MountainMornings

Yesterday I had to bite the bullet, I buzzed Bob’s head! He bought this Norelco hair trimmer weeks ago and I was secretly hoping I wouldn’t have to use it, but after watching a few YouTube videos I mustered my courage. He sat outside in the garden with a dish towel over his shoulders and I got to work. The buzzer had 100 attachments but I only used 4; one for the back, one for the top, two for around the ears and a small trimmer. It wasn’t so bad and I only left one small lightning stripe over an ear.

A runner cruised by and asked if he could be next!

But my next step was starting dinner. I defrosted some pork chops and began assembling the ingredients for rice and beans – shallots, garlic, rice, fire roasted tomatoes, and black beans. My chopping block now stands next to the sink, since my kitchen island has turned into a cutting table for our mask making endeavor. We have already made dozens of masks from donated material and tee shirts.

This week we delivered five masks to Great Grandma Ada and Hudson so that they could supply their friends. The routine so far is that we knock on the locked door and the receptionist opens it to exchange our bag of masks for their drugs. Then we sit in the vestibule and while Bob sorts their medications I talk on the phone, through the window, to Ada. But our last visit didn’t work so well.

First of all, the vestibule is a mini-Grand Central Station. Aides, physical therapists, private aides, and kitchen workers pass through every few minutes and every single one of them must stop… and knock… and have their temperature taken at the door. In the vestibule. One time a maintenance guy came in and started rolling up the carpet under our feet.

But the last time it was a piece of pecan pie that created the log jam. While one son (Bob), a doctor sorting his parents’ meds was sitting behind a table, another son came into the vestibule with his wife to deliver a piece of pie to his mother. And while one private duty aide was leaving and the receptionist had the door open, all four people, within arm’s length of each other, started into talking about pie. Granted they all had masks on, still it was getting crowded in there.

And although I found this conversation interesting, Bob was less than pleased, so he said, “Would you mind taking your conversation about pie outside?”

You would have thought he asked them to practice social distancing or something. In retrospect, I can tell when Bob switches into doctor mode where compliance is a given. It seems that everybody is a bit on edge these days, and long term care facilities are getting their fair share of bad coronavirus news. So the pecan pie fuse was lit, and the aide had a bit of a temper tantrum walking around outside, telling people that guy, my guy, doesn’t own the air. Calling him names while the receptionist disappeared and the couple stormed off to call in a complaint.

And it would have been comical if this wasn’t a life and death situation. I might have chalked it up to a misunderstanding over the Mason-Dixon line; we Yanks aren’t great at small talk, we get right to the point. But since Bob is also a caregiver, besides being family, going forward this “vestibule” arrangement isn’t sustainable. This semi-lockdown was the facility’s idea; aides go in and out of Ada and Hudson’s apartment all the time, to empty the garbage and deliver meals, and they only recently started wearing masks.

According to the CDC 20% of healthcare workers are infected with the virus, but they didn’t count long term care or nursing homes:

“The CDC’s report indicated most of the cases were white women in their 40s, according to The Washington Post.

Women made up the vast majority of cases at 73%, according to The Hill. Many of the infected professionals — about 38% — had underlying health conditions, and most of those who died from COVID-19 were 65 years or older, The Hill reported.

The report likely under counts the number of cases among medical professionals because of a lack of testing in a given region, The Post reported. There are also a number of institutions that are not testing health care workers in order to reserve tests for patients, according to The Post.”  https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article242019511.html

Instead of buzzing around like bees over gossip and horrible ravings about drinking or injecting disinfectant to kill the virus, let’s give ourselves a break and try listening to scientists. Here is a great article about two countries that are doing just that! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/australia/new-zealand-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage