On Thursday evening, while watching tv and learning to draw, practice session #4 this week, I decided I needed to get tested for covid before my parents arrived to visit for thanksgiving next week.
Just to be clear: I’ve been working with covid patients since early March including during the chaos when the entire country was running out of masks. But we have been lucky in the Bay Area, our surges have been smaller and more manageable. We’ve even had periods recently where no covid patients needed ICU-level care.
There was a time when my work mates and I were 100% sure that we’d already had covid—because how could we not?!?! Protocols were in flux, the federal government who was guiding our policies couldn’t decide what type of isolation precautions and PPE we needed. Not that the PPE (personal protective equipment) was even readily available then.
We probably had 20 pairs of goggles in our whole hospital… and reusable face shields? Oh hell no. Luckily our administration ramped up quickly, and many of our doctors with friends in tech hit donations of things like 3D printed face shields. We did have some crazy gowns mixed in there as our normal supply (made in China I’m sure) got depleted, but we got through the initial surge.
And while we were doing that, we also made our overflow hospital, overflow ICU, and organized anything else we needed. And then we did a trial run to make sure everything was do-able just to make sure.
As time went on, I actually became confident in all my colleagues’ abilities to deal with the covid patients. The isolation gear and protocols became second nature. I’m not worried that someone is going to expose us all.
So how does it feel to be tested for the first time this it a far in to the pandemic and be negative? I’m proud of my work crew. We’ve been keeping each other safe for 9 months now.
We just need to keep it up.