Covert Covid Chronicles, Part “it’s been too long to remember”

Yes, it has been a very long time since I’ve written a blog post about how the coronavirus pandemic is going. I’ve certainly mentioned it here and there over the past months, because we cannot escape that it is a part of life right now. We also can’t escape, here in north-central Wisconsin, that it has hit us and hit us hard.

I have so many stories that I’ve written in my personal journal of the pandemic – 38,342 words since March 22. But so many of those stories are too personal and would break HIPPA laws if I shared them, or at least would teeter into that abyss of privacy violations. Or break the confidences of friends, patients, and co-workers, people I most especially cherish during these crazy times.

But I need to stop there. I seem to be starting to ramble. It’s late Thursday night as I’m writing this; I really need to get to bed. But sometimes, most of the time, a person has to write when their thoughts and feelings are most ragged.

Clearly, I’m losing my mind.

Oh, not to fret, I’ll be okay. As you should already know, I work at the small clinic in my hometown. We have eight family practice providers and until, COVID descended, a regular mix of specialties. Their presence has been somewhat hit or miss over the last eight months.

As you can imagine, working in family practice, in the only medical center in a small town, during a pandemic, is a little bit stressful. Our town’s hospital, in the same building, has around twelve inpatient beds, I think, and up until recent weeks, has had nights when only a few patients could be found sleeping there. Our emergency room is equally small, but I would seek care there, instead of a big city hospital, for any medical crisis. Our staffs are the best at what they do, but our numbers are small. And possibly getting smaller, as wards in the larger cities have begun calling out for help with staffing, as the pandemic continues to rage.

The numbers of COVID cases in the state keep going up. Sure, a lot of these people are not sick with it worse than they would be with a cold or a minor flu bug. But others, of any age, are ending up in the ICU, and later, the morgue. Our little hospital, which does not have the equipment to support those folks, is reaching out far and wide to find facilities to take them and treat them. It’s bad enough when your loved one is in isolation in the hospital and you can’t visit them because of a pandemic. But now they are being air-lifted up to two hundred miles away. How can you possibly be there to support them when they need you the most?

First time I tested someone for COVID.
Got dressed for this again this week. 

In our clinic, we are testing, on average, over twenty patients a day. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s how many patients some of our providers used to see in a day, patients being seen for physicals and pre-ops and post-ops and med checks and broken bones and warts and every other malady known to man. Now, many of our patients are being “seen” via the phone or video chat, to keep them from possible exposure in the clinic. And to keep us from being exposed if they do have the corona. Yet, more and more people with possible COVID make their way through our doors and into exam rooms, rooms which then need to get locked down for deep cleaning before anybody else can use them. Our cleaning people are being run ragged.

We've hired a temporary staff member just to do COVID swabbing. You wouldn't have seen that on a resume a year ago. "My most recent job was as a swabber."  

And me? I feel like Karen Silkwood. Remember the movie where she tried exposing worker safety violations at the plutonium processing plant she works at? Where if workers are found to be radioactive, they scrub them down in the shower? I feel like I should go through one of those showers when I leave work at the end of the day. I have an active, and somewhat warped, imagination. If I was so concerned, I could get my nose swabbed periodically. But I rather be dramatic.

It's time I close this out and get to bed, so I can get up early and post this on my blog for the world to read. I suppose I should close with the lecture – the part where I stress the importance of the three golden rules – masks, hand-washing, social distancing. But you’ve heard that all before. You know what to do and what not to do, and I know a lot of people out there think they are above those rules. They don’t care about their loved ones, their family, friends, co-workers, or general public, and apparently, they don’t care about the medical community, which might not be available to them when they fall ill or get in a car wreck driving home from a bar where they were sharing all their COVID germs.

Yup, it’s definitely time to end this ramble. Have a good weekend, stay safe, stay healthy. Chris 

When we run out of human heroes to work here, I guess does will work here instead.
(Picture taken by a co-worker after work one night last month)