About a month ago, my sister and I sent our Mother’s ashes to join our Father’s in the Indian Ocean. It’s been just over a year since she passed away at the age of 95.

it was a bittersweet moment, tinged with both sadness and peace, knowing that both Mum and Dad had a strong and abiding faith, and were personally certain of a reunion post the gates of death.

Mum and Dad lived through a lot of history. Mum was seventeen at the end of World War 2, and Dad twelve. Mum had whooping cough twice, once as a baby, and then again at the age of five. She recalled that the girl across the road had diphtheria while she was ill with whooping cough. She vividly recalled the struggle to breathe before the next bout of coughing. She also once told me that seasickness made you feel as if you were about to die, but were scared you might not, which made us both laugh.

They lived through the polio epidemics of the fifties, and the Cuban missile crisis of the sixties. They saw men land on the moon. Dad was a great lover of science fiction, and he once said that everything he’d read in a Flash Gordon comic, had come true in his lifetime, except easy space travel. He loved technology, and at his last birthday (88), only three months before his death, we all gave him a new iPad, as he’d just completed a course on how to teach old people how to use iPads.

They both lived through the Covid-19 pandemic this century. Today, I was watching television, and was reminded of the uncertainties of the early months of the pandemic. No-one really knew what was happening, how bad things might be, or what might happen in the future. Living in an island country, we were safer than most, and with Mum and Dad in Western Australia, possibly in one of the safest places in the world.

I remember watching the death toll mount across the world. The mass graves in New York and Italy. The health workers who died looking after their patients. Attending an online update for physiotherapists who might be called on to work in ICU – the information being updated as fast as possible from across the world as new information came to light. (For those of you who don’t know, some physios are ICU specialists – focusing on lung function and rehabilitation. My job if required, would most likely have been to work in a musculoskeletal ward to free up someone eminently more qualified for the ICU – but knowing the basics never hurts.)

Due to interstate restrictions, it was incredibly difficult to travel to Western Australia when Dad became unwell. And there was the two week hotel quarantine while he deteriorated. However, I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to see him, when I know how many didn’t see their loved ones before they died, whether because of the inability to travel, or because they were being nursed in isolation.

I also remember the huge relief when the first vaccines were rolled out. Unlike bacterial infections, which can usually be treated with antibiotics, viral infections at this point in time, still have limited treatment options, which is why vaccination is such a boon.

Now, four years later, it’s easy to see how we can take things for granted. We can now be vaccinated against Covid, and it’s no longer the unknown, life threatening disease it once was. It’s still problematic. It still causes hospitalisation in the more vulnerable, and there are things we don’t yet know about repeated infections with it. But like many infections I’ve already mentioned – whooping cough, diphtheria, polio – we now have a vaccine.

Watching people though, reminds me of how much we can take for granted. I see so much misinformation about health daily on social media, and out of the mouths of people I see professionally, who’ve been (quite literally) infected by it on social media.

I remember early on in the pandemic, one of my patients said very seriously to me: “You know they’re going to microchip us all with the vaccine so they can track us.”

And I replied, somewhat offhandedly: “I reckon the size of the needle might give that away – if you’ve ever seen your pet being microchipped.”

I then asked her the first of several questions: “Where did you get that information from?”

She replied: “My friend.”

I then asked: “Did she also mention Bill Gates, 5G, and depopulation?”

She said: “How did you know?”

I replied: “Because they are the anti vaccine tropes that have been around for over a decade. Except that once it was 4G. Also, where did your friend get that information?”

She said: “She was showing me on her phone!”

I replied: “You mean the tracking device she keeps in her pocket?”

At which point, she went: “Oh, I’d never thought of that!” I was tempted to do a head desk manoeuvre at that moment.

And as of now, the conspiracies continue, unfortunately just like they have every time something new and medical has come on the scene. I find it distressing.

We live in a privileged time. We have antibiotics. We understand hygiene. We know the benefits of antiseptic procedures. We have life saving surgery. We have prosthetic joints. We have treatments for cancer (not all, but many more than we once did). And yet there are still some who denigrate our life saving treatments, and suggest a return to those of the days when people routinely died of what we now assume are simple issues.

This is the flip side of not being either old enough to remember what life was like before we could prevent certain diseases, or of romanticising the past. Alternatively, it’s possible to wander so far down a rabbit hole that the search engine algorithim learns what you keep looking for, and gets better at supplying it, until you end up in an echo chamber.

My hope, is that we stop taking our privilege for granted. That we treasure our moments on this earth, and leave a legacy of kindness and thankfulness for our children and friends. That we don’t find a conspiracy under every bush, but live in the real world, where good choices can make our community a better, and safer place.