A New Year’s holiday letter came in from a friend and mentor of mine at Virginia Tech. She wrote:
It’s been a difficult year – tragic, exhausting, and a bit surreal. Really, I don’t remember much of what happened before April, when we were shocked into a kind of violent parallel universe with the shootings at Virginia Tech. We still live there, partly, I think; there is a different feel to life in Blacksburg now, especially on campus. It’s not that we are on edge constantly, but that we are all more careful and more responsive, and thus busier and more tired.
Wow, I thought when it read it, that sounds pretty darn familiar. Maybe it was particularly poignant that this arrived last week… where my thoughts were with last year, when we were marching downtown over the unfathomable violent crime that continues to tear away at our city. The loss, the fear, and the fact that it isn’t changing is like a constant white noise in the background. But it’s part of everything that makes life here just a little bit… harder? grittier? riskier? I’m not sure what describes it, although my friend’s Blacksburg comparison made a lot of sense.
There is evidence of health impacts from the vagueness described above. Specifically, we know that people living in post-disaster zones experience higher rates of stress, fatigue, and related illnesses. Right now in New Orleans, there is an ongoing study of resting blood pressure rates — it’s being run out of various dentist’s offices. So, if you go to the dentist and get hooked up to a machine taking your blood pressure every 15 minutes, you’ll probably be asked to participate. The point is to see if us NOLA folks have higher resting blood pressure than average folks elsewhere. For me, the answer seems to be yes. (My BP is around 110/75 these days… more than the 100/70 I sported pre-K and much more than the 90/60 I had through both pregnancies. Granted, I wouldn’t run those results to JAMA, confounders as likely as they are, but it’s still something to think about.)
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