So the “inside” is looking a lot less like the “inside” every day.

When I resumed these posts, It was at the run-up to the surge in New York (Long Island more specifically) and I watched an orthopedic floor turned into an ICU, I saw nice clean step-down beds (were people go to have some cardiac monitoring – but nothing too “serious”) turned into ICU beds, a holding room for elective surgeries turned into “the fishbowl” of Covid patients were patients watched each other suffocate, and even ambulatory surgery units turned into Covid – care floors.

Like the receeding tide, I am seeing units being returned to their former functions, being made “clean” again. More and more, we are allowing families to at least come and see their sickest relatives before they are necessarily near death. We are even going to open a new cafeteria expansion next week (3 months late because of Covid).

There is a sort of strange melancholy to this process, as the huge bags of “dirty” supplies get thrown out and the rooms are “terminally cleaned” it feels like the day after christmas, after the superbowl, after the world series… the world returning to whatever passed for normal, the exploits and adventures spoken only in “remember whens”.

I look at the sparkling clean rooms and still see the hundreds of patients who suffered and died in them and I don’t want them to be forgotten, their suffering should not have been in vain.

And then I see the crowds rushing to bars and swimming pools and such flouting common-sense self protections and think, “yeah they did die in vain, and it is going to happen again, somewhere else if not here”.

I want it to be over.

I am afraid it is not.

As Always

Wash your hands

Don’t touch your face

Wear a mask… you aren’t freaking superman / captain marvel.

Exercise, eat right.

Love one another, hate doesn’t make anyone better.