Day 144: Sad Portrait of a Failing Hospital

Tonight I present an email from a nurse who explains why she will no longer report for duty at a big medical center in Brooklyn. She asks not to be identified. I’m withholding the hospital’s name, too. (I slip sometimes, but I try not to promote or make examples of institutions, companies, individuals, or products.)

“Thanks for trying to tell the truth but you don’t know the half of it.

WILLIAM BLAKE: NURSE'S SONG“_____ has people piled in corridors. The cafeteria is jammed with patients. They all say they just came down with flu no matter how long they had it because the [city’s] guidelines say Tamiflu and Relenza only go to people who went symptomatic less than 48 hours ago. We ran out of ventilators the first day and what we have are breaking from overuse and use by people who were never trained to operate them. There’s hardly any oxygen left to operate them with anyway. We use throwaway masks over and over, marked with our initials. Nursing assistants are running ICU beds on their own.

“Management is totally mixed up. They suspended regulations and qualifications so they don’t know if the people they’re talking to know how to do anything right. Doctors are losing it. Nurses are dying. My best friend turned purple yesterday. She’s stuffed in a freezer. She was 29. I heard there’s no more room down there. Where would they put me?

“My kids need me more than I need the money. School is closed. How is my 9 year old suppose to watch the others? I didn’t sign up for this mess. My husband’s a cop risking his life in a million ways wearing a paper mask they gave him. They don’t want either of us to wear the ones we got on your site because they violate standards by being better, for God’s sake. Anytime my husband could bring bird flu back with him. I’m going to stay home from now on to back him up and give our little ones a fighting chance.

“That means at least the end of my career if they don’t arrest me for desertion or something. Under the emergency, we have to stay here til they say we can go. They do anything they want with regulations, the unions, professional practice, “ethics,” whatever. Lucky they have no place to sleep us so I get to see my kids. What if I make them sick?

“I didn’t accomplish much in 15 hours today anyway. Lied to patients surrounded by people leaking blood and gasping to death. Told them help was coming when it was going to be a dental student who hasn’t had any sleep.

“They should have planned better. It’s all a wreck, everybody for himself. I’m for my family. Keep warning everyone to stay home. Did I mention the MRSA?

I have nothing to add to what she wrote. Readers who live in areas not yet affected should yell at their authorities to prepare FASTER! Any talk of heading off the pandemic is nuts. Sick.

She referred to MRSA, which can come with influenza. As with bacterial pneumonia, staph infections are taking advantage of flu-weakened bodies—particularly in children—to infect people. Hospitals are hotbeds of MRSA transmission….

Earlier I saw the bald guy stomping around his living room, waving his mantis arms like semaphores. I couldn’t see what his friend was doing. But he saw me and slammed the curtains so hard I could just about hear the fabric flap. He’s an insect version of the guy in Rear Window.

Stop telling me to go out! What’s the point?

Day 145: Wash, Pray & Whip It Good

A city truck fetched Lisa today. I’m sure it was because the LES DIY prodded someone. The dispatcher asked for me when she called the Irishman. Thank you, Evelyn! (By the way, who are you?)

The authorities now admit that flu has popped up just about everywhere. Maybe idiots will stop going on about illegal immigrants (I’m sorry to say some self-described libertarians are spreading dumb rhetoric, too) and start focusing on how we can all survive this thing.

The Feds coughed up a speech from the character who runs the Department of Homeland Security. Not a very good speaker. The result seemed at once liberal and paranoid, fussy and grandiose. Are they trying to reassure us or arouse us?

FLAGELLANTS IN A 15TH CENTURY WOODCUTIf I remember correctly, albeit painfully: “Wash and pray, and support those who want to help, not hurt, our nation through this historic challenge.” Yawn. “The American Family Comes First!” No comment. Words fail me, too. I smell dreams of a presidential run.

Help, of course, is on the way. That new Restore America’s Independent Spirit & Enterprise is already doing something or other (besides wearing out my fingertips). Vaccine coming … Testing, testing … patience … Americans special ... determination ... resolve ... solution ... be patient ... God bless.

I’m trying! I’ve been unable to ship packages of personal protection gear. UPS vows every day that they will visit. First guy I see in a brown uniform gets a free mask! Unless it’s a stormtrooper.

I reckon UPS will reach me before the vaccine does. As the whole country becomes like New York, things here will actually improve. Get ready for your part of that adjustment.

You might soon spot an odd group of medievalists flogging one another bloody on the steps of your parish church (St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in our case). They come in crimson robes, bare their chests for penitential abuse. A few strip down to loincloths. The Catholic Church is neither amused nor heartened by their devotions, which makes sense when you consider that they claim the Church invited contagion with “pedophiliac iniquities.”

The police want to vacate the cathedral steps, but the brass is evidently stymied by the thought that the NYPD’s customary thrashing would only reward the fanatics, who were known as flagellants in the Middle Ages.

I wonder if we deserve this. Is nature whacking us before we can finish wrecking the planet? While holed up here, I’ve looked into deforestation, extinctions, hydrocarbons, and waste. My mirror shows me an animal that no longer knows itself.

The Natural Storm Man Cooked Up

Around me, I see a swirling mass of ever-more lethal strains of diseases that we extracted from our favorite creatures. As Dr. Greger explains in his book, epidemic diseases are harbored by animals that cluster together in dense flocks (like us), or are forced to do so (like the protein sources we cultivate—pigs, chickens, cows, and ducks).

The tuberculosis that now infects a third of us likely sprang from our domestication of goats. Cows seem to have given us some tuberculosis, along with measles, and probably smallpox. Farming pigs gave us whooping cough; raising chickens brought us typhoid fever; taming water buffalo induced leprosy; and breeding horses (or cattle) introduced the common cold. Milking sheep is thought to have circulated the bacteria that trigger ulcers, even cancers.

You’re welcome to believe that God must have countenanced this catastrophe. My humble mission is to help you flout His will.

Here we are, stocking little arks of real estate with our families and threatened pets and food stocks, then defending them with masks, gloves, goggles, bleach, bootleg pharmaceuticals, semi-automatics.

But we are the beasts that caused this storm by corrupting chickens into filthy, dysfunctional critters so we could eat cheaply and blow the difference on video games. Or porn. Or hey, drive-in churches where they preach delirious consumption.

So how fair can the culling of mankind be if some of us can stave off retribution? Banks, government agencies, and insurance companies have prognosticated for years that Western countries will emerge from a pandemic in far better shape than poorer nations. We own the vaccine makers. We have doctors, satellites, the latest weapons of mass—or minute—destruction. We even have a few ventilators for people with clout.

Boy, do we have medical technology. The British lab that brought us Dolly, the cloned sheep, aims to start mass-producing medicinal protein for humans … in chickens.

Day 146: Flu Is Unknowing

Today was a gorgeous concept that hurt—a painting that felt more real than my dried-up skin. When you’re locked indoors, ears conditioned by canned, compressed air, even the colors seem like a mirage. You watch someone pass on the street below, seemingly immune to fear. Dazzled, jealous, you open your window. A bracing hint of autumn fills those blue skies. Someone calls out nearby and you pause. No problem: It’s a child, laughing.

Nostrils piqued by fresh air, I impulsively climbed onto my fire escape. It creaked, as always—a familiar, even comforting sensation. Then an ascending gust brought a whiff of reality: My street stinks like a slum in a tropical country. I swear I could hear rats scratching and chatting below.

THE SEVENTH SEAL'S CHESS MATCH: WE'RE ALL PLAYING FOR KEEPS NOWNext I heard glass shattering as some malevolent kids swept down the block, throwing rocks at our windows. Women howled at them. Fortunately the delinquents were clustered on my side of the street. They wrecked half the windows opposite my building. Shielded by the fire escape above them, I imagined pouring molten oil on the mob, as if in a medieval siege.

This reminded me of the grim flagellant procession that terrorizes a country village with whips, chants, and sermons in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a magnificent old movie in which a weary but defiant Crusader plays chess with Death to save a young family from the Plague. (“I am unknowing,” says Death, rather modestly.) I used to play chess with Nina, who was neither knowing nor modest.

I’m pleased to know and report that somehow, amid our ruins, the LES DIY has fully resumed its services. Again working out of Ric’s Place, the group is dishing out meals and delivering them to the weakest. The plates are smaller, though; certain stores that donated generously during Round One are holding back. (They must be losing a lot of money this time; newly unemployed, little-subsidized consumers can’t afford whatever goods they have to sell.) Evelyn reports that Ric seems listless, depressed. She urges me to visit my best friend at home. Does he know her?

I’d happily visit Ric, but I must wait every day till the curfew takes effect at dusk, in case UPS shows up. Ric sounds okay on his voice mail, but he never calls back. Trying not to be annoyed, I’ve been reckoning he was busy helping folks. I called him again. Left a message telling him not to make me leave my home. That sounded dumb, I’m sure.

Notwithstanding Fitch’s orders, I’ve invited the group to fetch some masks. I’m proud of my community. Their name says it all—Lower East Side Do It Yourself Committee.

Do It Yourself has a fine resonance. The East Village may not be what it used to be before I got here, but these people couldn’t be much better than they are.

Day 147: Fear Steals the Light

A banner day for the flu resistance! A saint from UPS saved me. He took every package that was due to go out, even waited while I raced to seal everything. (I was so shocked to see him that I wasn’t quite ready.) I caught up with raging demand.

The guy was wearing a mask that was worn and torn and barely covered his grin when he saw how happy I was to see him. I gave him a couple of masks and goggles and gloves.

POE WASN'T AFRAID OF LIGHT: HIS BRONX COTTAGEHis arrival would have allowed me to visit Ric’s Place—and Ric’s home, if necessary—but some neighbors turned up to trade plywood for protective gear. A lot of people are barricading their windows in the wake of yesterday’s assault. They’ll have no natural light, not even indirectly. No sights. No hope. I’ll never do that.

The bartering visitors in the hallway wouldn’t shut up.

I’ve returned to the purple twilight of my porthole, where I listen to a symphony of alarms from cars and stores and apartments, punctuated by shots and shattering glass. The city sounds like a haunted house in a techno amusement park.

Edgar Allan Poe, New York's poet laureate of personal doom, would celebrate our mass hysteria with a chilling story about the comeuppance of some pompous idiot who thought he was above it all.

Day 148: Cooped Up With Sick Memories

I’ve missed the boat on the trend toward pet abandonment as the pandemic spreads. Except for dogs, New Yorkers keep their pets indoors. (That’s not a bad thing, given that scientists think cats scare urban songbirds out of reproducing.)

Readers have sent me links to stories about stray dogs, cats, guinea pigs, parakeets, ferrets, anything—all tossed out of doors, or cars, or hearts by beings who no longer rate the adjective human.

It’s people that make me sick at times like this, not virions. Please read this Humane Society page about disaster planning for your pets!

ONLY THE MICROBES ESCAPE: PERTUSSIS (US Department of Health and Human Services)Meanwhile, Evelyn warns that I’m exhibiting dangerous signs of agoraphobia, a panic disorder that manifests itself as a fear of being in public places. “You have to take control fast,” she exhorts. “Please don’t let yourself get locked inside. Who’s ever gonna get you out?”

And here I was, thinking I felt claustrophobic as I watched my neighbors’ windows go dark with sloppy patches of plywood, heavy plastic, even furniture. A strong wind could hurl some of those sharp-edged slabs into peoples’ heads. The rampaging teen vandals seem to have put Rome over the edge.

Listen, friend, I hate being cooped up in here. I long to walk in the streets again, take in some sunlight. (I rise early to try to catch direct D rays in the window.)

I’m dying to taste fresh fruit. An apple, an orange—especially a banana. I’d beg for a stalk of broccoli. Shuttered inside with no fresh nutrients, no place to exercise, how much resistance can anyone offer this virus?

As a kid I was quarantined with whooping cough. (AKA pertussis; evidently my vaccine wore off, which can happen.) When I wasn’t wracked in bed, I’d stand at the front door, wishing anyone would come to visit. I even missed certain teachers. A sign told visitors not to ring. My older brother was trapped, too. He blamed me for our incarceration, made sure I couldn’t access toys or the phone. One day I made it to the corner in my pajamas before a neighbor called the cops on me.

In Justinian’s Flea (about the first known pandemic, a bubonic plague outbreak that may have broken the back of what remained of the Roman Empire), William Rosen notes that the people of Constantinople took to going out with their names fastened to their necks in case they fell ill and died before they could get home. 

I’ll step out when it seems wise or necessary. Fully clothed, with dog tags. Promise.