When you haven't written a post on your blog for two years, it can be a daunting task to just start writing again. I find myself with a lot of alone time (more on that later) and have been mulling over how to re-introduce myself after such a long absence.
Then I thought, who cares what has happened over the past 2 years. Everyone knows it was awful, with the pandemic, the quarantine, the global economic impact of it all. No need to write my own story of the past two years, because it's the same damn story for all of us. My story could be a bit different, since I work as a nurse in a hospital, and I frequently am assigned patients that have Covid. The last time I wrote on this blog, Covid deaths were common. On any given night, of my 5 or 6 patients, 2 or 3 would have Covid. It would not be uncommon for one of them to run into trouble, and be transferred to the ICU. Many of those would end up being intubated, and back then, once you were intubated, you pretty much died.
Now that it is May of 2022, my Covid patients are very different. Many of my patients are younger than they were before (many of our senior citizens are vaccinated, so it's the young stragglers that tend to get it now. And when they get it, they either totally don't realize they have it (having come to the ER for some other problem, and find they have it since every ER patient is tested for Covid), or they are terribly and deathly ill.
But time has marched on. In early 2020, after a shift of work, I would go to the basement where our laundry room was, and take off everything and run the washing machine on hot and walk up two flights of stairs completely naked. I'd then walk directly into the bathroom, trying to touch nothing, then take a shower. As I left the bathroom, I would wipe down every surface with a bleach wipe. Everything back then was FOMITES, so we were throwing away groceries that came in boxes, or left groceries in the garage for 24 hours. A year later, fomites just weren't a worry any longer and I could stop this strange ritual. Which was good, considering I share my basement with my downstairs neighbors (who agreed to not be in the basement when I came home, but honestly I never cared), and my staircase has a huge window to our next door neighbors' back yard and thankfully they were never out there when I made the walk up the stairs.
Fomites. Thank God we are over that.