Observations On A Friday Evening.

1. A brand new 3M N-95 mask smells a little like vanilla ice cream.

2. All nurses are amazing.

3. You can’t shock an ER nurse.

4. ICU nurses will save your life.

5. Nurses who have ever cared for COVID patients are certified Badass, will chew steel for lunch and spit out nails.

6. I would go into battle with any nurse at my side.

6a. Nurses Aides are the infantry in healthcare, they do the grunt work and come up with most brilliant observations in the fight. The view that is often overlooked by the higher ups.

7. There is a whole population of younger people (35-60 yo) who’ve contracted COVID who are alive, on high flow and high percentage oxygen, can’t move more than side to side, and are trapped as chronic pulmonary disease patients likely forever.

8. There is a whole new population of younger people (35-60 yo) who’ve contracted COVID who are now on hemodialysis as well as chronic pulmonary disease patients.

9. The medical system will have to re-create the “sanatorium” system for these patients for many years to come to aggregate these patients under the care of expert Doctors and Nurses if they are to have any hope of return to society.

10. Most of what we give now (in terms of medications) and the way we give it now is minimally effective.

11. The best treatments are oxygen, prone positioning, nutrition, great nursing care, and love.

12. It is genuinely frightening to walk into a building every day knowing that you could get a deadly disease, pass it to everyone you know, and become just another statistic, a mere number in a ledger.

13. It is frightening to realize that this is going to be the way it is for a VERY long time (even when there is a vaccine).

14. Much the same way that “every Marine is a rifleman first”. Every physician should be capable of intelligently and effectively managing a patient from top to bottom, specialty comes later. This should be reviewed on a certain timetable, not by testing, but by doing.

As always, wash your hands, don’t touch your face, wear masks in public, do the social distance thing, and practice love and kindness. There is too much hatred in the world.