Apples

After a month, I have almost finished Liane Moriarty's novel Apples Never Fall.

The first chapter of the novel starts in a far corner of a café where four siblings leaned over a round table, their foreheads almost touched. At the last few chapters, the tables and chairs were piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner; they were only doing takeaway coffees. No more table service.

Well, that's exactly what we'd found our life turns out to be recently. This is a month we have gone through something so chaotic, so unexpected and volatile, so entirely out of our control and out of our imagination, it is like a splash of icy water on a snowy day. Ukrainian residents are facing nightly air strikes. Disease outbreaks are spreading like wildfire in our local nursing homes. Round-the-clock crisis happens in hospitals with shortage of beds and shortage of mortuary spaces. I think we might have come close to the World War III.

For the first time ever, it occurred to us that the healthcare system probably would collapse and fall like a tower of Jenga. I don't know if apples would ever fall, but I shall pray that ours won't fall.

Toll

The pandemic kills in many ways.

We know the virus kills when it messes up our lungs. We know the virus kills when our body's immune cells can't stop setting fire on the fighting cascade. One of the yet-to-be-told stories about the untold toll is the pandemic's effects on the uninfected persons.

More often, it's a difficult trade-off between tackling pandemic and keeping others healthy. A back-and-forth between the two. Back and forth, back and forth: the sweet spot isn't easy to define. What are those stories of untold toll about? Running out of sleep after unbearable working hours. Running out of drugs like hydroxychloroquine after the misguided use to treat coronavirus disease. Running out of teaching opportunities for medical students, or even kindergarten students.

Or simply running out of friends or hugging.

Think about loneliness and social isolation. Social distancing is often the magic word for anti-pandemic measures. On the flip side, we can be truly alone (subjectively) and isolated (objectively). All that is bad news, and more so for a centenarian who can go downhill quickly, because loneliness messes with our stress response. Cortisol, the stress hormone, jumps higher after our connection with others are being cut off. Worse still, the risk of death goes up. And yes, you read that correctly: increased risk of death. It isn't a question of objective or subjective social isolation. It doesn't matter, according to a meta-analysis. Objective social isolation may raise the risk of death by 29 percent, and reported loneliness ups it by 26 percent.

That means we need friends. Don't let the coronavirus steal yours.

Present

If we choose to live our lives like a monk, it means we tell our monkey mind to be present to the moment. A seemingly simple mantra but easier said than done.

Jay Shetty - the oracle of mindfulness, the award-winning storyteller, the author of inspiring Think Like A Monk- once wrote that we're almost always somewhere else. Instead of thinking about what mattered in the past or what the future might hold, we are taught to "be here now." After all, the past is unchangeable, and the future is unknowable.

His teaching is life-changing, that much is clear. I was working late at hospital tonight and could not finish admitting patients until midnight. I decided to run back home. Little did I know, when I was planning my run after work, it was a blustery and rainy night. Fat raindrops dotted my short-sleeved tee, mingled with the moisture on my face, soon after I started my run. Regardless of the weather, I told my monkey mind to go ahead and be present, as I felt the cold air against my skin, my breath traveling through my body. I willed myself not to take short cut by train, even though the monkey mind wanted to.

And that's a good exercise to practice tuning in to my mind.

Camping

After a full week of rebound in local coronavirus infections, I haven’t had time for running. All hours seemed to be taken up by the one objective of clearing the cases.

It’s not just a matter of keeping my head above water; I have to keep my head behind surgical respirator and, yes, face shield.

If I had a dollar for every time I don personal protective equipment, I could be dining at Four Seasons Hotel.

At long last, I have taken two days off for a family camping vacation. The air is colder here, but being in the outdoors lifts my spirits. It’s a pretty landscape, but not in an extravagant way. There is no Michelin star, but we were happy to be the chef ourselves. It's not about the five-star dining, it's not about the wine. It's not about the world-class gastronomic experience. It's about the raw experience of making and cracking open our own beggar's chicken in the wild.

Change

All of the ways we've been talking about the coronavirus involve changes: changing strain with new variants, changing reproduction number R-naught, changing rules of the game.

We'd all been shellshocked. We worry. We panic.

But then, I try to remind myself to get prepared for changes. Today, one has fun at school or on school bus. The next day, there is in-person school suspension. Pretty soon many parents - including me - hear about the news of a teacher being quarantined and their children thus declared as close contact.

How should we make sure nothing bad happens? Try this. Open our eyes to the new opportunities. That's what my daughter showed me when school closure was announced without warning. She had come up with many pen-and-paper games when she spent time with classmates on school bus. She then switched to teach me her self-made game. First, write a list of categories: name of celebrity, villain character of any book, city, song, body parts, elements in periodic table. Next, think of an alphabet. We then have to race to complete the list by giving one example for each category, using that alphabet as the first letter of the example.

As it happened, we ended up having a non-stop-laughing night when we kept competing, and changing the categories for fun.

Monk

Omicron is anything but blameworthy. I suppose that's what most of us think.

Little did I expect silver lining on such cloudy days, when things turn dark earlier than usual. Actually, everything, cafeteria and restaurants included.

Besides the curfew on dine-in services, many venues are closed. No bars. No karaoke roooms. No gyms. No swimming pools. No cinemas. No libraries. 

In my case, there was something quite magical about my clairvoyance to time my public library visit. I was able to check out more than ten library books one week before our government ordered all those premises to shut. I then took a deep breath, sipped my coffee and nodded, feeling accomplished like Chip 'n' Dale after stocking enough for the winter. It's simply more than awesome. Quite a number of the books have been reserved by others, and I could have had only two weeks to finish them if not because the library is closed.

Good, simple, hassle-free. I'd figure I should have more than enough time to go through all those highly popular books before the library re-opens: Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk, Michael Lewis' The Premonition, Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?, Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall.

Hero

BioNTech is a wonderful vaccine developed from a brand-new technique. So much so that some of us remain skeptical of the new technology of messenger RNA platform. Consider how we compare with any earlier vaccine - the fastest one was mumps vaccine which took four years to develop - and we are amazed by the way Pfizer-BioNTech was developed within 12 months.

The fact is, we all forget how much longer the scientists have been solving the puzzle of mRNA vaccine. The answer, as it turns out, is more than 15 years. That's what l learned after reading the story of a Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who is named one of 2021 "Heroes of the Year" by Time magazine.

During these years, Karikó has been fascinated by RNA. If DNA makes up the letters of life, RNA creates the words, and ultimately the sentences, as explained by Time. In her pursuit of turning our body into its own drug-making factory, Karikó has been figuring out ways to use messenger RNA to instruct the body to make proteins, enzymes and different molecules. Think about her working late nights and early morning, writing at least one new grant application every morning, being turned down and rejected again and again - at least 24 times. But the key is that she kept pushing, even after being fired by her supervisors at the University of Pennsylvania.

The breakthrough came after her collaboration with an immunologist years later, when they found out the trick of encasing the mRNA inside a fat bubble, thus protecting the precious genetic code without triggering a cascade of inflammatory storm. The next thing they knew, in a lightbulb moment, is the flexibility of creating any vaccine once they get the readout of a virus's genetic sequence. Get the code, build the correspoding mRNA with chemical compoundes, pop it into the fat bubble and that's the birth of a new vaccine. Simple and smart. When this smart solution was first published in the journal Immunity in 2005, the beauty of their findings was clearly not appreciated by the scholars around the world. The night before the paper was published, Karikó was expecting a flood of phones calling to congratulate next morning. No one called. Nothing.

Not until 15 years after the original work of Karikó, when we are now blessed with the protection by BioNTech.