February is my favorite month. Maybe it’s the part of me that always roots for the underdog. For a lot of people, February is their least favorite month. February is cold, it’s short, and everything outside is dead. But those same things are what makes February great. It’s cold in the northern hemisphere, which means that humpback whales are migrating south past Hawaii. February is whale soup. February is short, which means it’s always four workweeks, except for leap year. Everything outside is dark and dead— I guess people who do winter sports go skiing or snowboarding, while the rest of us sane people snuggle up inside with a book or a board game. My favorite things happen in February— our anniversary, Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year a lot of the time, and always my birthday. President’s Day, which means another day off in an already short month. And all the people born on February 19th—for some reason, I know quite a few people born on the same birthday, but no one super famous. Count back nine months? Mid-May? What are people doing in mid-May? Anyway, the most famous person born on the same day, I think, is Nicolas Copernicus, but the one I’m most excited to discover is Millie Bobbie Brown, of Stranger Things ‘Eleven’ fame. Others to throw in there: Prince Andrew, Seal, Jeff Bridges (I can totally see that). But sometimes, I don’t think that the day your birthdate says everything about you--if it says anything about you. How could it say everything? There are twenty-four hours in a day, which is 1440 minutes. You could be born in the north or the south, the east or the west, under a sun or a moon. Therefore variability must exist. You could be born in a culture with a zodiac animal every twelve years, so I am specifically a Pisces Pig, a gay Chinese Canadian American Pisces Pig (writer-artist-surgeon?). Therefore the day you are born says only one thing about you.
But February is my favorite month. There’s a lot to celebrate. This February, it will be over a year since I’ve seen my family in Canada. I keep thinking that the pandemic will end and the quarantine rules will be lifted so that I can visit. As of January, I could enter Canada as a citizen, but I’d have to quarantine for 14 days before seeing anyone. I don’t have two-plus weeks to take off of work right now, or really ever. As of next week, the rule will change so that you have to stay three days in a government-approved hotel after arrival and have a negative COVID test, too. Toronto has also reinstated shelter-in-place, so the rules are getting stricter, not looser. It’s for the best. A few months ago, I could not imagine being the bearer of the virus and exposing my family to it. I keep hoping, though, that eventually, a vaccine-card-carrying citizen will be able to enter and visit for a weekend and that the science confirms vaccines prevent asymptomatic transmission. I had to explain to a couple of people today that that’s why we are still doing masks and social distancing because we don’t know yet that vaccines protect other people. And so far, we are nowhere near the number of people who need to be vaccinated.
I’ve given up on tracking the numbers. 100, 1 million, 100 million. The last I checked, about 3% of the US was vaccinated, but over 29 million had gotten ‘a vaccine’. If it was their first dose or second dose, I don’t know. Some people do get muscle aches and terrible fatigue. We may have to get vaccinated again in the fall for the mutant strains. I don’t know. No one knows for sure. I trudged to work in Winter Storm Orlena today because I had volunteered to supervise vaccinations. I went because I live pretty close by, and I figured other people taking trains and buses might not be able to make it, but I had no excuse. City vaccinating pods had canceled all their appointments, so I was sure I would be sitting there twiddling my thumbs. I was wrong. People came. If you have a vaccine, they will come. It was still slightly slower than on other days, so I chatted with some of the patients as they did their time, sitting in front of me for fifteen minutes to be sure they didn’t have an adverse reaction. A lot of them were older people who lived across the street or in the neighborhood. Here they were, 76 or 89 years old, wrapped up in multiple parkas and hats and gloves, some with their walkers, all of them telling me they would not miss their appointment for anything. Not even for a blizzard. At the risk of life and hip. They had trouble getting these appointments (most had to have someone else schedule because they were unable to do the ‘online’ thing), and to reschedule could mean waiting a week. Another week, when you’re 89, isn’t guaranteed. There was a tweet from Dr. Glaucomflecken— when he told an 89-year-old patient to make an appointment for next year, the patient told him, “Doc, I don’t even buy green bananas.” A bunch of the patients were younger people who were teachers at local public schools. They thanked me for being there; I thanked them for their service, always mentioning that my sister is a teacher, too, and I see how hard she works. All of them were willing to go out in two feet of snow for a chance at normalcy. A normal life with seeing people and without fear. When I saw that, I was glad I showed up and made a little difference in making that possible.
So. That’s my February 1st. We have a new president, a new plan, and I am cautiously optimistic that I may be able to go to Canada by the summer and maybe go on a cruise by the fall. I hope you all have a good month.
Here’s an article I wrote last month:
Baseline Med: It Gets Better When You’re an Attending
And here, apparently, I am on this website in a TikTok:
Fight CRC COVID Vaccine- What You Need to Know
here’s a new logo that I drew… soon, hopefully, we will have pins and stickers!
Until next month, always go black tie!