Sweet Mimi

Yesterday, Mimi's burdens became too heavy, and I had to pick them up and help her take the last steps of her journey. 

Little old girl, you can now run fast, run far, and take long naps in the sun.

You were with me for 15 years--it will never be long enough. 

Quicksilver Let's Play House 9/5/2005-11/11/2020

Lessons From The Past

Early on in the pandemic, I found myself most strongly affected by empty shelves at the grocery store. It was stressful enough to be leaving for work throughout March and April and May when all my neighbors were staying at home. It was stressful to insist back in March that my team at work wear masks when nobody else at the lab was doing so. But seeing large gaps and entire aisles with nothing but stray scraps of paper and dust on the shelves made me the most anxious. Increased my heart rate. I hated going to the store. I stopped my normal weekly trips and stretched out my visits to once every three weeks. 

The weird mass hysteria over toilet paper and paper goods also affected me in an unexpected way. I found myself looking at a paper towel and thinking, well, I've only used this corner of it. I can use it again. And I would carefully set it aside for that purpose.

My grandparents lived through the depression. They are long gone now, but as a kid, I would see them hoard bits of wire and string, re-use a kleenex all day, save tag-ends of soap and cooking grease to accumulate in jars and cans. I distinctly remember thinking at the time that this was odd behavior, but I never really made the connection until now. It's not odd at all when you see those empty store shelves.

I was already thinking a lot about this when I encountered an example of how this pandemic has changed our behavior at work too. 

We use a particular kind of disinfectant to clean the necropsy area at the lab. There are many cleaners that will effectively kill the biological agents that we know are present, but lots of those cleaners are corrosive. We use disinfectant in our boot wash and apply disinfectant solution to many different types of metal, plastic, and ceramic surfaces and tools, and we are ourselves exposed to it. We prefer to use neutral types of disinfectants. 

When we started running low on our stock, we placed an order like we always have. And weeks passed. It wasn't available from that vendor. This vendor might have it, but delivery would be in October or later. Another vendor said, yes, we have it, then the next day said, oops, sorry, no we don't. I started evaluating our options. We could use commercial grade bleach but it really was a choice of last resort. Bleach wasn't available from any vendor either but our bacteriology section had some bottles we could have borrowed. Then our Safety Coordinator came up with a bottle of a very concentrated phenol cleaner that nobody else at the lab wanted to use. Just mixing this stuff up into a solution required full PPE to protect the user. I said, I'll take it! We wear full PPE in necropsy anyway. We could make it work. It wouldn't corrode our boots or our metal tools. If things became dire, we could switch to bleach.

Just a few days later, our shipment of neutral disinfectant arrived. After a brief celebration, I told my team to prepare a purchase requisition for more. The new normal is that we need to order supplies and equipment many weeks in advance. We can no longer wait until we actually need something.

Remember how we started: the pandemic has affected us in subtle ways. I decided that we will reserve our precious neutral disinfectant for important things like tables and equipment. And the phenol cleaner will be used for the boot wash bucket, which is mixed and emptied daily. I told my two technicians, both in their late 20s/early 30s, about my grandparents and the Great Depression, but I am sure they didn't understand how that related to using phenol cleaner for the boot wash.

Hoarding. Choosing less desirable items to preserve things we have decided are more desirable. Using less. Not odd behavior at all.

Notes From A Pandemic

I was chatting with the director last week. Even before COVID-19 changed everything, we would chat 3 or 4 times a week, and that seems to be a habit in which we continue to indulge. Often, the director describes some proposed change to lab activities, and asks me, on the spot and with no preparation or notes, to riff on what I see as all of the consequences of that change, good and bad. This is not to say that he asks me for advice, as the process is not that direct. He asks me for my perspective. Even so, I know that he has modified his arguments for and against proposed changes based on what I say. I'm just coming up on my tenth month at the lab, and as a supervisor, I'm a relative newbie. But I think that he appreciates that I've been around the block a time or two. And my newness can be beneficial since I look at things with a fresh eye.

While the central topics of these chats are nearly always some administrative or technical process at the lab, we usually spiral out into fairly wide-ranging discussions of politics and science. We tiptoe around religion and similar landmine topics.

We of course talk about how the pandemic has been affecting us personally. With some exceptions, mainly administrative employees who can work from home, all of the technical employees have been coming in to the lab every day. Back in early April, when the stay-at-home measures were being widely implemented, I mentioned to him that it made me anxious to be the only person on my street who was going to work--daily I was driving past all my neighbors who were out walking or gardening or playing with kids. He said, yes, I know, when I get up in the mornings, my house is the only one in my area with lights on inside.

So last week, he mentioned that he had been feeling... he hesitated, so I said, feeling an existential dread? And he said, yes, of course, that (crazy how we both just rolled right past such a huge elephant in the room), but that he'd also been having real trouble focusing on projects that required planning for the future. We decided that the best word to describe this was "viscosity."

I told him that I had been feeling the same thing. There are a bunch of quality management documents that need my attention and even though I have time set aside for that type of activity, I couldn't seem to get to those tasks. It seems easier to focus on small activities of the moment--spending more time examining the biopsy submissions, spending more time reading up on a specific disease I found in a necropsy. We were both feeling dragged down, unable to tackle projects that required us to envision where we wanted the lab to be in six months or six years.

We decided that we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. If we (we personally, and the royal "we" of the lab) got through this pandemic without making any big mistakes, that would be okay.

Notes From A Pandemic

Don't bother going into Kroger or Wal-Mart here in Little Rock. There's still plenty of panic buying and hoarding going on. I am baffled at their failure to limit the number of "essential" items that someone can buy. All paper goods, most cleaning supplies, eggs, all forms of milk, canned goods, pasta, vitamins and supplements and OTC medications--rows and rows of empty shelves. However, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's still seem to have a decent supply of food, particularly fresh food. Need deodorant? Too bad. Need a nice head of cauliflower? Trader Joe's has big ones for a decent price.

It's interesting how the word "essential" has taken on new, even sinister meanings. In its unavailability, toilet paper has become essential. My job is essential. I am the only person along my street that still goes to work every day. No teleworking is possible for people who do lab-based work. My schedule hasn't really changed all that much. It feels strange to be going through normal daily routines when nobody else around me is doing the same.

At the lab, the number of necropsy and tissue biopsy submissions has dropped off quite a bit. We didn't have a single new small animal necropsy case last week. Still plenty of goats, chickens, and calves, though. Veterinary clinics are generally deemed essential businesses (there's that word again) even in areas where there are more stringent business closure actions than here in Arkansas. But they have to limit the procedures they can perform either by decree or because they have limited PPE and have to ration it out for the critical life-saving procedures.

We wear N95 masks when we do necropsies. We now have to ration them by wearing them for several days in a row. Even so, we are at much lower risk than human health care providers who have to re-use their masks. Sure, our exposure risks include some bacteria and viruses that can kill us, but those cases are rare, relatively predicable (we can identify those high-risk cases early), and we can further mitigate risks by moving the necropsies into a fume hood (if it's a small animal). Nurses and doctors are definitively being exposed to a virus that can kill them--their risk skyrockets with increased exposure. It's a bad situation for them.

Our lab has donated swabs and masks to the Department of Health. And it looks like some state employees who have experience in running PCRs are going to be seconded to the Department of Health. Their regular job may not be essential but their knowledge is.

Stay home if you can. Wear gloves when you have to buy gas. Limit your trips into the grocery store--and wear gloves in there too. No nitrile exam gloves? Use winter gloves and wash them. Alcohol in a spray bottle makes an excellent, clothing-friendly disinfectant. Don't panic. Check on your neighbors. Be polite.

Dark Days Continue

It's been a very horrible two days. I had become so paralyzed by my housing and financial situation that I wasn't able to make the simplest decision. It's a good thing I'm not working because I can hardly dress myself--selecting a clean Tshirt and shorts from the limited selection in my suitcase is a major task. I wear flipflops because keeping track of shoes and socks is too complicated.

I had a bit of a breakdown this afternoon, partly prompted by hours of viewing desperate, cockroach-infested houses and sad mobile homes perched at the dry edge of someone's property.

All of my dogs are acting out in the most horrible ways because they know that I am not happy, that something is not right. Harry broke into the extra dog food I brought to Austin and ate close to five cups of kibble. He looks like he's pregnant and moans when I pick him up. Cap has buzzsawed his way through dozens of toys in the past few days. He threw up a pound of kibble and dog toy bits last night--took him five tries to get it all out of his stomach. I was wiping up feet and ears from an array of stuffed toys, pieces of rubber balls, the sad half-cups of destroyed tennis balls, bits of stick, and hastily chewed kibble. Mimi, Jack, and Gracie are so on edge that they bark frantically at the slightest sound real or imagined. And Jack attacked Harry this afternoon for the first time in years.

I'm going home in the morning and I hope that I along with the dogs can recenter and calm down.

I'm blessed to have many friends that I can call on, friends who have both advice and other friends, but mainly friends who will calmly listen to me without dismissing my fears or ignoring my request for their time.

My mother talked me down from the ledge this afternoon and my good friend DSL made me laugh out loud with silly tales of silly dogs.

I'm nowhere near any sort of resolution or end to this difficult journey but at least I'm ready to face a few more days.