Monday, March 22, 2021

The Longest Year

 Most of this post won't be about my horses, so sorry!

My attempt to find peace in 2020. Stayed at a cabin on a lake.

My day to day gig is as a hospital microbiologist. I was inspired by L. William's One Year in a Pandemic post and wanted to share some incredible things.

I was cleaning off my administrative desk a couple weeks ago and pulled down a notification bulletin from the state laboratory that I had dated to January 22nd. That was the first time that I had made notice of the novel Coronavirus. I had printed out the bulletin, hung it on my push board, and carried on like normal. Within a couple of weeks, I realized that I needed to make additional preparations. Like many hospital laboratory staff, I began attending webinars, started trying to gather supplies while being swept under in a wicked influenza season. My staff and myself were being overwhelmed by the volume of influenza testing and the escalating positivity rates.

One of the first confirmed positive cases in the country arose in a county nearby. At this point, I had implemented fairly aggressive cleaning and preparation practices in the laboratory. We had PPE, but almost no swabs to collect specimens. Ironically, as China and then Italy shut down, the precious viral nasopharyngeal swabs and viral transport media was no longer being produced. How was it that the countries that made these items were being most affected?

Every single swab would be accounted for and daily inventory taken for more than the next year. Every request logged so I could ensure there wasn't hoarding or inappropriate usage. I didn't realize that I would end up being the keeper of all testing and supplies in short order.

The second week of March 2020, things became very difficult. Hours of paperwork and samples were pouring in. I did not yet have testing in my laboratory and everything had to be funneled to the state. Every result was called. At times, various references laboratories opened testing and within days, would be swamped and shut down again. The phones never stopped ringing. Each day, counting swabs, controlling inventory, and trying to play referee in a game I never imagined.

My state then entered into a safer at home order in the middle of March. What happened next I never expected. We had been battling two fights: one with nCOV-2 (now named SARS-CoV-2) and one with influenza. The side-effect from the order was that influenza spread dropped dramatically. Testing decreased and supplies could finally be adjusted towards declared pandemic.

Mid-April, I was able to bring testing in-house. Safer for the staff who continued to soldier on, seeing a crushing amount of patients. I have never brought a test online in less than twenty-four hours. I wrote almost sixty pages of documents to bring this test in. Every test in a laboratory has to be validated, have samples run, a plan, a procedure, training, and so on. It was an incredible rush, but we are feeling exhausted.

I had originally planned on visiting family in May, but that vacation time was rescinded. While I had initially been hopeful that people would continue to hunker down, it became clear that something else much more sinister was lurking under the surface.

People died. I wish I could share their stories. I'm just a microbiologist, but I know their names. I have some of the specimens forever frozen, others sent for genetic sequencing and surveillance.

I did find some time outdoors in October

I realized about this time in May that things were not going to quiet down the way that so many scientists had hoped. I had the sinking feeling we had tipped past the point of no return...

Time to gather my feelings for the second half of the year.

6 comments:

  1. I can only imagine the difficulty of being in a position to see what's going on like that. Despite being in a fairly safe job and able to work from home (still) there has many times been a sense of overall dread and sadness at the way the world is working. The light for me has been this future where my loved ones and myself can be vaccinated and hopefully help slow down this horrible illness. Fingers crossed I can get my first vaccine in the next few weeks. Thank you for doing what you do!

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    1. Good luck getting your vaccine soon! It was an incredible sense of relief to get mine, although much to my disappointment, I didn't gain superpowers. ;) :)

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  2. It's been such a wild ride. Interesting to read this perspective, as it's not one that's gotten a lot of media attention.

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    1. Thanks. I agree. I don't think most staff in the hospital even know we exist, lol, except when I tell them they couldn't run tests or they were looking for results.

      The public definitely doesn't have much of an idea of some of the major media shortages, difficulties in implementing testing, etc.

      I like being unseen...mostly! But our job really isn't automated and people don't realize that. :)

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  3. I can only imagine how stressful this was for you. And it's not over yet.

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  4. Thank you for sharing your story - it's so important that we all hear how things have been impacted during this time. Especially those working behind the scenes like you.

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Please leave a comment if you like. I love hearing from readers and would like to know that I am not always talking to myself. ;)