Last Saturday morning I attended the internment of an old lady. She had passed the 100 mark last October. I had known her since the Christmas of 1968 – a long time – and she had become to me a necessary part of my life. Because of recent Covid restrictions, only six or seven of her large family could attend her Requiem Mass in a little country chapel in the west of Ireland. She had had a long hard, and I mean hard, but fulfilling life, with her husband who had died 22 years previously, bringing up and educating her family of five children.
To pay my respects I brought my family to her graveyard in a quiet little village on the Roscommon/Mayo border. A once lively village that over the years and with emigration and other miserable elements of 20th-century societal experimentation decimating the cultural lifeblood of the place, it was now a quiet backwater.
We had arrived early or the Mass had been delayed so I wandered the cemetery looking at gravestones of families long departed both from this area and from life, remembering these strong men and women of my youth. It was a sad but happy 30 minutes on this cold windswept hillside as we strolled about this rough ground disturbed many times over in the previous few hundred years.
The cortège arrived followed by over 200 people undeterred by government edict but every one of them wearing masks. We were the only ones showing our faces to God as they dropped the poor lady into the soil as the faceless priest mumbled something behind his visor.
My immediate question was why? Why have all these people in this rural habitat been persuaded by some unknown being sitting in a leather chair in Dublin that wearing face coverings was the only way out of this present purgatory? In this wild scud of a place, you had more chance of dying from the elements than catching this homespun virus Covid. Why have most decided this is the way. If that fat unknown in Dublin had told them to put their hands in a fire, would they?
This question why infuriates me and has done for months and was the catalyst in my seeking an answer. As soon as I arrived home, out came my pen. Where better to seek the truth than off a purveyor of health. So I wrote the following letter to my GP thinking at least from him I would get to the bottom of this 21st Century outrage that is Covid. However, the more I wrote the more I realised that the answer is not in this man’s remit. He is just there to react to government lies and earn a few quid on the way. But thinking of that old sage Hippocrates, the father of medicine, made me continue with my quest.
Of course, I have redacted all words that could embarrass said medico.
Doctor *****,
***** Medical Centre,
****** Street,
*****,
Co Roscommon. 7th March 2021
Dear Doctor *****,
On a recent visit to your practice with my wife-to-be, ***** *********, we had a passing conversation and she promised to send you a link for certain ergonomic products.
That link is……
Whilst writing I thought I would take this opportunity to unburden my thoughts with regard to the present medical climate. Let me say before I start that I consider you to be my friend as well as my doctor. Certain past conversations have led me to that consideration and I just do not know what kind of feedback you receive from other patients in your practice.
On recent visits to see your practice nurses, I have noticed the growth in your operation with Dr ********. It is obvious that the Covid situation has done your business no harm with the growth in the staff population of the practice. It has come a long way from its basic roots in the redundant ****** buildings on the ******* Road and seems to be now a very professional set up.
However for my part, the doctor/patient relationship I cherished from my time first of all under Dr ******* ******* and then under your partnership with Dr ***** ******** has diminished. The present Covid restrictions have put an end to those cherished thoughts.
Let me be blunt and explain my feelings. I think that both the Irish Government and the Health Service Executive in this country have reacted poorly, in fact they have been unduly panicked into their approach to the Covid 19 situation that presented itself to the nation a year ago. There are many reasons for this, be it international pressure from unknown agendas or from Big Pharma wanting an excessive slice of future cakes, but there seems little original thought from intelligent people.
Why were the extreme measures taken by Government and the HSE, which quickly filtered down to most practices, so necessary, for a virus that possibly affects 0.01% of the population and only really those people who were terminally ill with massive underlying health problems?
Why has the whole country had to suffer so much anguish with these skewed thoughts just for the supposed benefit of the few?
I just cannot understand this overreaction in supposedly educated thought unless of course there are hidden agendas that I have previously mentioned. To be honest you need to explain it all to me but I do understand also that all the medical profession have been put under a non-disclosure notice under fear of professional suicide.
I, for my part, still enjoy my regular visits to your nursing staff in order to keep a check on my vital signs but even that is slowly wearing thin because of the draconian restrictions put on patients.
Personally, I have been quite ill over the last three months but have struggled through without any thoughts on a need I would normally have, to avail of your services. How many more of your thinking patients have adopted this point of view, died peacefully at home and been allotted as a Covid statistic?
On December 15th last, I took ill with flu-like symptoms that lasted for about 10 days. This was followed by about six weeks of chest complaints resulting in coughing up excessive fluids from my lungs. I also had severe catarrh and other general maladies in the lung area which to some extent I still suffer from. Ten days ago I suffered a stomach bug that kept me in bed for about five days. Excessive diarrhoea, tiredness and general malaise were the results.
Normally I would have asked your advice for both these conditions but the thought of you sending me to a Covid test centre where uneducated, unskilled operatives would assault me with invasive procedures on my nasal cavity, decided me against such action. I wonder how many other probable patients of yours have faced the same dilemma in the last year.
Confronted with these medical problems I brazened it out, kept myself to myself and sailed unsteadily through this medical upheaval. I now feel as fit as ever.
I have spent the last year without the need for a mask, social distancing or the horror of being told to have this so called Covid Vaccine which is not a vaccine in the true sense of the word but rather an emergency trial drug which I conceive to be a poorly researched placebo for the many disempowered unfortunates of this world. Our doctor/patient relationship is probably destroyed forever. I can only think that I am not the only individual who has come to this conclusion. I am certainly less intelligent than the medical profession who seemed to have been pushed willingly into this haze of panic. Obviously I understand the commercial benefits this situation brings both to medic and Big Pharma but surely Hippocrates all those years ago would have put up his hand and said, stop this madness.
You might consider me to be stupid, warped in thought or just plain daft as a brush but from here on in I will keep your profession at arm’s length for the rest of my useful life and I think I deserve an explanation but possibly you are not allowed to give one.
Paul Malpas
5 Wooden Bridge
Boyle
Co Roscommon
Tel No
E-Mail address – paulmalpas46@gmail.com
I will wait with bated breath for a reply. I am sure I will not get one and it is a shame because I have known this man for many years and he has always struck me as a man looking for answers himself. We will see. I had to do something to alleviate my stress in this matter. It is this stress that makes my blood boil and could easily lead to some cardiac emergency and another Covid statistic.
Paul,
You should meet my accountant. He didn’t used to take the virus very seriously either, even though his profession brought him into contact with a lot of people. After 15 days in intensive care earlier this year, which he was lucky to survive, his attitude has changed. (He’s an otherwise reasonably healthy man in his late 40s, not someone in one of the “high risk” categories.)
This is a dangerous virus. Masks make it harder for the virus to get from one person to another, even thought they are not able to stop all transmission. Therefore it is sensible to wear a mask when close to other people. It provides some protection for you and, even if you don’t care about that, it provides some protection for other people should you be infected without knowing it.
This one really is a no-brainer. I don’t understand why mask-wearing has become so controversial.
Linda,
You really have been hooked. You say that this is a dangerous virus, some have even called it a pandemic yet according to governments own statistics no more people are dying than in a normal year. It is only dangerous to those who are dying and possibly your bloody accountant.
Listen to the doctors who know, not the puppets the government and media are trying to thrust down our throats. There has never been a medical paper to say mask wearing is beneficial yet there are hundreds of papers warning of dangers to health and mind. Besides all of that it is demeaning and is a loss of personal freedom to cover your face. The bloody French were locking up women for wearing a burkha a short while ago and now most are burkharing now. I suppose it is one way of diminishing the gender difference.