I did have a nice shift on Sunday – steady and busy, but nice. I had time to really be with my patients which I enjoy the most. But I had some worrisome interactions with staff – the portable chest x-ray tech came late to her 8:00 am timed x-ray for a patient of mine and apologized to be because the ICU was so busy in the morning and I looked at her and said – COVID? And she nodded. And then I had a respiratory tech later in the afternoon who I was working with to administer chest PT and she said that they were also seeing an uptick in COVID cases downstairs. Of course, this is not surprising given the news. But it’s going to be a hard winter. I’m starting to rebuild my own stash of new n95s now that I’ve decided that the ones I’ve been using since April have done their duty and should be retired.
In the spirit of increasing COVID cases, we’ve decided to treat our house as a “place of work” and are using masks in the “public” areas of house. We now have two caregivers who come and go and work with other families/kids. I had kind of mentioned this to Jeremy before the 2nd caregiver (who started last week and we love) started her shifts, but Jeremy was reluctant to wear masks in the house – understandably, because it’s our house. So we started with no masks. But then it became apparent that we should (Increasing cases, people traveling around, work situations) and honestly, the new caregiver (Tri) seemed relieved that we implemented the masking and Kitachi was totally fine with it. Jeremy is the least happy about it because the everyone else does work outside their home and is used to masking. Jeremy is like I never leave the house and now I have to wear a mask in my own house?! (OK, maybe Edda is the least happy about it. We are still trying to figure it out – to get the loops to stay on her ears, to keep the mask from getting soaking wet in 30 mins, etc…) I said that he should find something to do and leave the house sometimes. Since we have 2 caregivers, we’ll now have some weekend coverage so he can leave the house when I’m working at the hospital. We also bought a HEPA air filter machine that hopefully will come in next week and exchange the air in the main living area of the house to keep it better ventilated through the winter months and hopefully filter out the germs? Jeremy’s excited about that because he’s always thought the air quality was bad in the first floor because of all the cooking particulates and has always wanted a full house filtration system – but we aren’t getting that now. And he’s excited that the house should smell less like dog.