Tag: puts

Long COVID diagnosis puts extra strain on family caregivers : Shots

Dania

Louise Salant (right), 72, and her aunt Eileen Salant (center), 86, both got very sick with COVID-19 in 2020. And as Eileen developed long COVID symptoms, so too did Louise, who struggled with fatigue and shortness of breath while also managing her aunt’s care. Nearly three years later, home health aides like Elfnesh Legesse (left) help Louise take care of her aunt.

Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR


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Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR

Louise Salant (right), 72, and her aunt Eileen Salant (center), 86, both got very sick with COVID-19 in 2020. And as Eileen developed long COVID symptoms, so too did Louise, who struggled with fatigue and shortness of breath while also managing her aunt’s care. Nearly three years later, home health aides like Elfnesh Legesse (left) help Louise take care of her aunt.

Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR

For Louise Salant, long COVID has meant new stress, new responsibilities, and multiple medical crises to manage. It’s transformed her life.

But there’s a twist. She’s had to deal with this condition not just as a patient but also as a caregiver for her 86-year-old aunt Eileen Salant, who has coped with long COVID’s disabling symptoms for almost three years.

Eileen and Louise both caught an acute bout of COVID-19 in March of 2020. Eileen had been taking care of her brother, who was admitted to a New York City hospital with heart failure during those dark days of the early pandemic. He got COVID there, and died from his infection with the virus. Both aunt and niece also became very ill.

It was early days of the pandemic in New York, and hospitals were so crowded that Louise was told to stay home and fight out the illness on her own. Meanwhile, Eileen was hospitalized and stayed there all spring, including two months on a ventilator. After that, she spent five months at a rehab hospital. She finally came home to her apartment in Riverdale, the Bronx, the day before Thanksgiving in 2020 — but she was very weak.

Eileen and Louise both got COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in New York. Eileen ended up on a ventilator for two months and then spent five months in a rehab hospital. Louise fought the illness at home as hospitals started filling up.

Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR


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Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR

Eileen and Louise both got COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic in New York. Eileen ended up on a ventilator for two months and then spent five months in a rehab hospital. Louise fought the illness at home as hospitals started filling up.

Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR

“She could barely sit up in bed, couldn’t hold a fork,” says Louise, who lives a 10-minute taxi ride away.

Over the years, Louise, now 72, has worked at various times as an art therapist, taught piano to children and adults and done medical interviewing for a cancer research team. But when COVID hit,

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Supreme Court’s abortion decision puts doctors in legal limbo : Shots

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Dr. Kara Beasley protests the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, in Denver, Colorado on June 24, 2022.

JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images


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Dr. Kara Beasley protests the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, in Denver, Colorado on June 24, 2022.

JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images

Historically, doctors have played a big role in abortion’s legality. Back in the 1860s, physicians with the newly-formed American Medical Association worked to outlaw abortion in the U.S.

A century later, they were doing the opposite.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when states were liberalizing abortion laws, “the charge for that actually came from doctors who said, ‘This is insane, we can’t practice medicine, we can’t exercise our medical judgment if you’re telling us that this is off the table,’ ” explains Melissa Murray, law professor at New York University.

The Supreme Court ruled in doctors’ favor in Roe v. Wade in 1973. The majority opinion spoke of “the right of a woman in consultation with her physician to choose an abortion,” Murray says.

Yet doctors and patients are all but absent from the latest Supreme Court majority opinion on abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In fact, in the opinion, Justice Samuel Alito uses the derogatory term “abortionist” instead of physician or doctor or obstetrician-gynecologist.

Legal experts say that signals a major shift in how the court views abortion, and creates a perilous new legal reality for physicians. In states where abortion is restricted, health care providers may be in the position of counseling patients who want an abortion, including those facing pregnancy complications, in a legal context that treats them as potential criminals.

For doctors, abortion restrictions create an 'impossible choice' when providing care

“Alito’s framing is that abortion is and was a crime – that’s the language he uses,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. There’s no dispute, she says, that “the result of a decision overruling Roe in the short term is going to be the criminalization of doctors.”

Roe v. Wade was doctor-centered

Doctors were at the heart of the court’s first landmark ruling on abortion, Roe v. Wade.

“The original Roe decision – it was very, very doctor-centered – extremely so,” says Ziegler, who has written extensively on the legal history of abortion. “At its inception, this was a right that was very much about health care and about the doctor-patient relationship.”

Roe and the abortion decisions that came after it like Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “had the framework that abortion is some sort of individual right, but it’s also health care,” explains Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

The court essentially told states: “You can put restrictions on abortion services and on provider qualifications as you do for other types of health care, and as long as they are not so onerous that we

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