I Heart New York

It’s Monday morning, just after four a.m. I’m at work. I don’t want to be here, but here I am.

I’m not happy to be here. I’ve been having some scary symptoms in the past couple of days. They come and go. By scary symptoms, I mean: Pain in left arm and jaw, GI problems—lots of things that point to a heart attack in women—but then they just go away. Then they come back. It’s happened a few times in the past few years and I’ve gone in to have them checked out and nothing ever comes of it. It’s’s scary though. If they got worse—or even if they stayed the same—I would go back to get them checked out again. But then they get better, so I think better of it. It sucks.

The weird thing is that they often happen in sync with my cycle. I think it’s hormonal in some ways—especially the pain in my left breast and above it. That kind of pain is known to be hormonal in some cases. So I ignore it and then it goes away. Then it comes back. It doesn’t happen every month, but it happens a few months out of the year. I wonder what it is. I should look it up online, but I’m afraid to.

Anyway.

I spent the last few days feeling crappy anyway. There have been forest fires all around us and the smoke blows into the city and my lungs get all crappy. I am congested and hoarse from breathing in this garbage all the time. I took some Benadryl today (mostly to help sleep but it opened my lungs up, too, which I don’t know if it helped or not). We run an air purifier in the casita 24/7, and it helps as long as I stay indoors, but I’m guessing the filter needs to be changed.

I’m feeling a bit worried. And that worry is layered with a kind of gray despondency. The world feels like it’s burning right now. I’m more and more worried about Covid. It’s getting so much worse here in the US and people are just ignorant or don’t care. I’d like to walk everyone I see without a mask through the ICUs (which are still running at 130% capacity) to look at patients on ventilators. This is not a joke. Not all of the patients are old, either. There are many people in their 30s and 40s—some even younger. We had a pediatric patient, too.

Later:

I just got finished giving report to the hospital supervisor. The place is kind of a mess right now. We’re always short staffed and staff is burning out. I listen to a litany of complaints every time I come in to work. It makes me not want to come in to work, but I do. I still come in to work.

I have some time off coming up for David’s birthday in July and then for my birthday in August. We’re not going anywhere. (Where would we go that feels safe?) But we can spend the day together and have a good meal.

I was thinking recently about our last trip to New York City. My anxiety wrecked that trip. Wrecked it. I had some kind of nervous breakdown in a too expensive hotel room and I’m tempted to say that I shouldn’t have gone, but if I said that, I wouldn’t really mean it. I’m glad I went. I love that city and I hope to see more of it before I die of Covid. I want to go back to the museums. I want to go back and walk the streets. I want to go back and eat in all the strange little restaurants. I would even go back just to sit in a too expensive hotel room and have a nervous breakdown.

I miss New York City.