Is it a badge of honor to refuse the vaccine but choose to die?

You know that if you don’t get vaccinated and you don’t wear a mask, you potentially will die.

You go to super spreader events, big groups at beaches, football games, baseball games … loads of people laughing and clapping, and shoulder to shoulder.

Your refusal of the mask and COVID vaccination almost seems like a passage. Beating your chest. The survivor. It won’t happen to me.

Until you can’t breathe anymore. Delta doesn’t care about your rights.

Delta could care less if you call the others “sheep.” Delta could care less that you refuse to wear what you call a “muzzle.”

Delta cares about you not having any vaccination protection and no masks, and it jumps from one host to the next. Lodging in your lungs, heart, kidney, and brain. Your lungs stop working. Delta throws clots to your lungs and heart, your brain.

It’s a virus. A deadly virus. It’s not a Republican, and it’s not a Democrat.

So when you come gasping into any ER, begging to breathe because delta attacks your lungs first, we try to fix you if we have room in the ER or in the ICU. But now you’ve overcrowded ERs and ICUs.

Now you’ve shut down elective surgeries, even emergent surgeries, because there’s no more room left in the hospitals.

You refuse a vaccine in your body. But when you come to the hospital, everything will be forced into your body. An ETT (endotracheal tube), a central line, an arterial line, IV drips for low BPs, a paralytic, steroids, Ativan drip, and morphine.

A nasogastric tube through your nose and into your stomach. A sheath to introduce dialysis for your damaged non-functioning kidneys. Weeks to months on a ventilator, and we can’t wean your oxygenation down.

You’ve seen the pictures. You see us, nurses and doctors, begging you all to social distance, wear a mask and get the vaccine.

But you refuse.