doctor's strong suggestion
I had my routine three-month in-person appointment with Dr. Brandon this morning, but for once he's encouraged me not to come back in after three months, and had my set my next appointment for September. This is due to COVID-19 coronavirus concerns, and the expectation that after six months it is expected to be more under control than perhaps after only three. He still wants me to come in to the lab for routine testing, and even gave me home test kits for swabbing in the event that I need them.
June is three months from now. I sure as shit hope that, at the very least, I can continue with my Birth Week plans as normal. I mean, at the very least, in pretty sharp contrast to last year's boating events I did, visiting state parks is hardly a "large group event," and in most cases it'll be just me and one other person. We can even hike around the park at a minimum of six feet apart the whole time if we really want to.
I was supposed to have lunch with Karen today, and she canceled yesterday because she apparently was super sick with pneumonia last week and her doctor recommended not going out for a while, especially as she is still recovering. This was after Laney also emailed me to cancel our plans for Happy Hour on Monday as her doctor does not want her going out for the indefinite future as well; we're playing it by ear regarding April Happy Hour and just hoping we can get back to it for sure at least by May, but who knows? Laney is on permanent medications for her heart after having that heart attack a few years ago, placing her also in the "high risk" category. Both Laney and Karen are over 60, which alone puts them into the higher-risk category.
Dr. Brandon told me this morning that the mortality rate for the elderly catching COVID-19 is 20%. Okay, he actually used "ninety" as an example age, and it's maybe less worrisome for someone closer to sixty. Except, of course, that both Laney and Karen have underlying health issues that categorize them as having compromised immune systems. So, I get it.
He also noted that all the stuff being done now is unlike anything he's ever seen, so it's not just me. He mentioned he was in high school in 2003, when the SARS outbreak happened, but even then its prevalence in the U.S. was comparatively minimal. This time around, not only is it widespread in the U.S., but the initial concentration of deaths is in the Seattle area, and already we've got bans on gatherings of groups higher than 250; college campuses closing down; public schools all shut down for at least two weeks; concerts and arts events being canceled or postponed; movie theaters still open (whew!) but capping sales of every screening at 50% so patrons can spread out in their seating.
I'm still trying to decide whether to start working from home or not. I overheard Noah talking to Scott just before leaving yesterday, about maybe having a meeting about how that will look if we all wind up having to do that. I told both Eric and Justine yesterday that my current position was that I would work from home only when told to; I really don't want to spend all my days alone over the next however-many weeks. Justine in particular seemed to empathize with that. But! Dr. Brandon this morning was rather enthusiastic in his encouragement that I actually do work from home for the time being, if it is at all possible, just as a preventative measure. He cited one point I had already brought up to him: that we already know people can be asymptomatic and still spread the disease. And the point is less about keeping myself from getting sick than it is about doing my part to prevent others from getting sick, and therefore driving up the strain on health care infrastructure when increased infections drive people to hospitals.
Really, I only even went in to the appointment this morning because it was already on the books and no one asked me not to, but Dr. Brandon said he's been doing a lot more on-phone appointments as they are encouraging people not to come in. There were signs all over advising anyone with a fever or cough to speak up and get a face mask from the front desk where we check in, both on the ground floor and on Dr. Brandon's floor on 8, and I was unsure of how to apply that to me: I've had a regular cold, almost certainly not coronavirus, for a couple of weeks now, never with any fever or fatigue. But, as is par for the course with my colds, I have had a cough, which is just ending. In fact, I did manage to go the whole appointment without coughing. I can't say the same of when I was on the bus afterward, or the rest of my morning so far at work—but it is still dramatically reduced even from yesterday.
I explained most of this to Dr. Brandon as soon as he came into the exam room I was waiting in, and after hesitating for a moment, he cited protocol and said he would be right back so he could get his own mask. He brought one for me too, though he did not say I had to put it on; he offered it as something either Shobhit or I can use if our coughs ever get out of hand. Shobhit's, incidentally, has generally been much worse. And honestly, I am far more concerned about him coming home from work with an infection, as he works the floor of a retail store interacting with the public, than I am about contacting something at work myself. Except, of course, if Shobhit did come home with an infection, it's probably a foregone conclusion that I would get it, in which case I would then bring it to the office, right? So, I probably need to talk to people at work about this. I still need to find Eric, who is technically my supervisor now so it's his to authorize; Scott and Noah are out on store tours as it is Thursday.
PCC has had its first confirmed case of an employee infection, though, at the Greenlake Aurora store. They closed it yesterday for a "deep clean" that is to last all through today and they plan to re-open tomorrow. I keep wondering, though, about how long it might be before this happens at all stores, and what the big picture will look like then? Also, the infected person worked in the Deli, which itself will now be closed through March 26. But wouldn't that mean they handled food, which presumably customers purchased? I don't envy anyone with customer service positions right now. In any case, this clearly means the virus has made its way to the PCC sphere, and it's probably only a matter of time before it reaches the office as well.
I just realized I never really properly updated you on my week so far since returning from Australia, in yesterday's post. Not that there's a huge amount to tell: after our plane from San Francisco landed just before 7 p.m. at SeaTac, we were home by about 8:00. I was feeling jet lag more severely than ever before in my life; we were both incredibly tired. The cats were immediately very happy to see us, and were especially clingy with me all day on Tuesday. We were both in bed shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, which was barely enough time for me to get everything out of our suitcases and bags and basically settle in. I did our laundry on Tuesday morning.
Tuesday was a final day off for me, something I continue to feel strongly was maybe the best decision I made about this entire trip: I actually got an unusually long 7 hours and 39 minutes of sleep Monday night. Shobhit, on the other hand, made the crazy decision of going right to a 5 a.m. shift Tuesday morning. Actually I think he fell asleep earlier than I did Monday night, so he maybe got a pretty good amount of sleep that night too, or at least more than he might have otherwise. Oddly he has zonked out before me every night so far since we got home.
He wanted me to bus out to meet him when he got off work at Big 5 in Northgate at 1:30 Tuesday afternoon, and I always told him it depended on how I was feeling. I was out of bed that morning by around 7:00, though, and I managed to do laundry while working on the Adelaide travelogue, which I managed to send out via email by 9:55.
That was only because I had only to add the photos to full text I had already written up on the flight from Sydney to San Francisco, which I had to do on my iPad because Shobhit's laptop wasn't working—as has been his annoying habit for ages, he did not put the cap on his water bottle tight enough and it leaked out all over his laptop in the backpack in the overhead compartment on the plane for twelve hours. Shobhit just shrugged, which was a little infuriating: if the roles had been reversed, even if it were to my own computer, Shobhit would have blown a fucking gasket. We actually got it to turn on briefly at the San Francisco airport, but then the screen went black and it hasn't properly started up since. And although I've already got them all on Flickr, my photo files with all their renamed file names are nearly all on that hard drive, so I'm really hoping we can get it fixed. Last night I finally Googled what to do if your laptop gets wet, and that was when I found out "time is of the essence"—you apparently need to take the battery and any other parts that you can out, immediately, and let it air out for a few days. By last night, it had been two days before I even did that. I still left it open face down on the coffee table last night with the battery taken out and maybe tomorrow will try to restart it again. Otherwise we'll have to find a shop to take it to.
Anyway! The Adelaide travelogue sent out, the final of five different ones I did over the course of our travels—and, fried from water or not, I am still eternally grateful to Shobhit for bringing the laptop at all, as this was really the only purpose it ever served, well, except for updating budget spreadsheets which Shobhit kept up with the entire time as well—I then took my shower. Once I was done with that, I realized I actually did not have a huge amount of time at all before needing to take transit out to meet Shobhit, especially if I also wanted to drop off my dry cleaning and return several library books. Those things done, I then rode the #49 bus downtown first, which had its own surreal moment: just before I got off at 3rd & Pine, someone at "Metro HQ" got on their announcement system and was talking not just to drivers, but passengers, about the importance of washing hands frequently, etc. Even by Tuesday this coronavirus business was turning everyday life into a weird creepy science fiction movie (except this is real), and it has only gotten more and more so in the couple of days since.
I got to Northgate right after Shobhit got off work. We first went to Costco, then we went to PCC Greenlake Village, and then we stopped at Trader Joe's on Roosevelt on the Way home for just a few produce items. We came home with quite a lot of groceries, thanks to our deliberate choice of leaving the kitchen largely empty, and particularly the refrigerator free of any perishables, before we left.
Once we had dinner and watched a couple episodes of Will & Grace, I spent the rest of Tuesday evening working on the actually pretty extensive html formatting needed to post all my travelogues as entries on this blog, backdated to all the dates they had originally been sent out as emails. This was just the easiest and most efficient approach to getting the whole trip documented here, without feeling overwhelmed with such a task when I had already written extensively in those emails. I did add a lot more extra shots, mostly videos that cannot be embedded in email the same way, to those posts. That alone, which was five large entries in addition to posting all the morning Twitter digests I also needed to catch up on, took right up until it was time to get ready for bed.
As for yesterday, my first day back at work, my two weeks away really fucked up my innate sense of routine, and I kept forgetting kind of important things. I only remembered to scoop out the litter boxes before getting into the shower because Shobhit asked if I had done it. Unfortunately he left for work before I did, so no one was around to remind me to feed the cats before I left for work, and the cats just straight up got no breakfast yesterday. They did still have leftover dry food from the previous evening so they were fine. But, because Gary had accidentally given them each a half can instead of a quarter can each as directed while we were away and the canned food ran out a few days before we got back, I gave them canned food for dinner last night as it was their first time not getting fry food in a few days. And although they did not eat it all in one sitting, they did eventually eat it all before the evening was over.
I was much more mindful this morning, and did remember on my own, both the scoop the litter boxes and to feed them before I left for my doctor's appointment.
I tried to spend some time last night working on adding tags to my Australia photos, and barely made a dent. My goal is eventually to have all the photos from the trip on Flickr captioned, even though I counted them all yesterday and the total photos I took—and these are just the ones I kept—came to 1,046. 222 of them were from Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras alone; 60 of those separated into the requisite "Random Hot Guys" photo album, an easy record. Anyway, Shobhit and I made vegetable and bean quesadillas for dinner, Shobhit making a bit more than necessary so I actually saved half of mine for lunch today. We watched a little bit of TV, and soon enough he had fallen asleep on the couch with Rachel Maddow on and all their coronavirus talk kind of made me realize this is all much more serious than I even already realized. This is some truly unprecedented, deeply serious shit. Also? Tom Hanks and his wife tested positive! In . . . Australia.
The news people also talked a lot about President Fuckwit's national address about the pandemic, which largely contradicted his previously denialist statements about it, so there was a lot of analysis of the ways in which the address was straight up boneheaded (though that's my word, not theirs). The one thing that gives me some solace is the knowledge that the outbreak in China, where it happened first, is pretty much now contained, giving a sense of hope that the same will happen here eventually. The flip side of that is, China is not a democracy and their government can do whatever the hell it wants and impose restrictions Americans will either refuse or try to refuse, and that's going to make it harder to keep the spread of infections contained here.
Shobhit eventually went to bed, after spending a few minutes with me updating the budget spreadsheet so charges on his credit card that reflect the Australian exchange rate are accurately reflected. Then I watched the new Netflix comedy special by Marc Maron, End Times Fun, which was pretty good, if not outright hilarious. I did quite enjoy his blasphemous closer. After that, though, and I have no idea why this was the case, I went to bed and then . . . just could not get to sleep. It took, like, a couple of hours. It must have been 12:30 before I was even sleeping lightly, and then I woke up again around 2:30. I got back to sleep much more quickly that time, but then I had to get out of bed again at 5:10.
The cats have been all over us all week, and they both continue to sleep with us on the bed each night. I think they are still processing their abandonment issues.
Anyway I have written way more than I intended today and I should probably actually get some work done.
[posted 1:13 pm]