Dr. Babb is about as selfless as they come. As a mother of 4, devoted wife, active community member, and primary care physician, we often wonder how she has enough time to churn out such thoughtful, deep content. Whatever her secret is, we sure hope she keeps it coming. Megan's dedication as a primary care physician transfers beautifully to text. She invites her readers under her wing as she confronts the hard-hitting injustices found in America's health care system. She's earnest, fact-driven, and personable—it's almost as if you can hear her voice as you read her stories.
Megan has been a creator on Vocal since July of 2019. Thanks to the compelling stories she creates and the way she uses Facebook to find her audiences, Megan’s gotten hundreds of thousands of reads on her stories and has seen her earnings spike. We asked her to share some of her advice to help you learn to do the same.
To all the physicians in America, I am one too and I need you to know: I see you. I hear you. To the Wachusett Emergency Physicians Group in Massachusetts who just days ago, have lost your contract to UMass without cause, I see you; I hear you.
It’s dependent on many factors; how I’m feeling that day, how the kids are behaving, if everyone’s slept through the night, how busy I am with work or how busy they are with activities. I can’t predict when I’ll hate being a mom, but I can predict I will hate it at times.
I am a Xennial and am pretty confident that you both are as well. Let me tell you why. I remember dial-up internet but was too young to use it. Mario Typing was brand-new when taught in my elementary school. Pearl Jam, Nirvana (RIP Kurt Cobain), and Bush dominated TRL on MTV but pop stars like Brit-Brit were about to run them off the Billboard Charts. Nokia phones were all the rage and Tom, everyone’s first MySpace friend, became the most popular man in the country. Hollywood was about to embark on a much-needed female-centric revamp and the young actresses leading this effort gave birth to a new species: The Mean Girl. Based on your recent ad, (the one above), followed by the pathetic and impassive apology that would come shortly after, I would have to guess you were born between 1982-1984 because you both reek of first-generation Mean Girl.
Remember when you discovered you were going to be a parent? The moment you learned that inside you, was another life? Remember the incredible fear and excitement you felt all at the same time? All you worried about was whether or not you would be a good mother. Do you remember when?
As a physician, I will never get used to the eerie absence of sound upon death in the human body. Placing a stethoscope atop the chest of one who has passed is haunting. Where there was once lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub from the heart echoing within the chest, there is now silence. Where there were once the breezy whispers of air filling and emptying the lungs, there is now stillness. While sound is confirmation of life, absence of it, is confirmation of death.
As COVID numbers spike, scientists have identified another potentially fatal risk to America’s healthcare workers and to Black Americans known as the Karen. The Karen belongs to its own unique viral family that surfaced around seventy years ago. Since that time, it has silently multiplied at exponential rates. The Karen is erratic, unpredictable, and favors no particular environment, making it impossible to know where it lies. DNA analysis demonstrates in infected hosts an over-expression of the proteins responsible for hate, ignorance, and moral turpitude. Though scientists are hopeful for the development of a vaccination to eradicate it, they surmise this will not occur any time soon.
An Open Letter to Lady Gaga - I am going to start this letter to you as I do all the other similar open letters I have written. I realize that the chance of you reading this is slim to none; however, I am discouraged by a statement you recently made, and I strongly feel a correction to this is necessary. Proud of the voice you have for women around the world, I never thought in a million years that I would be writing one of these to you, and for this, I am saddened.
The first time Dylan and I spoke in person, we were face to face but separated by thousands of miles. We had met two days prior to this when I received my first communication from her. Three weeks ago, after an essay I wrote was published detailing the truth of America’s broken healthcare system, I began receiving hundreds of emails from other healthcare workers all across the country recounting horror stories of maltreatment at the hands of the healthcare system. Dylan’s email was among them.
I am a white woman. I grew up in a very well-to-do community wanting for nothing. My parents are very well educated. They also grew up in well-to-do communities. Neither they, myself, my siblings, nor my other relatives grew up in poverty or a culturally diverse region. I had every privilege one could hope for, which was a complete disadvantage in one single way: I grew up in a colorless world.
The anti-abortion movement in Washington makes me cringe. This is mainly for two reasons. One, as a human, I am absolute in a woman's right to choose. Two, as a physician, my education allows me to recognize the unintended consequences of advocating against this, and it so happens, this topic falls in my lane. Yet those who are trying to dictate a woman's right to choose are not physicians and, more positively, rarely women. The issue of woman's health rights, within the political arena, is not for a matter of personal opinion. Rather a place for discussion aimed to find policies that place women in control of their reproductive health. Instead, your version of a woman's right to choose is nothing more than a curtain of lies concealing misogynistic behaviors aimed at creating policies that place women out of the control of their reproductive health. By law, you are no more in control of a woman's arm or the words that come out of her mouth (like mine today) then you are of her uterus. Yet, you use your political position to push agendas that aim to place subjective opinion above objective scientific evidence. This is an unsafe way to operate Senator. Bad business, indeed.
The other day while I walked to work, I deliberately slowed my pace to allow time for my left hand to lightly graze the brick wall I was passing. I watched as my fingers ebbed and flowed through every groove and imperfection. There was a familiarity to this. Perhaps it was the texture, perhaps the grit. Either way, memories emanated as I was no stranger to brick walls. Over the years as I pursued a career in medicine, my hands had gotten quite used to dismantling them.
One of the things that I love about science is how nurturing it is. It never judges. It allows for the complete inclusion of all interested parties as well as their ideas, whether good or bad. It even has space for these ideas to be fostered and explored by coming to life in the form of experimentation and hypotheses. When I think about science as it exists in our world, I can't help but feel the overwhelming maternal presence surrounding it. The essence of its being, its soul if you will, Mother Nature herself, and the wisdom she imparts to humans done so through the language of science.
While I recognize that I have a better chance of contracting dengue fever in my suburban city than there is of you actually reading this, I will try anyways. Here it goes.
I have four children, ages six, four, four, and two, and we live where pools are a common escape from the high summer heat. As a physician, I take swim safety very seriously, which is why when I witnessed my four-year-old daughter remove her Puddle Jumper without help, I came to realize just how dangerous these can be.
You died by suicide. This morning I was rushed. I always feel rushed. I feel rushed by More. In healthcare, More is this tangible thing like a fork or a spoon. It is creative, continually morphing into a new shape, disguising its true self when it is nothing more than a plague meant to turn physicians into machines, hoping to one day remove all of humanism from the incredibly delicate and difficult practice of medicine. Yesterday More was the number of patient visits being tracked. The day before this More took form as patient satisfaction scores. Last week More was the system reminding me of the hundreds of incomplete tasks that needed completion—if only there were thirty hours in the day I tell myself; if only I was a machine which never needed sleep. How dare of me to require such a thing.
An Open Letter to Sophia L Thomas Whenever a new face steps into a healthcare leadership role, there is a hope that new life and positivity will fill the space another left behind. My wish for you was that you would put patient safety before an agenda to propagate misinformation about the role of physician’s advocacy in America's current healthcare crisis. However, I, unfortunately, was wrong.
Picture courtesy of Lenore Stutznegger and Norman Rainock (Norman Rainock Art Ca.) COVID, the hallways are eerily empty because of you. At night, where there normally exists an air of calmness as patients sleep, the hospital walls that surround me instead convey a sense of uncertainty. It is palpable. It is heavy. It is unlike anything I have ever encountered as a physician. Perhaps this is because deep down in places where fear and dread reside, we know you are there watching and studying our patterns of behavior. All the while, you silently spread yourself at exponential rates, knowing that our testing capabilities, while ever-growing, still fail to keep up with you. For this, you mock us. You are learning the truth about the American healthcare system as it stands. On the outside we are strong, with sophisticated buildings, fancy technology, and state-of-the-art equipment. To nearly any onlooker we appear to be thriving, at the top of our game. Yet you aren’t fooled by this; no, not at all because you have already penetrated these walls, exposing the hidden prison behind the shiny facade of our healthcare system.
I have updated the story below with this blog: CDC Documents Prove Billy Meier Right…AGAIN In it I link to the article by the very courageous Dr. Megan Babb that was also published on VOCAL. We were in contact this morning and I have shared additional sources with her.
It’s a Saturday afternoon. You have rummaged through the vodka bottles in your apartment the night before. The drinking games, shot glasses, and beer cans are stacked in the center of the living room. There’s enough evidence to suggest that the residents of this home have a hangover. In the case of hangovers, you’re looking for comfort, low-lit rooms, resolution from your headache, and your aching body wants to lie around for days on end. So what’s the best friend to a hungover twenty-something year old? That’s right; movies!
The Priestess and The Fool A woman sat on a stump in the middle of the woods, with two young girls around her, seated in front of her on the ground as they had time and time again. It was mid-afternoon, with the sun high in the sky. It was just turning to fall, the leaves on the tall spruce trees changing colors. The sun hitting the leaves covered the ground in shadows, with enough light peeking through to keep the bottom of the forest lit .
Listening to my parents and grandparents story times was something I dreaded as a kid but now growing up and understanding the value of family, I yearn to hear them babble about the life they have lived. This is just a couple of memories my grandma shared with me over a phone call that I recorded. I wanted to keep the text as close to her authentic way of speaking as possible since I believe that’s as important as the stories themselves. Please enjoy as she remembers some of her most important memories.
Lisa Michel blinked a few times looking at herself in the mirror. She had a really bad headache that wouldn't go away. Her friends had warned her against drinking, it was Lisa's first time. Lurching about the bathroom, Lisa found her way into one of the stalls and sat down on the toilet to hold her head in pain.
Sloane bit her tongue as Luke whined for the hundredth time about vacationing in Myrtle Beach. Because that was such a hardship for a ten-year-old boy.
Come to me in the silence of night So that you may know the truth of my Self. In the cacophony that is daylight’s routine I can surreptitiously place a mask over what’s inside.
1 year later Melody From the corner of my eye, I can see Cole shuffling restlessly in his chair by the door. I swear he has the patience of a child sometimes. I roll my eyes, what a baby. The lawyer, a man with greying hair, probably only a few years from retirement, passes another document from a seemingly endless stack to Lauren and I across the table. We each sign it and hand it back.
Ever since I was a child, I have been afflicted with what I have recently dubbed “the horror gene.” It runs in my mother’s side of the family and skips a generation. My maternal grandfather had it; the varying four-foot tall stacks of horror films in his house certainly attested to that. Now, I have him to thank, for that very same morbid fascination with darkness and fear is in my own blood.
It’s been 10 years since the release of Catfish. Since then, we’ve watched as society’s view of internet dating has flipped. At one time, finding a partner online was essentially considered a final resort for sad and lonely people. Often this method was associated with crazy cat ladies and basement-dwelling gamer guys. Nowadays, it’s common for single people to have at least one dating app on their phone. In fact, the dating game now resembles the platforms we use for finding restaurants or searching for holidays. But for most people using these platforms, or the online arena in general, there’s always that one risk: the infamous catfish.
Alexandra and her friends arrived at the Hilltop just before the speed dating event was about to begin. Her friends had been urging her to try online dating, but she preferred to meet someone face to face. It seemed a better way to tell if there was any chemistry between two people, and it seemed impossible to even know if you would be talking to the right person online. People could post anything. A different picture or details that were not true. She just wanted to be able to spend some time in person talking to one another to see how compatible you are. Although she did not feel that speed dating was much better. How much could you really learn in such a short time? And as far as night clubs she felt that they were even worse. They were loud and people were usually intoxicated, and it was all about hooking up with someone before closing time.
There weren’t always dragons in the valley. To be fair, there weren’t always colonies of mushroom people in the forest or sentient scarecrows in the desert, either. If I remember correctly - and it’s getting hard to, I’ll tell ya - the dragons are the most recent, at least for this area, and they’ve been here for a few years.
Beneath honey skies and between hanging ferns, Frank moved his bus through the streets of New Orleans. It was summer, the sun beating its fist down upon his windshield and turning the pavement into a haze, but he loved this time of year. His brow was damp and the air chokingly thick, and as he looked ahead all he saw was a vision of swimming yellows and oranges, people milling to and fro, smiling at one another as they always did.
Prologue This is the absolute best. There is no one else on the trail with me and I stop for a moment to take in the view, and the quiet. The wonderful, delicious, delicate quiet. It hovers, suspended in the air like a thin sheet of ice just waiting to crack. It’s been a long time since I’ve experienced such peace. The view is beautiful, beyond anything I could have imagined when I dreamed of skiing these mountains. The snow-frosted pines stretch on for miles, an endless sea of evergreen glittering in the afternoon sun. The snow beneath my skis is pristine, the groomed path stretching off to the horizon then curving down to the valley below.
Although I currently call the province of Alberta my home, I'm a Newfoundlander, born and bred - and I'll be one 'til I die. Growing up in the '90s, I was the living embodiment of a free-range child. I was adventurous, chaotic. Choosing to cannonball rather than dip my toes in to test the water. My friends and I would leave our respective homes in the morning, ready to seize the day. Our parents rarely saw us until the streetlights lit the night sky like beacons; barring the occasional bathroom breaks and scavenging for food like the feral house goblins we were. My hometown has always been a wonderful, quiet little place, where our neighbors knew everyone's business, and always kept a watchful eye. These types of small towns instill a certain level of trust. If our parents only knew half of what we were up to! We were resilient children, and were confident that nothing bad would ever happen to us - until it did.
2021 has been a very… interesting year for me. I intend to write a piece at the end of the year, but with October coming to a close in a little over a week, there’s likely not a whole lot left to write by most standards. I hope anyway; there've been some curve balls this year that I’m still dealing with. Here, I would like to talk about a trip I took to South Dakota this year, in July/August. It was the cause of first stress, then some happiness, and then gratitude. Due to my aunt and uncle’s desire for privacy, and also my lack of impulse to take many photos (reaching for my phone isn’t usually my first instinct), I will only refer to my aunt and uncle as such - without name - and there won’t be many personal photos.
Willow Smith recently came out as bisexual. The 18-year-old daughter of Hollywood power couple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith joins a growing list of young female celebrities who have opened up about having a non-heterosexual orientation, and she even revealed that her ideal relationship would be a polyfidelotous one with one woman and one man.