Dear Julie, here’s what you say.

Dear Julie,

It’s a lot, isn’t it? And exhausting, and I know you feel like you’re taking crazy pills, especially after three days in a row of talking to people and reading tweets from people who imply that the doctors at UNMC, a global leader in infectious disease, don’t know what they are talking about. (You really need to limit your time on Twitter to 30 minutes a day, but that’s a letter for another time.)

So I’d like you to take a little trip back in time with me, to September 1999.

Remember September 1999? You were in your last semester of coursework before student teaching, you’d just started dating someone, you had good friends, and a retail job you actually really liked. What a great fall on the horizon.

And then your dad was diagnosed with colon cancer. Netscape Navigator was your internet search engine of choice, but you didn’t even think to use it to research mortality rates of 50 year-old men with colon cancer. You didn’t spend hours reading story after story of folk remedies that reportedly saved other lives. After all, internet research at that time was still viewed with suspicion. How could you trust a research venue where *anyone* could upload information and present it as fact, even if it wasn’t?

Your dad liked his oncologist, Dr. Soori, and together with your mom, they chose to trust him. You’re still not certain of what his initial prognosis was regarding how many years (or months) he had left, but after the initial colon resection, you trusted the surgeon and the pathologist and as your dad embarked on his cancer-fighting regimen, you trusted the process.

And then the cancer spread to his liver.

It would’ve been so easy for you to hop on Netscape Navigator and start finding alternatives for his care, to look for “data” to support your compulsion to find a way for your dad to survive, through sheer force of will if nothing else. But you deferred to the doctors again, and your dad and mom still liked Dr. Soori, so as a family, that was the plan. After all, it wasn’t HIS fault the cancer spread.

So the family plan was this: trust the doctors at UNMC.

Now I know there is a part of your brain right now screaming “But not ALL of Dr. Soori’s patients survived, and plenty of people die from cancer all the time!”

You’re right.

There was plenty of luck and circumstance that went into your dad surviving those two cancers. But be sure of this: all the luck and circumstance in the world would mean nothing without all the surgeons, pathologists, nurses, anesthesiologists, and dear Dr. Soori—and think of the research since then! Why, just the other day you heard of someone who had a colon resection laparoscopically! Could you have even imagined that in September 1999?

So the next time you are accosted by someone making false analogies with the current pandemic by comparing it to the flu (which—sidebar—if 60,000 people die from flu-related illnesses every year and masks would save 30,000 of those lives, why AREN’T we normalizing masks during flu season?), or someone who says they just need more data, I’m giving you a response. The only response you need.

“I’m going to stick with the doctors from the hospital that saved my dad’s life.”

Love,

Julie