Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i 5280 Magazine

Well into the summer of 2020, it had become clear that the same divisions driving so much of our political discourse had bled into the dialogue about the COVID-19 pandemic. As cases around the country started to tick up, videos of Americans becoming completely unhinged when asked to wear masks in restaurants or places of business went viral on social media. That the simple act of wearing a face covering in public, an effective way to protect both yourself and those around you, had become politicized seemed to be a perfect microcosm of the dissension in America. ¶ One thing that can’t be debated, however, is the valiant responses of our health care workers to the virus. Assistant editor Shane Monaghan reported this month’s cover story, “The First Wave” (page…

Pressure to make the grade, make the team, and not make embarrassing mistakes has long stressed students out. In Colorado, all that anxiety is contributing to a crisis: The state’s teen suicide rate jumped by 58 percent between 2016 and 2019, and a report from the attorney general points to fears about academic failings as a key risk factor. It’s that kind of anxiety Tessa Zimmerman of Asset Education aims to ease. The four-year-old Denver company creates stress management curricula for the classroom, and research suggests the nearly 20,000 learners Asset reaches see benefits—in a 2018 Denver Public Schools study of two different classrooms, 60 percent of students reported feeling less frazzled after practicing Asset’s techniques for a year. With the pandemic inducing even more tension than usual, we asked…

Winter Counts packs a lot into its 336 pages: Written by Denver’s David Heska Wanbli Weiden, 56, the thriller follows Virgil Wounded Horse, a private enforcer hired to rough up crooks when the legal system fails. But after a heroin overdose hospitalizes his nephew, Virgil must find the supplier while confronting problems that mirror real-life issues on U.S. reservations. Before the book’s August 25 release, we asked Weiden about his Sicangu Lakota identity, seeking justice on tribal lands, and why he thinks more Native Americans should write crime fiction. 5280: Winter Counts is set on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, where your mother is from. Did visiting as a child influence the book? David Heska Wanbli Weiden: Very much so. At the reservation, they’d think I was this wealthy, half-Native…

Hiwot Solomon is obsessed with baking. Her cousin, Mickias Alamirew, is equally devoted to Ethiopian coffee. Together, they have re-created their homeland’s delicious (albeit postcolonial) tradition of pairing a Western-style dessert with a cup of coffee at Solomon’s Aurora bakery, HiRa Cafe & Patisserie. Solomon has vivid memories of visiting similar cafes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, for a slice of cake and a cup, a custom she says Ethiopians adhere to whether in their native country or elsewhere in the world. Baking cakes began as a hobby in 2006 when, at age 26, she immigrated to Aurora. Following a decade of working as a restaurant server and with ample encouragement from family and friends, she decided she wanted to make it her career. After earning a pastry and baking…

For most of her career, Monika Charyga believed people didn’t fully understand her job. The 28-year-old would mention that she was a respiratory therapist at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, and someone would guess that she examined people’s lung capacities or gave out inhalers. “I’d tell them that’s partly true,” she says. “But people never realized that we work in every area of the hospital—the ER, the ICU, the NICU. And we aren’t just doing routine stuff. We play a big role in emergency situations.” Since COVID-19 infiltrated the United States, however, the importance of respiratory therapists—specifically, during challenging procedures—has been on full display, and confusion about the job itself disappeared pretty quickly. The virus unleashes some its most devastating effects on people’s lungs, and thousands of Americans have been…

Dr. Steven Brown felt like things were finally beginning to calm down in early + May. The chief medical officer at Lutheran Medical Center was seeing fewer COVID-19 patients coming through the hospital’s doors. People were being taken off ventilators, having successfully fought off the disease. Even elective surgeries were returning in a limited capacity. That didn’t mean Brown could relax, though. He now had a new challenge: helping Lutheran return to something approaching normal operations with the threat of the novel coronavirus still imminent. The 68-year-old chatted with 5280 about that task, lessons learned from the disease’s initial outbreak, and the problems hospitals still face in the immediate future. 5280: Is there anything you and your team figured out over the past few weeks that will make dealing with…

AURORA – The Medical Center of Aurora—HealthOne AVISTA – Avista Adventist Hospital—Centura Health BROOMFIELD – UCHealth Broomfield Hospital—UCHealth CASTLE ROCK – Castle Rock Adventist Hospital—Centura Health CHILDREN’S – Children’s Hospital Colorado CRAIG – Craig Hospital DENVER HEALTH – Denver Health Medical Center GOOD SAMARITAN – Good Samaritan Medical Center—SCL Health HIGHLANDS RANCH – UCHealth Highlands Ranch Hospital—UCHealth LITTLETON – Littleton Adventist Hospital—Centura Health LUTHERAN – Lutheran Medical Center—SCL Health NATIONAL JEWISH – National Jewish Health ORTHOCOLORADO – OrthoColorado Hospital—Centura Health PARKER – Parker Adventist Hospital—Centura Health PLATTE VALLEY – Platte Valley Medical Center—SCL Health PORTER – Porter Adventist Hospital—Centura Health PRESBYTERIAN/ST. LUKE’S – Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center—HealthOne RMHC – Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center—HealthOne ROSE – Rose Medical Center—HealthOne SKY RIDGE – Sky Ridge Medical…

I’m not naive enough to think that the people you elect are the be-all and end-all to our problems, but it does really matter to have representation. You can see it in Colorado now. We have representation of women and people of color. When you have people who are direct lines from these communities and are policymakers, we see change happen. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and I’ve been part of that process with the work we’ve done with reproductive rights. But we know we’re one bad election away from losing the progress we’ve made in these policy fights. And voting is a big, important step, but keeping politicians accountable is vital. Your participation doesn’t end at the ballot box.…

Kaitlin Ziesmer To help run Babe Walls, Pangburn recruited five local artists she admired as co-founders—including Ziesmer, known for her kooky animal-human hybrid paintings. “I’m inspired by her work ethic and organization,” Pangburn says. “And her color palette is so fun.” kaitlinziesmer.com Denver Museum of Nature & Science Before moving to Golden in 2017, Pangburn worked as a vet tech in Ohio and painted portraits of her patients. Today, she’s inspired by the animals preserved in DMNS’ wildlife hall. “It gives me a sense of their fur texture, their eyes, how they might move,” Pangburn says. “I try to capture that emotion in my pieces.” dmns.org South Table Mountain Pangburn used the cacti-studded mesa above Golden as the backdrop for her series Women of the West, paintings depicting the women…

I began working at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s about a month before COVID-19 showed up. When everything started, I wondered if it was worth keeping the “ job. I was scared I would take COVID-19 home to my family members. But I thought about it more and realized the community needed me. This is where I belong. It doesn’t matter that I am in housekeeping; I can help people as much as a nurse. Sometimes that’s by cleaning more thoroughly, and sometimes it’s with a simple smile. —Nhamen Yilma, environmental services employee at Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center It was tough talking with patients’ family members and friends over the phone, because we weren’t allowing visitors. It’s one thing to say, Yeah, they are stable, doing OK in there. And it’s another thing to…

Dr. Keri Propst works as an anesthesiologist, but during the early stages of the pandemic, she also got to hone her detective skills. She became part of the Colorado COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Project Consortium: a group of Centennial State health care groups, including Kaiser Permanente and SCL Health, and blood banks, like Vitalant, that have teamed up to both study the blood product and help get it to the sickest patients. Throughout April and May, Propst still spent some days sedating people before surgery at Saint Joseph Hospital, but she also tried to find people—mostly by sifting through files and calling folks—who’d recovered and were willing to donate the fluid. “I have been astounded by all these institutions working together,” Propst says, “as well as by how many people are…

At one point during Colorado’s stay-at-home orders, Kaiser Permanente, a medical group with 29 offices throughout the state, saw its number of video telehealth visits go from around a dozen a day to several hundred. The spike began the same week primary care and specialty doctors shut down offices to limit the spread of the virus, which forced Kaiser to expand its already existing suite of telehealth options. It turns out that just about everyone is a fan: 93 percent of patients indicated they were satisfied with the attention they received during such visits, and Dr. Ari Melmed, medical director for Kaiser’s telehealth services, said many doctors were enjoying the work-from-home experience more than they anticipated. “Every field is figuring out that more can happen using technology than people thought,”…

Why didn’t you choose my doctor? We don’t pick the docs—Denver physicians do. For the past 26 years, 5280 has surveyed doctors and asked them, specialty by specialty, which metro-area physicians they would trust to treat themselves and their families. Our theory is that medical professionals are best qualified to judge other medical professionals. The ballot is posted on 5280.com from the end of January to mid-March each year. Every metro-area doctor with a valid Colorado medical license can fill it out. Once the doctor hits “save,” the votes are entered into our database and tallied. So doesn’t that make it one big popularity contest? In some respects, yes. We hope that doctors give us careful, responsible answers, but there’s little we can do to stop them from recommending their…

“We often talk about women being ‘granted’ the right to vote—but they demanded it,” says Leah Davis Witherow, curator of history at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. “The campaign in Colorado shows a coordinated, grassroots effort that placed tremendous priority on strategy.” In addition to their gumption, Centennial State women had a few things going for them. They’d been successfully voting in school district elections since 1876, which nullified the sentiment that women would cause chaos at the polls. Thanks to the boom-and-bust nature of mining town life, women’s economic work—washing clothes, taking in boarders, serving as midwives—also had political value. “The brilliance of the 1893 campaign was that they employed a strategy they knew would work in our state,” Davis Witherow says. She breaks down their primary tactics into…

One of my most vivid childhood memories is a political one. I was eight years old, watching Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush on the debate stage, both vying to become the 41st president. I ate Ritz crackers—the same way I still do today, by placing the salted side down on my tongue—while the candidates spoke about things I didn’t fully understand. It was common for political discussions like this to float around our house; tariffs and equal rights were discussed along with homework and meal plans. We weren’t a family of politicians, but we were a family of voters. Exercising my franchise, I learned as a kid, was an essential action. I repeatedly heard the story—it’s more folklore than fact at this point—of my great-grandmother, who, after the 19th…

55 Percentage of voters the Pew Research Center estimates were women in the 2016 presidential election (women make up 50.8 percent of the U.S. population) 44 Percentage of women in Colorado’s state Legislature (the national average is 29.2 percent) 0 Female U.S. presidents, U.S. vice presidents, Colorado senators, Colorado governors, and Denver mayors…

HIS DAD WARNED ME. HE SAID IT’D BE DIFFICULT TO READ. I PRINTED THE EIGHT-PAGE DOCUMENT ANYWAY AND LEFT IT ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF MY DESK FOR A FEW DAYS. BOLDFACE WORDS ON THE COVER SHEET WOULD CREEP INTO MY PERIPHERAL VISION, THOUGH, AND AFTER TAKING A FEW DEEP BREATHS, I PICKED UP THE PAPERWORK. NO ONE, I THOUGHT, SHOULD HAVE TO READ THE AUTOPSY REPORT OF A FRIEND. Using the emotionless prose of a pathologist who sees dead bodies every day, the coroner described Brian Heath Roundtree’s six-foot, 165-pound frame, brown hair, graying beard, and blue eyes. She noted that he looked roughly his age, which was 43. They were prosaic details, things even an acquaintance would’ve observed. But I’d known Brian for a little more than 13 years…

RETURN TO SENDER David Satin of Hooked On Books in Colorado Springs was shocked when a pristine WWII Romanian Army medal tumbled out of a book. He wasn’t nearly as surprised, however, as the descendants of the honoree were when Satin tracked them down to return the heirloom, which they didn’t know was missing. CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN In the 1970s, scaling19,341-foot Mt. Kilimanjaro earned you a crisp certificate of completion, one of which fluttered out of a book and into the hands of Linda Dillie, former owner of the Bookworm in Boulder. We at least know who it didn’t belong to: No Coloradan would misplace such bragging rights. DATED DEFENSE Storing contraceptives in foil hasn’t always been in vogue. Denver’s Printed Page Bookshop co-owner Dan Danbom discovered as much when…

“In the first few weeks of dealing with COVID-19, I remember a specific elderly woman who came in saying she didn’t feel well. Her husband had already been admitted with COVID-19, “ but she looked decent despite having the virus. She said to me, I just don’t want to die from this. All of my clinical knowledge suggested she would be OK. So, I told her that. She ended up dying three days later. That was a wake-up call. The woman had moved through the ER, and once she was in the hospital they did everything they could for her with breathing devices. That still wasn’t enough. I started realizing how little we can do as doctors to fight this disease. Most of the treatment is supportive. We can use…

At the end of February, I, myself, was about 27 weeks pregnant. I experienced some complications, and the baby’s heart stopped beating. I ended up losing the child. Testing was done to see if the fetal loss had anything to do with the new coronavirus, but it doesn’t appear it did. I was supposed to take a lot of time off, but I decided to come back to work after about 14 days. It had a lot to do with COVID-19. I wanted to be present and felt like the department needed some direction. When I returned, I was really nervous I wouldn’t be able to relate to patients. I have been active in administrative roles for the past three to five years, and I was considering options where I…

Not only is voting my civic obligation—voting is also a family obligation. By voting, I honor my maternal grandfather, who bravely fought in General Douglas MacArthur’s Philippine Army and was decorated with a Purple Heart in both World War II and the Korean War. By voting, I honor my paternal grandfather, who was one of the Sakada, the Filipino laborers who were recruited by the United States in the early 1900s to work the sugar cane fields in Hawaii and the canneries in California. By voting, I honor my mother, who, throughout her life, refused to allow anyone to bully her family because of our Filipino heritage. In their own ways, they all fought for the right and privilege to vote. Their pride in being American was evident at every…

I told myself this past July when I turned 18 that I was going to educate myself on politics and the news so this year, when I could vote for the president, I would be ready. You hear it talked about a lot that the younger population didn’t come out because they felt like their voice didn’t matter. I understand that your one vote might not sway much, but if 1,000 people come together or 10,000 people come together, that might matter. Just having the opportunity to vote—one I didn’t have for 18 years and one women didn’t have for a great number of years—makes me feel like it should be exercised. Now that I have the chance, I’m really excited to make good on it.…

I believe voting is the greatest platform to express your words without saying much. As an immigrant líder, I believe that this country is built by people like me from all over, and we all bring something to this land, including great creations and ideas to change different industries and our economy. Sometimes we don’t vote because we don’t agree with some political bullshit, but one thing I learned over the years is that not everything will always work for everyone, but you will find the way to make it work for you—if you vote. Another thing I have learned is if you don’t agree on something, you can vote no or against it and it will still be counted. If you vote, that means you are demanding your rights…