finally, and she finds three boxes of penne.
There are worse fates than having to eat only pasta.
“Stamps?” I ask. I hold out my postcard and point to the corner.
She shakes her head, and points across the street to the closed post office.
On the counter is a small stack of newspapers. I cannot read the Spanish headlines, but the picture makes it clear—it is a priest in a church in Italy, blessing scores of coffins filled with Covid casualties.
This is what is coming to America. This is what Finn will be dealing with.
And I am stuck here.
The shop owner holds out her hand, the universal symbol for payment. I offer a credit card and she shakes her head. I don’t have any Ecuadorian money and I still haven’t found an ATM. Panicked, I peel off two twenties and hand them to her before she can renege and take away my groceries. She locks the door again, and I head off with my plastic bag.
I’m halfway down the main street when I hear a ping on my phone. I pull it out of my pocket and watch a torrent of messages from Finn roll onto my screen.
I lost you.
Hello?
Tried FaceTiming but… ?
Bad Wi-Fi? Will try you tomorrow .
He’s texted multiple times since then, and finally seemed to realize that I still didn’t have cell service. The last message says that he’ll send an email instead, in case I find an internet café.
I look up and down the street at the tightly closed storefronts and snort.
But apparently, I am sitting in the one hot spot of service in Puerto Villamil, because when I check my inbox, somehow there is an email that has downloaded from Finn. I sit down cross-legged and start to read, absorbing his words like they are an oasis in a desert.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
I can’t believe it’s only been two days. The schools are already shut down here, and bars and restaurants. We’ve got 923 cases in the city alone. Ten deaths. The subway is empty. It’s like New York is a shell, and all the people are in hiding.
Not that I’d know, because I haven’t left the hospital. They scrapped the model for surgical residents. You know how I used to bitch about being a junior resident, because I’d have to do nights and ED consults while the senior residents scrubbed in to the actual surgeries—and how you said that one day it would be my turn? Well, nope. I may be a fourth-year resident but that’s gone. No one is doing surgery anymore. All elective procedures—and even emergent ones, like appys and gallbladders—have been canceled, because the surgical ICU is filled with Covid patients. Residents are expendable, I guess, so we’ve all been reassigned to Covid, too.
To be fair, it’s the only illness we’re seeing. But I was trained as a surgeon, and suddenly I’m supposed to be an internal med doc treating infectious disease, and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Neither does anyone else.
I’m on hour 34 of my 12-hour shift, because there aren’t enough of us to take care of the patients. They started arriving and they haven’t stopped. They all show up gasping and by the time they get here, they’re already screwed. They try to suck in air, but there’s nowhere for the air to go, so they wind up damaging more lung—it’s this vicious cycle. Normally, we’d put patients like that on high-flow nasal cannulas, which can get them ten times as much oxygen, but they also would aerosolize the virus all over the place. So instead we use non-rebreather masks or small nasal cannulas. They don’t work. Nothing in our bag of tricks does. People are crashing left and right because they aren’t getting enough oxygen, and the only thing left to do is intubate. Which is the most dangerous thing of all, because we can’t get a patient on a vent without literally spreading the virus all over ourselves.
So we have armor, I guess, even though there’s not enough of it. Now, just to see a patient, I have to put on my hair covering, my N95 mask, then my face shield, then my
There are worse fates than having to eat only pasta.
“Stamps?” I ask. I hold out my postcard and point to the corner.
She shakes her head, and points across the street to the closed post office.
On the counter is a small stack of newspapers. I cannot read the Spanish headlines, but the picture makes it clear—it is a priest in a church in Italy, blessing scores of coffins filled with Covid casualties.
This is what is coming to America. This is what Finn will be dealing with.
And I am stuck here.
The shop owner holds out her hand, the universal symbol for payment. I offer a credit card and she shakes her head. I don’t have any Ecuadorian money and I still haven’t found an ATM. Panicked, I peel off two twenties and hand them to her before she can renege and take away my groceries. She locks the door again, and I head off with my plastic bag.
I’m halfway down the main street when I hear a ping on my phone. I pull it out of my pocket and watch a torrent of messages from Finn roll onto my screen.
I lost you.
Hello?
Tried FaceTiming but… ?
Bad Wi-Fi? Will try you tomorrow .
He’s texted multiple times since then, and finally seemed to realize that I still didn’t have cell service. The last message says that he’ll send an email instead, in case I find an internet café.
I look up and down the street at the tightly closed storefronts and snort.
But apparently, I am sitting in the one hot spot of service in Puerto Villamil, because when I check my inbox, somehow there is an email that has downloaded from Finn. I sit down cross-legged and start to read, absorbing his words like they are an oasis in a desert.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
I can’t believe it’s only been two days. The schools are already shut down here, and bars and restaurants. We’ve got 923 cases in the city alone. Ten deaths. The subway is empty. It’s like New York is a shell, and all the people are in hiding.
Not that I’d know, because I haven’t left the hospital. They scrapped the model for surgical residents. You know how I used to bitch about being a junior resident, because I’d have to do nights and ED consults while the senior residents scrubbed in to the actual surgeries—and how you said that one day it would be my turn? Well, nope. I may be a fourth-year resident but that’s gone. No one is doing surgery anymore. All elective procedures—and even emergent ones, like appys and gallbladders—have been canceled, because the surgical ICU is filled with Covid patients. Residents are expendable, I guess, so we’ve all been reassigned to Covid, too.
To be fair, it’s the only illness we’re seeing. But I was trained as a surgeon, and suddenly I’m supposed to be an internal med doc treating infectious disease, and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Neither does anyone else.
I’m on hour 34 of my 12-hour shift, because there aren’t enough of us to take care of the patients. They started arriving and they haven’t stopped. They all show up gasping and by the time they get here, they’re already screwed. They try to suck in air, but there’s nowhere for the air to go, so they wind up damaging more lung—it’s this vicious cycle. Normally, we’d put patients like that on high-flow nasal cannulas, which can get them ten times as much oxygen, but they also would aerosolize the virus all over the place. So instead we use non-rebreather masks or small nasal cannulas. They don’t work. Nothing in our bag of tricks does. People are crashing left and right because they aren’t getting enough oxygen, and the only thing left to do is intubate. Which is the most dangerous thing of all, because we can’t get a patient on a vent without literally spreading the virus all over ourselves.
So we have armor, I guess, even though there’s not enough of it. Now, just to see a patient, I have to put on my hair covering, my N95 mask, then my face shield, then my
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