Hey everyone, dropping this special unspooled episode on you out of the blue because I think a lot of us right now are dealing maybe with questions we have about vaccinations or people in our lives that won't get vaccinated.

And my wife, June Diane Rayfield, actually got to sit down with a pulmonologist who is a frontline worker. She's our good friend, Kate Grossman, and has been at the forefront of this health crisis for the last 20 months.

And she's incredibly knowledgeable and she can answer some questions right here and also talk to you about how to talk to family members who might be on the fence. So take it away, June.

Deep Divers, how did this get made listeners? I have a very special conversation that I'm excited to share with you.

So many of us know people in our lives, no people who know people who are unwilling, afraid and not getting the COVID vaccine.

And in this conversation today, I am going to be talking to, yes, she's a dear friend of mine, but more importantly for this combo, she's a pulmonary and critical care physician. She is a board certified.

She's board certified in internal medicine, Pediatrics, pulmonary and critical care medicine. She attended medical school at the State University of New York, downtown medical center. She completed both internal medicine and pediatric residency.

The University of Chicago followed by pulmonary and critical care fellowship at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. And her name is Dr. Kate Grossman.

And she is joining us today to provide us with a cheat sheet of sorts. And I'm going to be asking some questions as playing the part of an unvaccinated, hesitant member of society and Dr. Kate Grossman will be answering my questions.

I'll be doing what I do best, which is acting and doing some of my acting for you today. And Kate will be doing what she does best, which is giving out sound, safe medical advice.

Please welcome Dr. Kate Grossman. Hi, Kate.

Hi, Juneie. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your talent and your knowledge with our audience and our deep divers and our how to the skip made listeners.

So many of them I know are already vaccinated and that's wonderful. But if we've learned anything from this pandemic, it's that we're not well unless we're all well and just how key it is that we all join in on this effort to get everyone who can get vaccinated, vaccinated and and quick.

So Kate, I thought I would start actually before we jump into our scene work where I play the part of an unvaccinated person.

I'd love you to just give maybe a minute or so of just an update on what you've experienced during this pandemic as a doctor working in the pulmonary and critical care field and what it's been like for you.

Absolutely. So I am a pulmonary and critical care doctor. I happen to practice in Missouri, which you know we're kind of famous right now.

And throughout the pandemic and in my career, I work in the intensive care unit as well as have a pulmonary clinic where I see outpatients who just have general pulmonary problems.

So through the pandemic, I've taken care of patients in the intensive care unit who are sicker than sick and on ventilators and having complications from COVID like blood clots and kidney failure and other infections.

And I've taken care of patients who are just on huge amounts of oxygen with with big masks attached to their face and just unable to get off that oxygen and end up with us for for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And oftentimes don't go home. I've taken care of patients in the clinic who had COVID and and were able to stay home and had a, you know, got sick but never needed to be hospitalized. But you know now come to me with with long hauler symptoms.

You know, are overwhelmingly fatigued. They're short of breath. They have scar tissue in their lungs. They now have asthma and are really debilitated from what they thought was, you know, a mild infection.

And now, you know, that we have the vaccine out. We're seeing a pandemic of unvaccinated in Missouri where our ICU and our hospital is full again of COVID patients and and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated and they are just as sick as they were in the beginning of the pandemic.

...