I haven’t blogged for nearly nine months. I can’t even. Writing a blog about esotericism and the unknown just seems superfluous and unhelpful at this time of pandemic pandemonium. I started wearing an N-95 mask at work in November once I heard about SARS2 coming out of Wuhan China. It’s the peak of the flu season and we’re testing respiratory samples on an open platform generating aerosols because we’ve been told to whip the sample in the eluate. By the end of March, outpatient clinics went to telehealth and we were seeing fewer people at the lab. Our staff went to A and B shifts to protect our health and in response to the lower patient population. I was a C person, a floater that didn’t end up in any of those shifts. I feared for my job so I volunteered to be deployed to cover main hospital duties. I got put on a team to create COVID-19 test kits.
When you’re dealing with a novel virus, you don’t know much and information is swarming around you like mosquitoes during an Alaska spring. Stuff flying at you with little or no oversight or peer review can be just as dangerous as no information at all. We had to respond fast with what we had. First we knew that viral transport media was being processed in an area of Italy badly affected by the virus, what can we use instead? Phosphate buffer? Saline? Let’s run with that. Thousands of vials of buffer and then thousands more of saline were meticulously pipetted into sterile conical tubes and then placed in biohazard bags with the rapidly dwindling supply of swabs. Turns out, no testing platform has been certified with phosphate buffer so those had to be thrown out. Saline doesn’t have anything to impede the growth of, well, anything so those weren’t very popular either. Finally, we were getting shipments of the precious VTM from other sources and filling our kits with them. Hours of being in repetitive positions that would have made any ergonomics expert cringe left my shoulders, neck and spine in agony by the end of my shift.
I was then deployed to work early morning drawing patients on the wards so the doctors could have the lab results before morning rounds. I got up at 2:30 in the morning to be on the floors at 4am. I had to walk the gauntlet of nurses asking me “Have you had blah blah blah symptoms? Have you been exposed to anyone with COVID-19?” They take my temperature, make me clean my hands with the rare and precious hand sanitizer, place a colored dot on my work I.D. and then give me a poorly fitting surgical mask a third of which the earloops break but all of them fog my glasses. Only the most ill patients are in the hospital at this time and few of them are easy to get blood from. Some of them cuss me out when I turn on the overhead light so I can see what I’m doing. Most are so kind, but they’re tired, scared and in pain. Some aren’t coherent. It’s the nature of hospital wards, one of the main reasons I quit nursing school…I’m too empathic. I did that gig for four hours, took a breakfast break and then did filled test kits for the remainder of my shift. I went home to sew cloth masks for my family using a dwindling supply of elastic and fabric I had set aside in my workshop for other projects. This went on until mid-May when I was called back to my clinic job as a floater. I was one of the lucky ones able to keep my job and be paid my full time pay, then to return to work full time with a few restrictions. We are all wearing masks, our patients (except for the very young ones) are all wearing masks. We try to stay apart from each other, but human nature being what it is, we struggle with that. We try to keep that mask on all day unless we’re putting something in our mouths. Summer in the South means your face sweats even without a mask on. We try to keep ourselves and our patients as safe as possible which means restricting how many people get to be in the waiting areas. At one of our clinics, we were drawing in the rooms. I got double my steps in during those weeks. I knit ear-savers for those of us who’ve developed pain from having earloops around the backs of our ears.
Compound all of that with keeping food and toilet paper in a house that for a few months had only two people living in it. College students were being sent home to continue their semesters online. Not only did I have my son at home, but a friend of his from high school with nowhere else to go. New restrictions and recommendations to contend with and worsening infection rates put a cherry on top. I came down with hives. I have never had hives, I don’t recommend them to anyone.
Then I read stories and hear on the news far worse scenarios then I have had to deal with. Nurses and doctors working long shifts in full isolation PPE. People with no money unable to get food because the food banks are slammed. People dying at home for lack of space in a hospital and people dying in hospitals without a loved one nearby. I feel guilty that I feel stressed out and I’m angry at the lack of leadership from those we voted into office. Too many emotions to write anything coherent. Besides that, what can I write now that is relevant to our current situation? All of us are dealing with this thing in all corners of our planet.
Now is the time for amazing change because we’ve disrupted our normal, mostly comfortable lives. We are expanding our visions because we have to, we are becoming more empathic to the plights of others, Black Lives Matter movement, though it’s been around for a decade or more, has finally got traction toward social change. Horrible things that disrupt us humans provide the fertile soil of awareness that we don’t have with our heads down and our eyes on the little screens of distraction. I can write about all of that with hope toward a better future for us and the planet.
