Big Catch Up

It's been a long while since I updated, almost two weeks. I've been writing, but mostly on my personal computer that I take to work. Then I just update it as I go, but never upload it to the blog. Sigh. It's a lot. There's a lot going on right now, isn't there?

Just a quick update: I'm transitioning, I hope, to a full-time position at work. That means moving from two days to three days a week. It doesn't sound like much, but when they're 12.5 hour days, it's a significant amount of time.

We're spending a lot of time at home, of course. We did go out a couple of times this past week to pick up groceries and prescriptions for my brother. We also splurged on a pizza--but we've been cooking and eating at home mostly. I've been ordering grocery delivery online, which is expensive but worth it. The one time I tried to shop for groceries, my anxiety level went through the roof. Not worth it. We tip the shoppers/delivery persons really, really well as a balm to my guilty conscience.

I've also been sewing up lots of masks.  I've given away lots of masks. I tried to count the number of masks that I've made and given away. I know that it's at least 25--with additional masks made for David and me to wear out.

My work entries:

April 2, 2020

Already.

April is already here. It’s Thursday night—well, actually it’s Friday morning. It’s 1:33 in the morning and I am at work. It’s a quiet night. Everything is done and I am casting about for things to do. In a bit, I’ll go in and break my techs. I have three breaks to run tonight, only half hours, so it should only take 90 minutes.

I also agreed to stay to give the patients their morning medications because they are short staffed this morning. Short staffed is a way of life around here. It’s ridiculous. That’s every hospital in the U.S. right now though. Because it’s such a chronic problem around here and very little is done to try to alleviate the problem, I very rarely feel as though I have to help out when they are massively short, as they are tomorrow. They need systemic fixes, not single employees continuing to bail them out on the fly.

So that’s my take on things.

It’s scary out there in the world right now, isn’t it?

April 4, 2020

Another night at work. It’s my Saturday to Sunday overnight shift. It’s very quiet tonight. I’m okay with quiet. I hope it stays that way. There are open beds on my unit, but as far as I know there is no one in the pipeline waiting to be admitted.

I didn’t sleep very much on Saturday, I woke up earlier than usual, but I woke up feeling rested. There’s nothing like staying up all night to test whether or not I got enough sleep that day.

One of my friends who works at the hospital in a different department calls the Covid-19 virus “the new sheriff in town.” Everything we do now is with one eye toward reducing the rate of infection. (Everything except testing, which is too rarely being done, in my opinion.) We’ve been washing our hands like fiends. We’ve been deep cleaning with an anti-viral cleaner every hour. Now we’re wearing surgical masks during our shifts. (Twelve hours in a surgical mask is not great. They’re uncomfortable and people who are claustrophobic have a hard time with it. My glasses get steamed up about half the time. But we do what we must.)

I am still following my routine of sanitizing everything when I come home in the morning. Everything comes out of my pocket and gets wiped down with an anti-viral wipe. I change out of my scrubs on the patio and bag up everything until it can be washed. I keep my robe near the door and wear that from the front door to the shower.

It’s not quite halfway through my shift. I have another seven hours or so.

Later:

It’s just after five a.m. I have about another two and a half hours of my shift left. I am very tired so I’ve been having way too much caffeine. I’m listening to music right now as I drink a diet Pepsi. I wiped down the entire office with anti-viral wipes. It’s the third time I’ve done it tonight. Even though I’m the only person who’s touched anything for the last several hours, I still wipe down. (What if I’m one of the asymptomatic carriers we keep hearing so much about? The person who is coming in at seven to relieve me is not young and fits the high-risk profile.)

After I ate my (middle of the night) lunch (chili and sweet potato), I took a fifteen minute walk around the campus, twice around the track at the far end of the campus. I’m grateful to work where I work because we can walk out the door of the unit and be outside. Tonight I saw bunnies and heard the owl hooting away in one of the trees over the cafeteria. (Yes, we have a resident owl.) We’re separate from the main hospital and we have our own little enclave, safe from the world (as if such a thing as safety existed).

I was telling my therapist that we’re so isolated in each little house-like unit, that some nights it feels like I’m on a boat in the middle of the ocean. The crew: Me, two techs, and a small number of patients, set adrift in the darkness. I don’t know what it’s like to work on a med-surge floor in the night. Maybe it’s like this, too. Maybe not. Here, because we badge in and out everywhere, people can’t just wander through. Even before visitors were banned, we only allowed visitors during certain hours and so I never have had to deal with families unless they called at night to check on their child (which happens rarely, very rarely).

April 10

April 17, 2020

My Thursday night/Friday morning shift. It’s around 5:15 in the morning. It’s been a steadily busy night. I have to remember to email the therapist.

I’m tired. I’m always tired.