Uncle James: It didn’t have to happen.

We lost my Uncle James on Friday. He died of COVID-19.

He died of a preventable disease with a vaccine. He did have some underlying conditions, ones that he was living with and managing. It was getting COVID that killed him, though. Within a few days. The worst part is, he didn’t have to die.

I get really tired of people that defend their unvaccinated position with “Well, there’s a 99% survival rate. It only kills the old and disabled. If you’re healthy, you don’t have to worry about it.” I was tired of hearing it before, and now I’ve HAD it. It’s like the elderly and disabled don’t matter. (I wonder if some of these people are among the pro-life and All Lives Matter crowd????) My Uncle James mattered.

I would like to take a moment to tell you about my Uncle James, his amazing life, and his terrible death.

My Uncle James is the second of five brothers. As a child, he had a fever of 106 that they couldn’t get down, and that caused irreversible brain damage. I’m guessing he never really made it mentally past the age of a young child. He could live independently and take care of himself, but he had to be watched. He lived in a small house on the five acres of land that my dad’s family lives on, with his brothers and parents around for support. After my grandparents died, his brothers and later his nieces helped him and kept an eye out on him. Like any normal boy he had girlfriends, and later a short-lived marriage. He fathered two children. He buried one when she died of a heart attack in her early twenties, shortly after giving him a grandson that he loved dearly. He loved his children, but was only able to know his daughter. I’m not sure why he never got to know his son. He met his grandson a few times before he died. He enjoyed having all of his nieces and nephews living around him, and was a constant joyful presence in our lives. He was a family man. When I gathered pictures of him for the funeral, I received very few of him alone. In most of the pictures, he was either with his brothers or his nieces and nephews. We loved him dearly, although dealing with his mental disability was challenging at times. In all reality, he could get pretty cranky. It was usually when he didn’t understand something.

When he was a kid, he rode around with a friend’s dad who was a cop. He became fixated on first responders in general, but mostly on the police. He never lost his love of police work. He was a volunteer fireman for awhile, and did security work. He became absolutely convinced that he was a cop. He rode around on a motorcycle with all the cop gear. He found a place that made him badges that named him the police chief….and fire chief…and a few other types of chief. Everyone in town knew Uncle James wasn’t a cop, though. With the rare exception of a few jerks, most people played along. He never tried to pull anyone over or anything. (I don’t think.) You could see my uncle riding around on his motorcycle, looking official and watching out for speeders and other small crimes to report. He would do odd jobs for pay for the Splendora cops. Uncle James was absolutely convinced he was a cop and you couldn’t tell him otherwise. The Splendora Police Department made him an honorary cop and gave him a fantastic wooden plaque. When announcing his death, they named him as Head of Maintenance. He would have loved that. He also ran for mayor for the last several elections. He almost won once, too. I’m not sure if that says more about the voters or the current mayor, though. He loved his community and lived to “Protect and Serve”. He wanted to keep people safe.

At first when he got COVID, he was at home. They called an ambulance after him when he went to my younger cousin next door and he could barely breath. The hospitals were so packed that he was in an ER bed for two days before they could get him in a room.

Uncle James’s body started shutting down almost immediately. He couldn’t move his extremities. He was on a Bi-Pap machine that he absolutely could not breath without. The most horrifying part of this is that he was completely conscious the whole time. Remember, he was mentally disabled. Like a child, he didn’t understand what was happening to him. He was in pain, lost, confused, and terrified. He cried constantly, wanting someone to hold him, to hug him, and make him understand what was happening. He didn’t know he couldn’t move his legs, he thought he was. At the end, they got him on palliative care and gave him Ativan and morphine. Only then could he rest and pass peacefully into Paradise.

And he was alone for much of it.

The hospital, because of COVID, wasn’t allowing any “visitors”. Apparently, my cousin was considered a “visitor” even though she was his advocate and held his medical power of attorney. She protested that she needed to stay with him, because he was medically incompetent to make his own decisions. She was told that there was a whole hospital filled with mentally disabled people. Anita fought the good fight and won the right to stay with him, a right that should have never been denied him under ADA laws. A fight she should have never had to fight, but should have been granted. Would you leave a child in the hospital, helpless and scared? Would you make a child puzzle through his own medical decisions when he wasn’t capable of understanding what was happening to his body?

Before I rant on, I want to thank you publicly, Anita. You are an God-sent angel and went through hell the past few days. I can’t imagine what all you went through, because I know that you didn’t tell us everything that you saw. All of us bless you for it, and words can’t describe our gratitude. Where Uncle James is, know that he isn’t mentally disabled anymore and understands everything. He blesses you for it, I know.

Now I’m going to rant, and I’m going to offend a bunch of people. People are up in arms about this vaccine FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Are you an anti-vaxxer? Well, good for you. Consider this: when’s the last time you’ve met someone who had smallpox?

Never? Oh.

What about polio? Wait, never? Yellow fever? Not that, either? Measles? Mumps? Diphtheria? Whooping Cough? Tetanus? (Ever stepped on a rusty nail?)

Maybe not whooping cough. That one is still around a little bit. So is measles. You know, around the unvaccinated. The only reason is because we have mostly eradicated these diseases….by vaccines.

So why do we suddenly not trust the COVID vaccine?

You can never come up with a medical procedure that will not have some side effect, but the risks are almost nil. A quick search of scholarly articles reveals a whole slew of scholarly articles written by medical professionals about the safety of vaccines. I’m not going into all the details, but I’ll include links at the bottom. You’ll note, of course, that there’s nothing from YouTube and Wikipedia. That’s not research. My standard of research includes pondering if one of my professors would have slapped me for trying to use it.

Now let’s discuss the vaccine itself. The vaccine does not give you the virus. It shoots a piece of messenger RNA into you that teaches your cells how to make a protein that’s unique to the virus. Your immune system sees it as an intruder and attacks it. When you actually get the virus, it sees the same protein and knows how to get rid of it already. Even if you still contract the virus, you have a running start on getting rid of it. But here’s the deal. I’m gonna say this loud for the people getting mad at me in the back.

mRNA IS NOT GENE THERAPY AND DOES NOT MODIFY YOUR DNA.

The resulting protein simply floats around uselessly until your immune system eats it. That’s all. I got that information from the CDC, at least the parts that I didn’t get taught while getting my biology degree and two different genetics classes.

You might feel sick after getting any vaccine, of course. That’s your immune system learning how to fight that disease. That’s why you feel like you get the flu after you get the flu shot. Your immune system is working.

So let’s quit with the conspiracy theories, okay? The CDC and WHO have been fighting disease successfully for something like 80 years. It has eradicated a whole host of diseases in the United States. Why aren’t we trusting the experts anymore? I don’t have a degree in epidemiology anymore than you do. But like we do in all illness, I consulted my doctors and listened to a friend who has a Ph.D in genetics. I read scholarly articles. They are the experts, and I trust them far more than Wikipedia, Google, and some “doctor” on YouTube that has been shunned by the scientific community. We have one of the highest standards of medical care in the world. I’ll continue to trust them.

Considering the fact that I have an auto-immune disease and haven’t caught this virus yet, I think they led me correctly in getting vaccinated. I urge you to do the same. Let’s get rid of this disease. I don’t want other families going through the pain that my family is going through. I don’t want other people dying alone in the hospital. Uncle James should have had 20 years left to him, and passed peacefully surrounded by his family. He didn’t have to die like that, and that makes me angrier than you can understand, unless you’ve lost a loved one to this disease.

Most of the following links are from the CDC, with numerous other links to scholarly articles for more information. Note that there is a rigorous process to being allowed to publish a scholarly article that includes the ability to reproduce the claimed results and rounds of peer-reviewing for mistakes. Not everything passes these tests.

At least wear a mask. If it really cut off your oxygen like people say it does, then surgeons would be in a world of hurt, wouldn’t they?

Vaccines and autism: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/autism.html

History of the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/about/history/index.html

How mRNA vaccines work: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/how-they-work.html

Safety of Vaccines: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4599698/