Message from the Chair, Professor Ian Davis Welcome to this latest edition of “A little below the belt.” Whoever thought we would need to be familiar with Greek letters? Alpha, Delta, Omicron, ThreeBagsFull… I’m just waiting for Omega, because that designation isn’t ominous at all! Honestly, I feel like giving a big ψ to all of it, although I do feel a little better now because that joke works on both an auditory and visual level. I’m writing this just before the close of 2021, and the projections are scary. I’ve already seen the effects on health care services and, more importantly, the people who provide them. We are battening down for a storm that none of us really know how to weather. It’s worrisome, demoralising, and frustrating because the best efforts of so many well-meaning people seem all too often to come to nothing. We can easily fall into the traps of saturating ourselves with the fear and uncertainty of it. Browsing becomes doomscrolling. Socialising becomes dangerous. Common courtesies, like wearing a mask to protect others, earn abuse. There have been some shocking failures of leadership, although there is also huge disagreement about which leaders have failed and which have not. People we thought were like-minded and reasonable members of society suddenly declare themselves as sociopaths. We hang on daily numbers, often fed to us by people who do not even understand concepts like exponential growth. We don’t even know what numbers we should be concerned about: Cases? Hospitalisations? R? Doubling times? Variant characteristics? Antibody tests? What booster to get? Will life ever be back to normal? We’re all tired but there is no escape. Must it be like this all the time? Every bit of news, every conversation, every aspect of life: it’s all disrupted and nothing is as it should be. A huge part of the problem is the uncertainty. Not all of the predictions have panned out. Unexpected events have occurred, and the pace of change can leave us breathless. We get used to one situation and then suddenly everything changes. A treatment that previously worked seems like it might be less useful in the
current situation. We hear pronouncements apparently based on evidence that are seemingly contradicted when more information comes to hand. Misinformation abounds and it’s hard to know whose authority to trust. We are told we need to take “personal responsibility” and that this is the only way to fix the problem; the people we trusted and put in place to fix the problem seem unable to do so. Our usual anchor points all seem to have come loose. On the other hand, look at how far we have come. We know way more about it than we did at the start. The science continues to move rapidly (although never as fast as we would like), and our approaches to management and prevention are much more rational and effective now. The situation changes day by day but our long familiarity with it means that we can rapidly adapt and make changes to our everyday lives when and as we need to do so. We can find ways to experience joy even in the midst of extreme constraints on what we are able to do. There is hope despite it all. Lots of good things have come out of all of this. We have all had to increase our health literacy. We have had to learn how to identify reliable sources of information. I think we all have more respect for the science and the scientists, and I’m personally amazed sometimes by the work they do. We’ve had to modify our behaviour, often unwillingly, but also often for the good – remember when we all blithely came to work with a bit of a sniffle? We’ve learned that just because things were always done a certain way doesn’t mean they should continue to be done that way. We’ve definitely learned to value our freedoms, acknowledge our privileges, and appreciate the most important things in our lives, especially those we love. Does all this sound a bit familiar? It should, because if you look carefully you’ll see I haven’t mentioned COVID since paragraph 2. What we are all experiencing at the moment is what people affected by cancer have to manage every day, and their challenges are magnified when you add a pandemic to it.
A LITTLE LITTLE BELOW BELOW THE THE BELT 5 A
