A skeleton crew has been allowed back into the medical office where I work. After working from home for a week and a half I moved back into the office this past Monday night during a rain storm (it had let up by 7PM after a day full of torrential bursts of rain and strong gusts of wind that I kept an eye on from the den window as I worked throughout the day.
First of all, I need to say that it is heartbreaking to scan the obituaries each day and find patient names and pictures. Of course not all of them are COVID-19 victims. Some are passing from natural causes or pre-existing terminal health conditions. It's just that the list seems to grow by one or two daily.
I started back at the office yesterday (Tuesday, the 14th). I am alone in suite 2, although there was an NP in making televisit calls from her office I hardly saw her. In suite 1 a doctor was making his televisits from his office at the opposite end of the building from where I work. The woman who scans the EMR into the system was busy going through a veritable mountain of faxes that had come in last week, plus all; the work I did from home which I delivered in a copy paper box Monday night to her work area. There is one receptionist fielding phone cals and call patients to remind them of the televisits the next day. And there is one woman handling referrals, test orders, answering the phone as the back-up receptionist, fielding questions, VNA calls, group home calls, etc. After 13 years of walking through the double suite doing my job it was very strange and somewhat eerie today to walk through darkened areas (no point in leaving lights on when we have no patients and very few employees working at the moment). There is no music, just silence, so when the phone rings it makes you jump.
I'm more or less quarantined to suite 2 but I do have to mask and glove up to go to suite 1 to fax stacks of stuff that need signatures, to be filled out and returned, this includes piles of VNA orders, durable medical equipment prescriptions, mail order medicine orders for nebulizers, and so forth. One other employee and I share the kitchenette, but I just sit at my desk and eat my lunch while she sits behind a wall in the kitchenette eating hers. We both quietly play games or check messages on our phones for an hour while eating and then she returns to suite 1 and I resume my work. Normally the office is full of patients coming and going, providers bustling about, and employees chatting and coming and going. It's like an apocalyptic world where there are just a handful of survivors trying to maintain some semblance of a normal routine.
The office has been so heavily disinfected that there is a lingering irritating miasma of chemical odors hanging in the air. There are no windows to open and we can't just leave doors open or people will walk in and we can't have anyone in the office at this time. It's like sick building syndrome, but the disinfecting had been necessary. I worked all day yesterday and came home with that cloying odor on my clothes, in my hair, in my nose, and most troublesome, in my lungs. This morning I woke up coughing and with shortness of breath and had to use my inhaler for the first time since being sick at the end of January into February. My lung feel irritated by the lingering fumes.
I am happy to be back in my familiar workspace with everything I need close at hand, nt working out of two rooms at my house trying to keep track of paperwork. I'm way more organized at work and can spread out all in one place.
Upstairs the lab is closed and the physical therapy place sees few patients and they are well-spaced. The VNA has some nurses checking in and picking up equipment in the morning, and then the parking lot, normally very busy, is empty except for employee vehicles you can count on one hand.
As a writer, I am constantly observing, listening, and filing stuff away in my brain for use in future stories...believe me, there is a lot of material accumulating for post-apocalyptic stories, and even ghost stories. Social distancing and quarantining has given my imagination plenty of room to expand, plenty f fertile soil for all these ideas to grow in.
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