkers 🙂 Naturally, we thought it might be COVID-19 because, as a friend recently said, “Will there ever again be a time we think any illness isn’t COVID?” Probably not. So out …
Is it really as simple as eating less?
Since I've been writing about Covid for nearly a year now in my Arizona Daily Star columns, I've received dozens of emails from anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and even people who think Covid is a hoax. Thankfully, those latter are few and far between. Through these emails I've learned a number of things, including the negative cost …
Natural immunity should count for something
In case you haven’t noticed, people are dog tired of #pandemiclife. It was one thing to be locked down for a few months in March of 2020, a communal effort to save the elderly and protect hospitals from implosion. The vast majority of people took the sacrifice in stride. But we just passed the 18-month …
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Trying civil discourse with the unvaccinated
This column took me so long to research and write that I was flat laid out for a bit after it ran. Ergo, the delayed posting here for my dedicated followers! I spent two months this summer in mostly email dialogue with a number of unvaccinated acquaintances. It was frustrating because the vast majority of …
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Am I worthy? Are the bishops?
“The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak. … The Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone with all their problems.” -- Pope Francis I …
Someone called me honorable
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists just announced its 2021 Contest Winners and I got a badge – see the sidebar to your right. There were 200 entries from 120 publications for ten categories. I received Honorable Mention in the Crisis Category, along with two other great columnists. This means, as I explained to my …
Life in an almost post-COVID world
The day the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced that persons fully vaccinated against COVID-19 could go back to pre-pandemic behaviors, my family was driving up to Flagstaff with a box of American-made, FDA-approved surgical masks to give guests at our son’s wedding. The announcement was both cause for celebration and confusion. Celebration because more …
Once, we all believed doctors ….
Brutal honesty: A side effect of this pandemic has been an increase in my distrust of other people. I hate this. And yet how can I trust someone who thinks that the more than 500,000 U.S. citizens who've died from Covid didn't actually die from Covid? According to these deniers, hospitals coded all deaths beginning …
Public worship versus public health
Last weekend for Easter, some of my family ventured inside a church for the first time since COVID-19 hit Arizona. I remained home, huddled up with a headache and chills, courtesy of my Good Friday dose of the Pfizer vaccine. As my husband reached the front doors, a woman in front of him paused to …
Traumatic brain injury and me
In a nano-second on an otherwise lovely Sunday afternoon, I sustained a traumatic brain injury. There are currently 45,000 Arizonans living with TBIs, according to the Brain Injury Alliance of Arizona, and prior to the accident which caused mine, I never thought about any of them. Now, I think about them every day when I …
Renee Wrote This 