Friday, December 18, 2020

December 18

I'm vaccinated! 

It's not the end of things, not by a long shot. Our hospital is down to a precious few ICU beds, and we're just now getting waves of the people who caught COVID during Thanksgiving, spent a week without symptoms, and then a week or so being sick at home but not bad enough to come to the hospital and are now 7-10 days into symptoms and crashing. 

It's dire at work. Every day. Our RTs had a discussion yesterday about vent triage - we intubated two people back to back in the ER and someone mentioned that we were down to single digits for available ventilators. But not to worry, "some of those people are going to die soon, so that'll free up the vents if we need them." NOT the reassuring news one wants to hear.

So, yeah. I got my vaccine yesterday, and am looking forward to this being over one day. But that day is not today, and we're going to keep going until it is.


***

My pancake plant that arrived in the mail a week ago looked pretty sad when I first got it - most of the leaves were smooshed during transit, so while it looked great as soon as I took it out of the package it dropped a lot of leaves over the next two days. I was worried the plant wouldn't survive, but then noticed yesterday that I have a tiny baby leaf coming up and more on the way. It's gonna make it! Once it's a little bigger and healthier I'll repot it to something better looking. 

Plant babies! I love this!




3 comments:

Aesop said...

You're getting what we're getting.

For those who need a little cheering up, I made you some things in Shop Class:

https://shepherdofthegurneys.blogspot.com/2020/12/blog-post.html

Merry Christmas.

L said...

@Aesop - It's almost like we could have looked at other parts of the country that got hit before we did and had something to prepare by...alas, we shall continue to be blindsided at each step.

We knew this wave was coming and are only just in the past couple weeks converting more COVID units and hiring travelers. We lost a ton of nurses because they didn't want to give any hazard pay, and when a large portion of staff quit the higher-ups panicked we all of a sudden got 8 weeks of a ridiculous amount of extra money. Which is nice, but money can't take care of patients or work a ventilator. LE SIGH. One day things will be better. The cheery memes do help though :)

Aesop said...

YW.

We got hit in Califrutopia April-June.
Then again starting after Labor Day.
They're still just now doing things, in Month Ten, we should have done on Day One.

I'm pretty sure a prerequisite for becoming a hospital administrator is having a complete lack of foresight beyond 5PM today, and a sociopathic unconcern for consequences to staff and patients.

But that's purely anecdotal, since it only describes everyone of them I've seen for 25 years.

Hang in there. :)