Day 15: Public health medical quiz, aka this is what I get for refusing to write prescriptions for family members

The following exchange happened on family chat yesterday. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and/or insane. Ten points for each correct diagnosis (hint: almost all can be found in the DSM IV; none are COVID19).

Family Member Without Medical Training But a Propensity for Self-Diagnosis No. 1 (FMWMTBPSDx1):
BTW, don't panic; I have a sniffly cold, but a robust sense of smell, so I'm afraid the common cold is also doing the rounds. I and [Family Member Who Ignores Any Medical Problem Including Skull Fracture with Traumatic Brain Injury (FMWIAMPISFTBI)] are completely exhausted and not feeling great. I've got a stinking cold. No fever, no cough, just sinusitis. xxx

Family Member Without Medical Training But a Propensity for Self-Diagnosis No. 2 (FMWMTBPSDx2): Oh no! How do you think you picked it up?

FMWMTBPSDx1: I whizzed out to buy wine three days ago (mask, latex gloves, social distancing, sanitizer, etc) but yes, I was meeting an essential need! But don't worry, this definitely not the dread c., just sinusitis which is very different.

FMWMTBPSDx2: If you can pick up an arbitrary virus being as careful as possible, please don't go out again! It's too risky.

FMWMTBPSDx1: I figured out that - duh - this week FMWIAMPISFTBI has been sawing wood all week in the house, and I've been living in all this dust and doing the sweeping up. I'm having a strong allergic reaction, scratchy eyes and runny nose. Absolutely no other symptoms, no sore throat or anything. Not taking Benadryl because I don't want to put any drugs in my system because of the Advil news. Definitely allergy. Streaming nose!

FMWMTBPSDx2: Hooray!

FMWMTBPSDx1: I sent off for 6 bottles of red online this afternoon!

FMWMTBPSDx2: Medical family members [i.e. me + Trophy BF] - turns out I fractured a knuckle. I have an appointment with the doctor next week, and would like to stabilise the joint in the meantime. Do you know if bent vs straight is better? I've been wearing a splint that keeps it fairly straight. I bought plaster wrap so can also easily stabilise it in a more bent position.

Helpful Trophy BF Who Has Yet To Fully Gauge the Depth of Insanity of Which My Family Is Capable Despite Having Been Immersed In It For Nearly 5 Years (TBFWTF5): You poor dear. How did you manage that? Can you call so I can ask some questions? Easier to evaluate and instruct by phone.

FMWMTBPSDx2: Eep, sorry, was just peeing and crawling into bed. Can I ring tomorrow?

TBFWTF5: If you can call before 9 am one of us can talk you through making a gutter splint in the right position - important to get position right.

FMWMTBPSDx2: You're so kind - thank you! I hate to waste your time though, so if it's on YouTube I can also just look there. But I can probably catch one of you.

TBFWTF5: It's your ring finger most proximal knuckle?

FMWMTBPSDx2: It's my fuck you finger. OK zzzzz now I love you!!

TBFWTF5: Here's a decent video. Note the finger position; making a radial gutter splint is a two-hand job so you'll need help. Don't try it unless you're sure that you can do it; not that easy a splint if you've never done it. In addition to the correct bend at the MCP joint and the relative straightness of the fingers, note the slight backwards angle of the wrist. There should be no tension on the tendons on the front or back.

FMWMTBPSDx1: Explain to your dear family how you broke your knuckle

Me: Wait, wtf, sorry to be late to the party here. How the hell did you break your hand? Around now - ring anytime.

FMWMTBPSDx2: Thank you! That video is great. Did not break hand! Tiny tiny hairline fracture in knuckle when using drill. Read this hilarious Economist article!

Me: fracture = break, silly

FMWMTBPSDx2: I know, just clarifying the magnitude so that FMWMTBPSDx1 doesn't report to FMWIAMPISFTBI that I've shattered my entire right arm. Are there splinting competitions? After watching three YouTube videos I now feel like I can splint any mangled MCP joint you throw at me.

Me: Where did you end up going to get an xray? Urgent care? I hope nowhere you could have picked up COVID.

FMWMTBPSDx2: I am mistrustful of urgent care since [a completely different provider at a completely different UC in another city] mishandled my broken foot a couple of years ago

Me: Right, because all urgent care doctors are identical. So where did you get your xray?

FMWMTBPSDx2: I've got an appointment for one next week.

Me: I begin to smell a self-diagnosis based on YouTube videos, unless you McGyvered an xray machine out of old laptop parts and some radium you found in the basement.

FMWMTBPSDx2: I've had enough joint breaks to know what they feel like vs other joint injury.

Me: How about at least jumping on video chat to show me where your hand hurts?

FMWMTBPSDx2: Thanks, but all outcomes are taken care of! I'm already bored of it. Read the Economist article!

So to sum up: we're apparently a family of allergy-prone alcoholics, but at least one of us has Xray vision, which is totally better than average. I'll take it.

Day 14: junior hackers, preoccupied slugs, sex dolls

We got an email from the teachers yesterday saying that some kids are playing video games on their computers during virtual classtime and that the kids are expected to stay focused etc. etc. - I don't think we are quite that naughty, but I did open up my laptop to discover that my home screen wallpaper had been changed and the icon representing la p'tite in her Google classroom had been changed to a dragon, and she hasn't had access to the laptop except for during official distance-learning activities, so clearly a somewhat beadier eye is required. I also caught her yesterday going through the kindergarten level of Chinese flashcards supposedly because she couldn't figure out how to access the third grade ones - hmph, a likely story - but I gave her a pass on that one because I was feeling smug: I had only caught her because I was hearing words that _I_ recognised. Anyway. The point being: digital native. I think my best hope of not having every account I own hacked and used for nefarious purposes is for her to get religion, preferably some hideous old world religion that involves a very strict all-seeing & fierce deity, who has stayed current and issues specific edicts about not using your parents' Amazon account to order stuff they've refused to buy you or read their email when they're not looking.
 A moment of discord in the afternoon when she DID NOT WANT to go out to exercise, but it was a beautiful day and we needed to get outside for a wee rollerskate/run up the greenway as far as the El Cerrito Plaza BART station: we pissed and moaned and clung to the back of my shorts all the way there, and then literally the moment we turned around to come home, all was once again sweetness and giggles and funny stories and pretending to be various animals: we got a lot of mileage (literally) out of 'preoccupied slug', 'despondent puppy,' and 'obstreperous hyena').
I know that there are people out there who live alone who have no physical touch with another human for long periods of time normally, but that is, if not by choice exactly, at least something that you theoretically could do something about: get a pet, pay for a massage, make a friend who will hug you, hire an escort, whatever. I had a conversation with K. - an avid tango dancer and massage therapist who lives by herself: she has gone three weeks with not a sausage, and there must be a lot of people like her out there who _are_ used to casual, frequent, affectionate touch from humans who are suddenly not getting it, which has got to be very hard. I was a bit horrified when I read recently about the hyperrealistic robotic sex dolls now available, but if social distancing is the future, we should consider making taxpayer-financed regular-to-slightly-dowdy-but-very-good-company dolls using the same AI technology available to anyone living alone. (The government can start buying hot nubile  sex dolls for anyone who wants one only _after_ it starts paying for food, housing, health care and higher education for anyone who wants it). Meanwhile, I am getting my quota of cuddles from madam, who fell asleep last night demanding 'tighter hugs,' and sleepily announcing, "if my knickers aren't pulled up high enough, I can't sleep. That's a quote from Shakespeare."

Day 13: Masks, doom, stage-combat.

While la p'tite did her online distance learning in the morning, I spent the morning sewing surgical facemasks, which was fun and felt very wartime - sort of like knitting socks for Our Boys At The Front, except they were actually for my parents (my mother was wanting something more stylish than the grotty sawdust-covered all-purpose masks that have been hanging on a nail next to my dad's table saw for the last twenty years, can't think why). I did feel very proud of my pre-COVID reduce-reuse-recyle mentality, as I was successfully able to scrounge up enough garbage twisty-ties to successfully make nose-pinchy inserts for all the masks. I made a mask out of octupus and squid-print material lined with grey - for the business cephalopod look - since la p'tite wanted one as well, so we are all set, at least fashion-wise, for the apocalypse. Oh, the irony that I taught a class in monster mask-making just last summer, with no inkling that I would be mass-producing surgical masks less than a year later... Trophy BF has requested a Batman N95, which is above my paygrade but which I am sure will be one of the first things to start getting produced once the factories in Wuhan are up and running again; I secretly hope that the experience of having lived under actual clear blue skies for the last couple of months while everything's been shut down will result in some converts to the environmentalist cause in the mainland Chinese powers-that-be. Dare to hope... 

In the afternoon we went out for a run/rollerskate; passing through the Westbrae we passed two grocery stores both with lines out the door and multiple smaller food shops which were allowing only one customer in at a time. The shops are, thankfully, starting to limit people as to how much of any one item they can buy in order to prevent hoarding, but it does mean that we will need to go out to buy food more often and spend longer doing it than before, which is somewhere on the frownyface/smileyface pain scale between tedious and possibly dangerous. Video chat with auntie D. over dinner - she is on the lam in Utah camped out in a vacation rental in a closed-down ski resort, and likely to remain there for the duration, working online by day and teaching her co-fugitives 'how to find the beat in a piece of music' (yes, for real) by night - and then we watched Song of the Sea, which I think is up there in my top ten favourite movies ever. I love, love, love the artwork in it, plus I just read that the whole thing was drawn by hand. Wow. I wish Tomm Moore would make more films already. 

I am trying not to worry about money. Quite apart from only being able to work halftime while the schools are closed down, furloughs and layoffs and reduced hours are happening, even in the doctor world. As locums physicians both trophy BF and I are, we are finding out, very, very vulnerable - as the outpatient clinics reduce their services and go down to unreimbursed phone visits, the locums are the first to get the chop, and credentialling as a hospitalist/ER triage provider will (a) take time (b) not be guaranteed either and (c) put us more in harm's way with regards to getting sick ourselves (I am grateful la p'tite and I are both in a low risk group, and was very reassured by Atul Gawande's level-headed recent article in the New Yorker, but I could still bring it home to other, more vulnerable family members). 

I fell asleep and dreamt that I got into a stage-fight with some woman in a cafeteria while waiting for our plane to leave for South Africa for the medieval bookmaking art class I'd registered for, and our fake fight was so convincing that someone called the cops on us and we ended up missing the flight. I have no idea what it means. 

Day 12: tech support, baby ninjas

Someone said to me around the time that la p'tite was born that when you have a baby, the baby itself is the most amazing wonderful thing ever, but that it will make the non-baby rest of your life speed off to hell in a handbasket in a most expeditious fashion, and, you know, it is kind of true still even though we are nearly ten years in. I am feeling a pang of sympathy for all the hapless IT helpdesk employees I have inflicted my forgotten passwords on over the years: literally every time that I got on the phone to start a phone visit with a patient yesterday, something would go wrong with the digital school setup and I (me! ha! the universe is laughing at the thought) would have to provide tech support. There's also the random injury factor (we were playing Baby Ninja Training Academy out in the garden, as you do, and I added a couple of really pretty spectacular exemplars to my bruise collection), the cooking factor (a pot of chili will feed me for the whole weekend; however, when she's around, I feel this inconvenient compulsion to provide somewhat varied nutritious meals, which turns out takes some time and effort), and the chore factor (I wanted to get laundry and seed starts done, she wanted to play Baby Ninja Training Academy; I got the clothes into the washer but not out of it, and half the seeds done, so I'm counting it as a draw).

She is, however, good for a laugh, which is nothing to sneeze at in these trying times: as we were falling asleep last night (I know the Good Mummy Handbook says that kids should sleep in their own beds, but you know what? fuckit, coronavirus) she was telling me jokes.

Q. What goes on and off and on and off?
A. An on-and-off machine.

Q. What goes on and off and up and down and sideways?
A. An on-and-off-and-up-and-down-and-sideways machine.

etc.

Speaking of tech support, she also had a virtual playdate with another child from her class, who is not quite the alpha-dragon that madam is, and the conversation went like this:
Her: Let's play Ninja Academy.
Other kid: How do you be a ninja?
Her: You spin your stick around like this, then you do ninja-y things.
Other kid: What's ninja-y things?
Her:
Other kid: Are you just going to read?
Me (shouting from other room): Don't read when you're on a playdate with another kid! That's rude!
Her: OK, OK, OK, OK, I said OK.
Other kid: Have you ever noticed how many letters sound like ay? K, J... may, play, day, lay, say...
Her: Do you want to draw dragons?
Other kid: I used to be really good at drawing dragons. Now I'm terrible. How do you want to do it?
Me (off-camera): do you want some paper and pens so you can draw, and then you can hold the drawings up to the camera and show each other?
Other kid: can we use whiteboard?
Her: What's whiteboard?
Other kid: Here, share your Zoom screen with me, and then at the bottom of your screen you can see the whiteboard icon, then you click on whiteboard, and then you can use whiteboard to draw...

We had Zoom dinner with grandparents & trophy BF last night, which was a little bumpy to get going but ended up being very successful and I think we will do it again soon, and then madam had another chess game with her grandfather snuggled up with the computer next to the fire, which was all kinds of cute, and I fell asleep with my cup of tea and my book on the sofa.

It feels a little bit like a long-haul trip via steamboat from Victorian England to some farflung colonial outpost, this coronavirus thing: steamships are safe enough that you are mostly assured that you will arrive at your destination, but there could well be some crocodiles along the way, and it will take months to get there, during which time you are stuck with just the other people on the boat with you, and there's not a lot to do but wait, and for those of us lucky enough to be travelling second-class, play tiddlywinks or shuffleboard or shipboard cricket or whatever the hell they used to play, and go for walks along the deck and hang over the prow of the boat singing "The Heart Will Go On," at least until the hospital gets back to us about working  the shifts in the Emergency Department once the storm really hits.

Day 11: swabs up my nose & more Wagner

So, phone visits with patients all day, punctuated by an exciting ten minute visit to clinic in the middle of the day to get a Q-tip stuck deeper in my nose than I've ever had a Q-tip go before. I am still not sure whether I did the right thing requesting a test, given that I've had none of the classic symptoms (cough, fever, shortness of breath) and there are loads of people out there sicker than me, but since I was out in the world seeing patients this whole last week without realizing I was 'symptomatic' (insofar as -not- being able to smell counts as a symptom; as M. pointed out, it's not like I went blind and failed to notice it) and it does appear that anosmia is weirdly correlated with COVID19, perhaps it -is- the responsible thing to do... urgh. I don't know. But I am now officially a Person Under Investigation, which means that I am staying completely home for the next few days, which is what I was going to do anyway since madam is back with me for five days starting today and we have digital school to manage.

Trophy BF very gamely offered to watch the first bit of Das Rheingold with me in the evening, and we ended up watching THE WHOLE THING. I have never seen any of the Ring before, and boy, is it ever the silliest plot, even for a genre renowned for silly plots. But it was really fun to watch, and the singing was great (especially Freia and Loge, and except for one of the giants) and I really liked the crazy rotating plank contraption in the set, as well as the discofabulous lighting design, and I am kind of tempted to power through the rest of them over the next three days, just because apparently we're all going to be stuck at home not doing a lot of anything for the next however long, and why NOT spend Armageddon watching opera.

I am looking forward to la p'tite coming home. It will be nice to have human contact that I don't have to stay 6 feet away from. Also, we have dragons to paint.

Day 10: anosmia, chili, opera

I just found out last night that the lovely friend with whom we had brunch two weeks ago subsequently got sick and tested positive for coronavirus; then I read in the NY Times that loss of smell is in many people the only symptom of COVID19 and hey! guess what? last weekend I couldn't smell or taste anything, which I attributed at the time to having had gum surgery a few days earlier, but now of course I'm adding it to the constellation of phantom psychosomatic symptoms I have also been having since the whole bloody thing started, and thinking, well, shit, I think I need to try and get tested. So, instead of going to work today, I'm going to ask if I can do all my telephone visits from home (daft not to be doing this anyway, really) and in between phone calls see what I can do to get myself tested. Getting past the fierce barrier of triage nurses to get a test is going to look a little bit like this I suspect, but following the standard public health testing formula of
legit specific symptom + known positive contact + healthcare provider = asymptomatic NBA star
I totally deserve a test, and, if there's any justice, a spot in next season's draft as well.

My shift yesterday was slow, slow, slow - everyone without respiratory symptoms is staying home, and anyone with respiratory symptoms is being turned away at the door by the Urgent Care Sphinx and sent to the coronavirus triage tent, which I haven't worked in (yet) but imagine as being kind of like the tent in the Great British Baking Show, where you have to compete in front of a judging panel made up of Paul Hollywood, Mary Berry, and the head of your county's Public Health Department to see if you deserve the accolade of this week's Star Convincing Coronavirus Patient.

Afterwards, I came home and finished the pot of chili which has got me through the last weekend (had madam been with me she could have helped me determine whether my sense of smell has completely returned or not...) and watched the first half of Tristan und Isolde courtesy of the New York Metropolitan Opera, which is streaming a different opera from their archives every night for free. It is the first time I have ever felt properly sad about not having a huge bloody great flat screen TV, because it was fantastic - they had set it in a very dark and gloomy modern naval ship/submarine, with black & white waves tossing outside & a huge glowing green submarine sonar hanging over the stage endlessly circling in a way that suggested CERTAIN DOOM - and the singing was seriously luscious. At the risk of sounding like an uncultured slob, I gotta say I have trouble with Wagner; it can get a bit soupy, and it's not always obvious what the melody is, but still, absolutely great and I might well watch another one tonight, since my music-making date got cancelled due to impending inclement weather. Fiddle-playing friend and I have coined the term "active social-distancing": we were going to sit six feet apart playing our respective string instruments so badly as to actually repel anyone who might be in the vicinity. If the police get overwhelmed in the coming weeks trying to enforce shelter-in-place orders, they could use us to dispel inappropriately-gathering crowds. It's a public service we're providing, people.

Day 9: wtf

It has been two weeks since I last got to see trophy BF, but it feels like a million years, and I MISS HIM. I took him to the airport for his regular Monday morning flight back to Seattle - we were worried enough about COVID19 then that I didn't want him taking BART to the airport - but we didn't have any sense that it was going to be a really long time before we saw each other again, whereas now... months? who the hell knows. I do not want me or la p'tite to be the one to get him sick, however, so I don't know if I even want to try to see him. Urgh. He sent out a very articulate precis of what's needed w/r/t data collection to a data guru friend yesterday, which made me feel very proud of how smartypants he is, but also made me miss him more.

Anyway. So the people who are taking all this seriously here, scrupulously following all the 6' distancing & shelter-in-place rules and sewing home-made facemasks to donate to hospitals are me 'n' my hippie lefty friends and neighbours, whereas Trump & co are busy squashing cheek to well-fed jowl onto stage at press conferences while his supporters frolic on beaches by the thousands in Florida, organizing themselves into flashmob middle-finger formations pointed at the CDC. I am curious as to whether this has played out along political dividing lines in other countries as well - in the US, at least, it seems that until enough people of all walks of life and political ideologies get sick and die and make it obvious that this virus is not picky, the self-reinforcing tribal identities of the two camps seem likely to continue to diverge; from what I have read, this has not happened (at all) in Italy, Spain, or South Korea, but is happening (a bit) in the UK; the us v. them lines are apparently drawn strongly enough here that even a 1% threat of death isn't enough to shift them (yet). I don't know whether this has to do with
a) size - it's hard to maintain a cohesive sense of national identity when there are 250 million of you spread over thousands of miles
b) relative youth as a nation - it's hard to maintain a cohesive sense of national identity with very little in the way of shared history & accumulated culture - or
c) chronic intractable bloodymindedness - it's hard to maintain a cohesive sense of national identity when the only shared culture that we do have is apparently an unshakeable belief in every-maverick-for-himself.

Off I go to urgent care shift with my cute new fabric surgical mask over my reused N95 mask. La p'tite has days-of-the-week undies; I've got days-of-the-week N95's. At least hers can be washed...