How a Zen Buddhist Monk and Hospital Chaplain Spends His Sundays
To care for Covid-19 patients and their families, Seigan Ed Glassing reserves one day of the week to care for himself.
Seigan Ed Glassing walks regularly through Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan.Credit.Karsten Moran for The New York Times
By Ted Alcorn
Jan. 1, 2021
Even for someone accustomed to facing death, like Seigan Ed Glassing, who serves on the palliative care team at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, 2020 was a brutal year.
Ordained as a monk at Dai Bosatsu Zendo, a monastery in the Catskills, Mr. Glassing also studied in Japan and helped direct a temple in New York City, where he met his husband, Andrew Lagomarsino. But restless with a life that felt cloistered, he found reconnection as an interfaith chaplain. Now he ministers to the grieving and dying “of all faiths, no faiths, and everything in between.”
First he battled AIDS, now COVID-19. Meet the N.J. doctor one congressman calls ‘our local Fauci.’
Updated Dec 31, 2020;
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The doctor feels a little numb.
Adam Jarrett had only one goal last spring during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic: take care of the COVID-19 patients who flooded Holy Name Medical Center. That was it.
But it’s been 10 months. The longer the pandemic drags on, the more desensitized medical workers grow, as they continue to slog through shift after shift, tending to both coronavirus patients as well as the usual stream of the sick and dying.
“It’s actually more stressful (now). It really is. It doesn’t seem like it would be. But it is because it’s not a singular focus,” said Jarrett, 58, the Teaneck hospital’s chief medical officer.
The New York Times, Dr. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, an internal medicine resident physician at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, wrote that her uncle is sharing incorrect information about the vaccines now being administered across the country.
“As a doctor, and as a member of the Kennedy family, I feel I must use whatever small platform I have to state a few things unequivocally,” Kennedy Meltzer, the daughter of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the sister of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote. “I love my uncle Bobby. I admire him for many reasons, chief among them his decades-long fight for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.”
5 Medical Innovations You Probably Didnât Notice Happened in 2020
Written by Brian Mastroianni on December 30, 2020 â Fact checked by Michael Crescione
Even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical community made advances throughout 2020. Here are 5 of the yearâs most impactful innovations.
From breakthroughs in oncology, gene therapies, and heart health, the medical community made many new advances in 2020. Morsa Images/Getty Images
Overall, 2020 has been a tumultuous year. From a health perspective, itâs been one turned upside down with a deadly global pandemic reorienting how we live our lives and relate to others.
The COVID-19 pandemic has justifiably dominated headlines and attention from media, policymakers, and health officials alike.