PeterHogenkampWrites

  We all want the pandemic to be over, don't we? <nod head> Well, we have a way out of this god-forsaken mess--it's called the Covid-19 vaccine. Want to find out more? <nod head>  Good, click on the arrow above. Wants the Reader's Digest version? <shake head> Good, click on the arrow above. But if you are in a tearing hurry (to go where? I ask you, as were in the middle of a pandemic) remember this. All the vaccines either currently approved or shortly to be approved offer near complete protection against serious disease, defined as either hospitalization and/or death. What does that mean? It means that, once vaccinated, the worst outcome for those few who might still catch Covid is a mild viral illness, which you have had many times previously in your lifetime. Don't get lost in the various numbers representing the different efficacy rates for the different vaccines to prevent all Covid disease. Frankly, I don't care if I get a cold, and likely ne...

It was 2015 by the time I sat down to write the book that would eventually become my first published novel ( The Intern , TouchPoint Press, April 13, 2020) a solid twenty years after meeting the twelve-year-old boy who inspired me to write his story. Maya Angelou said that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” and she was dead on, because I can’t remember many of the things he said and did, but I can remember, with complete and absolute clarity, the way he made me feel, the punched-in-the-gut feeling that has stayed with me all these years. It was the spring of my internship, April, 1994, and the skies in Syracuse, New York were leaden and grey, doing nothing to improve my mood which had become dour with the long hours, lack of sleep and the never-ending scutwork. I was on Pediatric call for the weekend, meaning that the never-ending scutwork had now been multiplied by four, and I’d just...