The Plague Years

March 27, 2020

The hospital is quiet. It’s the very end of my Thursday overnight shift, about 5:30 in the morning. I had caffeine way too late (I was asked to work late and I agreed, so I drank an extra coffee, then was told I didn’t need to stay) and now I’m going to regret it.

Although I’m so tired that I may just go home and conk out.

Everyone here is stressed about the possibility of catching the corona virus. I don’t blame them. I’m stressed about it too. I thought that I had it, as I mentioned earlier, but now I’m second guessing myself. I’ve been trying to avoid the news recently. There’s only so much I can take and being stressed is not great for your immune system.

So it was a quiet night. We’ve been discharging several patients who have been here for far too long. (We’re an acute care facility, which means that we really shouldn’t have patients for longer than a week or 10 days, but some patients have been here for months, waiting for placements in longer-term care facilities. This place is meant to be safe, but it’s incredibly restrictive (which is how we maintain safety for the most at-risk patients, children who want to hurt or kill themselves or hurt or kill others) and children with mental illness diagnoses don’t do well over the long-term here. They start to decompensate, meaning that their behavior starts to degrade and what little coping skills they have start to fail them. It’s a bit paradoxical, I’ll admit, that the place that was once so safe suddenly becomes not so safe.) Anyway, recently some of the patients who have been here for a very long time are leaving. One of them said to me, “I’m going to miss you.”

I wish I could tell you about this patient.

Later:

It’s still March 27—Friday, but now it’s almost five p.m. in the afternoon.

I got about four hours of sleep after my shift. I ended up coming up to Judi’s with Dave. I had an impromptu breakfast (a handful of unsalted potato chips, a protein bar, a smalll piece of cheese).

(Judi fell a few days ago and fractured her hip. She was kind of dumb about the whole thing. After she fell—onto a concrete floor, which she had put into her home when they were all the rage in the 90s and she was in her early 50s—she couldn’t get up. She crawled to the phone (that took about an hour) and called me. Dave and I rushed up to her house. She had hauled herself up into a chair and was sitting there. I asked about the fall and she downplayed it, of course. I told her I thought she needed to go to the hospital and she didn’t want to. She asked us to feed Buzz, get her some water, and get her walker (which she still had from after her last hip replacement surgery) from the garage. I said, so you called us to get you some water and feed the dog?

I knew from the way she was downplaying everything that she didn’t want to go to the hospital. She said she felt like she had just jammed her pelvis and it would be better in the morning, so she wanted to wait. (It was too late to go to an urgent care, so she would have to go to the hospital if she went anywhere). She had taken two aspirin and thought that was going to keep any swelling down.

Sigh.

So Dave went and got the walker from the garage and asked her to try taking a few steps. As soon as she stood up, she said she was going to pass out and she sat back down. Then she agreed to us calling an ambulance to take her to the hospital. (That was fun. We’re all supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and suddenly I’m in a house with four people who do nothing but go from place to place interacting with sick people. Great.) They asked her her pain level—she had told me she was fine as long as she was sitting—and she said 4 out of 10 sitting and 10 out of 10 standing. They brought in a stretcher and loaded her up into the ambulance (I had stuffed her phone and iPad and water bottle into her purse along with chargers for the electronics because I knew she was in for a long wait), put in an IV, and hit her with some Fentanyl (which is a potent painkiller, once used primarily for cancer patients). Then they took her to the ER.

Because of corona virus, hospitals have banned visitors. We couldn’t go with her and we couldn’t do anything but keep in touch by text. The doctors did some imaging and found out that she had a hip fracture. The decision was made to send her to a rehab facility. This was probably done for a lot of reasons. She lives alone so there’s no one to help take care of her. She lives in a big house with lots of stairs which she would not be able to navigate. Plus she was not going to be able to drive and she was going to need a lot of physical therapy to get better.

So that where she is right now, for a few weeks at least, and so Dave is staying at her house with Buzz and I’m staying at our place with Gray Kitty. Today after Dave picked me up from work, I came up here to get some sleep and to keep them company. Normally it wouldn’t matter so much, our being in different places for a few weeks, but I think this mandatory isolation has everyone feeling a bit disconnected already and so it feels a bit more like a hardship. We need to find reasons to be connected. Even though I spent the morning upstairs trying and mostly failing to sleep and Dave spend the morning downstairs trying to work, it was still nice to have someone around. Buzz also appreciates the company, so that’s good.)

While I was trying to sleep (melatonin on board, eyes shades on, listening to episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation because I need some hopeful bit of humanity playing in the background right now), I got a text from the scheduler at work. I picked up two shifts (that will pay for our insurance next month) and said I’d text to let her know about others.

March 29, 2020

I’m here at work and it’s a very quiet night. Knock wood that it stays that way. It’s about 1:20 in the morning and I’m more than finished with my work.  Now it’s a game to stay just caffeinated enough…

I didn’t get enough sleep today, I don’t think. I’ve been avoiding looking at the clock, but I know that I was up for several hours in the middle of the day and when I tried to go back to sleep, two things happened: First, I remembered that I had not been careful with the mail delivery at Judi’s house the day before and had handled it and mixed it in with the other mail without decontaminating it at all. So I had to text Dave to let him know he needed to move it and sanitize the table where it was. (Dave was having his own trying day as he had discovered a major plumbing leak at Judi’s and had to have the water shut off all day as it was being evaluated. They were hopefully going to put a patch in place so that he could have water tonight, although I never texted him to find out if that happened.) The other thing that kept me awake was that my idiot neighbor started on some home improvement project outside my window that apparently involved hitting a metal fencepost repeatedly with a hammer and the use of some kind of circular saw.

I got out my noise cancelling headphones (not the usual non-noise cancelling headphones that I wear while I sleep because they are more comfortable than the other pair) and put them on with an episode of Star Trek playing and I put on some white noise at top volume on the echo dot. That mostly drowned out the noise. Then I was able to get about another ninety minutes of sleep. (If I’m being generous about the amount of time.)

I got up late, about half an hour, but still had plenty of time to get ready. Dave dropped me off at work a bit early because he was going to make a grocery pick up for my brother, then he was going to sanitize all the groceries and then drop them off both at my brother’s house and at our house. Then he had to go back up to Judi’s to feed and walk Buzz.

So it’s been a ridiculously busy time, despite the need for everyone to shelter in place to ward off the coming plague.