Dr. Donald Donahue

But one of the things we say is nobody needs disaster medicine until you do.

To borrow from Tip O'Neill, like politics, all disasters are local. I mean, there's regional disasters, but all disasters are local.

I read once that the mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's open.

Their theme was every crisis is a human crisis. We can rebuild buildings, we can restore computer systems, we can find information, but the real damage is to people.

What this graphically illustrates is that disasters impact everybody, but they more significantly impact those of us who have less, those of us who have fewer resources.

Historically, one of the measures that FEMA uses, especially in the Deep South, to measure whether a community is rebounding and is resilience is showing, is whether the Waffle House opens up.

Know your tools, use your tools. And nobody expects a disaster. That's what makes it a disaster. It can happen to any one of us or all of us.

October also represents the start of multiple other seasons — return to school season, election season, but more ominously, flu season, RSV season, COVID season. The seasons to celebrate and the seasons to be wary.

You certainly have the right as a patient, as a human, to not be vaccinated and become ill. What I would question you don't have the right is to expose the teacher — your child's teacher who is on chemotherapy — or someone who's immunocompromised. So we owe an obligation to those around us.