Happy January 2nd!

In the year 2021...

I admit that I spent yesterday in complete disbelief that 2020 was over and we had made it to 2021. It didn’t feel like the end of anything. Yesterday did not feel like a new beginning. In fact, it feels like we are steps away from another few months of ‘the new normal,’ which is now just Blursday.

My grouchiness isn’t limited to this year alone. If you’ve known me in real life at all, you would know that I’ve always hated New Year’s as a holiday. I used to storm off to bed well before midnight in my youth, leaving my puzzled parents and sister in the living room to watch the countdown. It wasn’t just that I didn’t have anyone to kiss when the ball dropped. It was more that, having moved to different countries several times, I always felt that midnight on December 31st was a relatively arbitrary designation as ‘the end’ of something. Especially when, in Hong Kong, their midnight is twelve (or thirteen) hours ahead (of Eastern Standard Time), and the west coast is three hours behind. When is the real-time that the year ends? Based on this arbitrary end time, we tell ourselves that we need to make New Year’s Resolutions, another concept to which I object. People make resolutions they don’t keep, so what’s the point? We should be trying to better ourselves every day, not just one day of the year. So, I was in an anti-New Year’s daze yesterday. It didn’t help that we are still dealing with COVID-19.

I woke up this morning and read Louise Penny’s newsletter, which is, strangely, what brought me back to this year, this day. (Another thing you might know about me— she is one of my favorite authors. She writes quiet, thoughtful, character-driven murder mysteries set in a small town in Quebec. While they are a quick, fun read, I always learn something from them, either about history or humanity. I love them. My other favorite author is Haruki Murakami. Odd, I know, since he is on the opposite end of the surrealism spectrum, but maybe they both write contemplative novels that are more about the human condition than anything else?) Anyway, and I don’t begrudge her any of this, but Louise Penny said she spent nine months in quarantine, half of that at her country lake house, and she wrote her seventeenth novel. She said that most of her days were peaceful and serene. She said that she was in New York City on March 13th, having dinner with a friend, when everything changed.

I was in New York City on March 13th, seeing a full schedule of patients. (To think, I may have been blocks away from Louise Penny!) That evening, I went to round on my patients in the hospital. One of them had just been downgraded from the intensive care unit. When I leaned in to examine him, he coughed on me. At that time, I had come back from a short trip to Toronto to visit family, where reports of this virus from Wuhan was already circulating. I remember a genuine concern that the borders would be shut down and I wouldn’t be able to leave Canada. Here in the USA, several cases had been reported on the west coast. In our hospital, we had several PUIs (patients under investigation) in the intensive care unit. This was in the early days when we couldn’t get any tests. As soon as the patient coughed on me, I whispered to my team, “We need to test him for COVID.”

The rest, as they say, is history. The city was shut down the following day, elective surgeries were canceled, and I fell ill almost exactly two weeks later, with the worst muscle aches I’ve ever had in my life. I have spent nine months trying to write down everything that happened, and every time it comes out wrong. Every time it comes out whiny. I have over 100 pages of… stuff, and several more dozen hand-drawn comics besides. But I don’t think anyone wants to hear about what we had to do because there is no one that COVID-19 did not affect. Everyone, in every occupation, walk of life, socioeconomic status— suffered. For that, I am not sure I can ever forgive the systems that failed us.

For the past six months, I’ve gone back to taking care of my colon and rectal patients. The volume has been a deluge. I am only half-kidding when I tell my patients that everyone’s hemorrhoids and fissures got worse in the pandemic. People’s cancer and diverticulitis got worse from delays in care. When it rains, it pours.

I got the vaccine on December 31st, the Pfizer one. Aside from my arm still being a bit sore, I haven’t had any other symptoms. Friends have told me that they’re jealous that I got the vaccine first. I tell them that I would be happy not to have gotten the vaccine if it meant that I could work from home, too. I am not ungrateful for the science and the opportunity to be vaccinated, or the chance to serve my community. The problem is, I know that they gave me the vaccine (and were suddenly in a rush to do so) because I am getting deployed again to the COVID units as of next week. The administration needs to put people on the front lines while they sit in their hilltop fortresses. I don’t relish being sent to fight a war that they don’t have to fight. I don’t relish still having to fight this war. I am tired. I want to sit by a lake and write a novel.

2.8 million people in the US have been vaccinated, 0.86%, up from 1.1 million 9 days ago. That is less than 10% of the vaccines that have been shipped. When they said that people would start getting them the next day, who were they kidding? They are obviously people who don’t work within any kind of infrastructure, or else they’d know that it takes months to get anything done. It took six months to figure out how to test everyone, and STILL, it is very hard to get tested. People should just be setting up tents on street corners to test and vaccinate everyone who walks by.

I could go on a rant and write about health inequity, about how they are shutting down a downtown community hospital and taking away elective surgical services from an already underserved population. I could write about how everyone is just trying to save the bottom line in a year where hospitals (and everyone else) hemorrhaged money. But that would make me angrier. I don’t know about a resolution for the year, but my resolution for today is to channel that anger into something useful.

In other news, I finally set up one small piece of my multimedia empire, Whirled Books. I have always wondered where my used books have been and where they’ll go next, so I set up a simple website and algorithm to track them. For this month, if you email me, I will send you a book and a set of stickers so that you can send your books on their own journey.

We also re-watched Hamilton on Disney+ for the umpteenth time after doing a virtual ‘Hamiltour’ with Broadway Up Close (totally worth it!). Several weeks after, we walked around downtown and visited most of the sites on our own, including the Fraunces Tavern, where Hamilton and Washington ate and drank.

Sorry, this was a bit of a rant anyway.

Stay safe, stay positive, stay alive!

Until next month, always go black tie.