I read four books in January. Here is a blurb of each of the books I read in January.
“Built to Move: The 10 Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully” was written by Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett, the cofounders of San Francisco CrossFit and coauthors of the Wall Street Journal Bestseller Deskbound. Kelly is also the cofounder of The Ready State. This book included different movements and tips to incorporate them into daily life. Here are some takeaways:
The range of motion and body positioning relates to health, ease of movement, and the presence and absence of pain.
This book included measurable and repeatable diagnostics that will help you assess your current condition, where you need to go, and how you’re going to get there. This book also included mobilization techniques for reducing stiffness and resolving pain.
Think about how you want to live your life, take into consideration that the body naturally gets stiffer and weaker with age, and undertake strategies to counter those potential erosions before they set in. To be able to keep moving when you’re older, you need to get or keep moving now.
Some tips:
Sit-and-rise test – getting up and down off the floor without using your hands, knees, or losing balance – determines when you have good range of motion in your hips and gauges leg and core strength and balance and coordination
Incorporate various ground-sitting positions into your day: cross-legged sitting, sitting with your legs out in front of you, one-leg-up sitting, etc.
Find your balance. Do the one-leg stand test with your eyes closed for twenty seconds. How steady you are on your feet depend on your feet, your inner ear, sensory receptors in the muscles, tendons, fascia, joints, and eyesight.
Aim to limit sitting to six hours per day. Set up a standing workstation and move around every thirty minutes.
4 out of 5 stars
“While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence” was written by Meg Kissinger, who teaches investigative reporting at Columbia Journalism School. Meg spent more than two decades traveling across the country to report on America’s mental health system for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has won dozens of accolades. This book was frank and revelatory and was a personal and painful narrative. I highly recommend this book! Here are some of the many things that resonated with me:
Meg details the family dynamics of alcoholism, mental illnesses, and two of her siblings committing suicide and how the shame and practice of “not talking about it” impacted her and her family.
5.6% of adults suffer from serious and persistent mental illness, and more than 1/3 of them don’t get treatment. A person with serious mental illness is 10x more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized.
Jails and prisons have become the nation’s de facto mental health hospital system. By 2010, almost 90% of the hospital beds across the country that were once available for the sickest psychiatric patients had been eliminated.
“Suicide prevention experts I’d interviewed over the years told me repeatedly that we can do a lot more to stop people from killing themselves. Knowing the warning signs for suicide and how to talk to those who are considering it will save lives. So why weren’t we able to stop our siblings? Because we had been discouraged from talking about it. I could not help but wonder what life would have been like if we had grown up in a more transparent era.”
“Only love and understanding can conquer this disease.”
5 out of 5 stars
“Riding the Lightning: A Year in the Life of a New York City Paramedic” was written by Anthony Almojera, an EMS lieutenant with the Fire Department of New York City who has also been featured in various media outlets. This book was devastating, candid, and vital, and guides readers, one month at a time, through the first year of COVID-19 from the perspective of a paramedic in New York City. I recommend this book to readers who want a glimpse of how COVID-19 changed EMS each month in 2020. Here are some takeaways:
In the beginning of COVID-19, every EMT and paramedic who transported a patient with suspected coronavirus was instructed to wear gloves, a gown, goggles or a face shield, and an individually fitted N95 mask, then throw everything away after each patient contact. Originally, the health department recommended that ambulances be aired out for two hours after every fever/cough call. (!)
Protocols were shifting constantly – what protective equipment to wear, how to deal with a cardiac arrest, whether to consult telemetry about where to take a patient, whether to notify the hospital that you were transporting a suspected case of COVID, how often to change your N95 mask, etc.
Surgical masks are made of polypropylene, a nonwoven paper substance that allows air to pass through it but not droplets of moisture. They don’t stop airborne particles from passing into your nose and mouth. For that, you need an N95.
In March 2020, the New York City COVID-19 deaths averaged over 400 per day. On March 30, 2020, New York City EMS received 7,253 calls – one call every 12 seconds!
The telemetry office couldn’t keep up. There was 1 physician fielding all questions from EMS crews in a city of over 8 million people!
Hospitals didn’t have enough ventilators or CPAP machines. For all the people who were dying in the hospital, many more were dying before they even got there – at home, in ambulances, or in lines to the emergency departments.
At one point, the author had 14 calls in 16 hours, and every patient died!
Patients’ families want to believe that something can be done, that the outcome will change if the patient goes to the hospital. But the medical system was so swamped during the pandemic that our protocols had changed. As of March 31, 2020, we were transporting patients only if we got a pulse back at the scene. Hospitals didn’t have the resources to try to resuscitate them, and we didn’t have the resources to transport them, so we had to pronounce these patients dead then and there.” By April 2020, if there was no pulse or electrical activity in the heart after 20 minutes, paramedics/EMS were instructed to stop CPR and pronounce the patient dead.
4 out of 5 stars
“A Bit Much: Poems” was written by Lyndsay Rush, a comedy writer and the poet behind the popular Instagram account @maryoliversdrunkcousin. This book was great, and I highly recommend it!
Here are some of my favorites:
When your surroundings begin to feel cold and uninhabitable and your environment no longer offers the support or sustenance you need, I hope you migrate. I hope, as you make your way down south, that you find another silly goose to fly with, too – in such a tight-knit formation that Wikipedia would refer to your crew as plump. And I hope that no matter how long the journey takes you, the wind is always at your back; nudging you closer to home.
“Starting something new is like a one-man show for a one-man audience; the only applause worth seeking is your own. Don’t rob yourself of that while you wait for approval from somewhere else. Sometimes winning yourself over is the greatest show on earth.“
“A great philosopher once said I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes (I saw the sign). But when you see the world through rose-colored glasses, it can be hard to recognize a red flag. So what I have learned is this: If they’re mean to the waiter, they’ll be mean to you. If they never follow through, they will never show up. If it hurts your stomach, it will hurt your heart. You can’t temper a storm, but you can sure as hell evacuate the beach.“
“If cauliflower can be pasta, you can be whatever you want.“
5 out of 5 stars
I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!
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