Update.

I’m done with my six-week two-jobs no-touching my family deal. The last time I was on a covid unit was May 6th. I added two weeks to that date and relieved the quarantining in the house. I hugged and kissed my husband and children. I started helping with Edda’s care and with kitchen duties. It’s all good. I guess I’m counting my life in six-week blocks now because that’s how the scheduling at the hospital goes. Elective surgery (really semi-elective, the people who are having surgery now can’t really wait. Is it “elective” if like – if you don’t have the surgery now, you won’t die immediately (like the next couple of hours), but you’ll die later? I don’t know how much later is OK for elective.) is back on now, my unit should be back to full capacity. I almost can’t tell that there is a pandemic going on in the hospital except 1) I wear an n95 mask all day and 2) so much free food. so much. Now I have 5 (or 4 now) days off and then I’m going to 75% time at the hospital.

Oh and 3), my non-covid patients are so so so needy. So needy. It also might be a psychological thing for me, because I just want to rest and as my time got closer and closer to my designated “time of rest”, my perception of my patients started altering and I perceived them to be needier when they were really the same. On Thursday – all my patients were crying. Or at least 3/5 which is really high. Usually, I have no one crying. One cried over a tuna sandwich. One cried and then when I got into the room, they refused all medical care. One cried over bad news. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a bunch of patients who think they are having a heart attack, but really, it’s just a panic attack, but it doesn’t prevent them from pushing the call bell numerous times a day saying OMG my chest hurts really, really bad and then – even though I’m pretty sure it’s a panic attack, I’m like – omg what if it’s really a heart attack. (aaaaannnnndd, they weren’t heart attacks. only panic attacks. I’ll tell you the # of people with panic attacks is on the rise.) And, the patient undeniably feels really, really terrible.

We celebrated being reunited with my family with hamburgers. It was a lot of fun.

I had a patient who yelled at me in Spanish all day on Sunday telling me to do things. Move tables, cold water not hot water, high ponytail, comb, move bed higher. I could barely understand – picking up a few words here and there and then I would ask if we should use the translator phone and they would bellow in English “YOU UNDERSTAND!” and then we would keep going using Spanish and hand gestures. It all got done (mostly) to their satisfaction. That’s not a bad way to learn Spanish. I for sure picked up a few words. I’m going at it in two directions. From the “beginning” using Duolingo. And also from the “end” trying to decipher fluent speech. I’m using Netflix to learn. Nailed It! Mexico! is easier to understand. Money Heist should be fun to watch, but I think it’s very fast Spanish, so it’s hard hear the words enough to understand and it has weird vocab words about robberies and heists. I’m also using LLN (Language Learning with Netflix) which allows me to replay the video sentence by sentence or go back/forth quickly to hear things over and over again. It offers both the Spanish subtitles and an English human translation. It allows me to play the video at 70% speed as well. Spanish will be a challenge for me, because it relies on my least sensitive sense – listening. (I actually also don’t have a good sense of smell, but I don’t think you are considered disabled if you can’t smell things – only that you might have covid). Music and lyrics just pass through me – meaningless and unnoticed. I like music and I listen to it all the time, but I don’t pay attention to music. I can’t mimic things very well verbally. I can’t sing on key and if I’m in a chorus, I can’t hold my line of the music nor can I keep a steady beat. I can’t even really remember what people said a lot of the time. All this lack of sensitivity to sound is a detriment to learning any language. And, of course, my age. I couldn’t remember the word “label” in English yesterday. So to remember it in Spanish seems like an unreasonable goal. But whatever. We’ll see. I just want it to be passable. Or entertaining. I think it amuses my Spanish speaking patients that they have an Asian nurse trying to speak to them in Spanish.

Vince finished his last HS class on Friday. We celebrate on Friday night with my parents via video. Jeremy cooked dinner and I delivered their portion over to their house. We will celebrate with the Martins today. We are trying to figure out this college stuff. I think if it is even partially open, we’d want Vince to be in California. But the dorms/dining hall might be shuttered. So that’s mean finding an apartment. But since the demand would be unusually high, we might not be able to rent one out close enough for biking, so then he’d have to have a car and commute in. It’s not ideal. But we’ll roll with it. It’d also be important that he have a place that he could quarantine for a long time there instead of coming all the way back here.