Obesity and Ozempic

In the time of COVID-19, what we all have is… time. In retirement, time may be viewed differently than when working. I empathize with everyone who has continued to work during stay-at-home and social distancing and even more so with those who have lost their jobs and are in economic peril. What are you doing with your time now? How might it be better?

My favorite Founding Father was and is Benjamin Franklin. In his Poor Richard’s Almanac in 1746, Franklin wrote, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time; for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.” Perhaps it really requires the accumulation of years to realize just how true this saying is. In reading the news today, I am struck how many people seem unable to deal with time in this public health crisis. There have been intervals in my lifetime that I realize have also been defined by time and place and a sense that something needed to be done to make me feel productive.

A warship is a place of work but there is a lot of time in most of the days to capture for yourself. In 1984 I was on a Mediterranean cruise on a large amphibious ship that conducted exercises with 2400 embarked Marines. Medical duties kept me busy most mornings. What to do with the rest of my time? Luckily, being a lifelong reader, I found the small but reasonably stocked ship’s library and began to read through the section on history and geography. Reading took over the otherwise idle hours and I learned about things that were never on my radar.

In 1990, during Operations Desert Shield/ Storm (the First Gulf War), I was deployed to Fleet Hospital 5 in Saudi Arabia. As with the deployment to the Med, there was no need for social distancing (fortunately) but movies and gabfests wore thin. Once again, reading was a savior. This time it was mostly novels, sent to me by my wife in daily care packages. Over 5 months, I read about 50 of them. There was work and duty but the hours of waiting for something to happen (which it did with a bang in mid-January 1991) produced anxiety in many of my shipmates. Reading was a great way to distract the mind when uncertainty reigned.

Then came 1999 and my wife and I decided to obtain our MPH degrees. We were both working Navy Captains. We were adding a large time sink to already busy professional days. Lots of course work. Biostatistics. Epidemiology. Public Health. Environmental Health. Capstone Project. My leisure reading slowed to a crawl, wedged in between term breaks and the odd weekend free of course work. But there was still an awful time sink for me. We lived in Chesapeake, Virginia but my last command was at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. The MPH program was in Norfolk, Virginia, split between Eastern Virginia Medical School and Old Dominion University. Commuting made long days, well, longer. I had a beautiful Toyota Solara, racing green and a 5-speed manual (but a 4-cylinder engine, quite thrifty). Most importantly it had both a CD player and a tape player. So, I enrolled in the second degree program – what I called The University of the Highway. I went through a lot of books on tape that not only filled the mindless hours on the road but also relaxed me and filled my brain with new thoughts, ideas, and facts.

And now we have COVID-19. As an infectious disease physician, I have consumed all the information about this virus and the disease it produces as it comes along. It reminds me of the time earlier in my life when I had to do the same thing as the HIV/AIDS pandemic unfolded. You do what you have to do and you educate yourself as time passes. This time I am not treating patients though. I am translating that knowledge for the members of my community and helping them understand what is happening and why we are doing things like social distancing and handwashing, and masking. I understand their frustration when they say “I’m bored” or “When can we get back to normal?” But I have recaptured books and reading again. Love or hate Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Kindle is magnificent. And now I have a great smartphone and my children have tuned me into podcasts. As I posted above, we are continuing to exercise during this pandemic (staying fit is really necessary!) and part of that for me is a pacing routine in our apartment. The podcasts are the lubricant to an hour’s worth of pacing and the steps pile up on my Fitbit.

Reading matters. It remains perhaps the best way to learn for the majority of people. It is fun. It makes time, the “stuff of life”, productive and worthwhile. Try it again in the time of COVID-19; at least for me, it beats other uses of the precious commodity of time. As Groucho Marx said, “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Dr. Thad Zajdowicz is the Co-Chair of the League of Women Voters-Pasadena Area Healthcare Committee and a retired infectious diseases physician who spent many years in clinical practice, emergency preparedness, and pandemic planning for the US Navy. He holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Temple University School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health degree from Old Dominion University/Eastern Virginia School of Medicine.