Coronapocalypse: the prequel
Mar. 22nd, 2020 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toorsdenoteI just realized that I asked Z to keep a journal during the Coronapocalypse, but I haven't been doing that myself. I just tried to answer a question on Twitter about when the schools shut down here, and I realized I'm already losing track of the timing of events. So, here I am, I guess.
The first US case of covid-19 was diagnosed on January 19, but my experience of this whole medical situation started the previous morning, when my mother had a stroke.
She and my dad are staying with us right now, as they do for usually around four months a year.
She woke up feeling a little off-kilter on the 19th, but it wasn't until she tried to ask Z to take the dog outside that she realized she couldn't make her mouth make words correctly. She knew it was a stroke right away, and I immediately threw her and Dad in the car and sped off to our closest hospital, Evergreen.
The ER there was amazing -- extremely speedy, very caring, checking in with her often even while the man screaming obscenities in the next room over was requiring a lot of extra staff.
What has really stayed with me is that the neurologist asked questions, sped her off for brain imaging, and then immediately started reassuring us about the financial implications of having brought her in to an out-of-network hospital. What a world we live in!
As he predicted, our insurance company transferred her to different hospital as soon as she was stable -- the Providence hospital up in Everett. That seems nuts to me. They had an ambulance transport her 40 miles just so she could get the exact same care from slightly different people, for paperwork reasons. Dad talked to the ambulance driver on the way there, and learned that that's ALL this particular ambulance does -- no rescue calls, just transferring patients between hospitals.
We were really lucky. Her symptoms went away quickly on their own, even as the imaging continued to show an evolving stroke. And she got to go home after 24 hours of observation. While there is visible damage to her brain, the only actual function she's lost is handwriting. Since she already gave up calligraphy when her arthritis got bad, that isn't a very disturbing loss to her. (Losing the ability to knit, on the other hand, would have been devastating.)
So that threw the whole year into disarray. They'd been about to fly down to see my sister in California for a couple months, but apparently you can't fly right after a stroke. So they started making plans for my my sister and (separately) my uncle and aunt to come visit us here.
Aaaaaaand then the coronavirus arrived.
And it arrived right where we were.
The day after mum checked out of the Proidence hospital in Everett, that man with the first US case of covid checked in.
And by Feb 10, people at the LifeCare nursing home in my own neighborhood -- south Juanita in Kirkland -- started falling ill.
I'll pick the story up there next time.
The first US case of covid-19 was diagnosed on January 19, but my experience of this whole medical situation started the previous morning, when my mother had a stroke.
She and my dad are staying with us right now, as they do for usually around four months a year.
She woke up feeling a little off-kilter on the 19th, but it wasn't until she tried to ask Z to take the dog outside that she realized she couldn't make her mouth make words correctly. She knew it was a stroke right away, and I immediately threw her and Dad in the car and sped off to our closest hospital, Evergreen.
The ER there was amazing -- extremely speedy, very caring, checking in with her often even while the man screaming obscenities in the next room over was requiring a lot of extra staff.
What has really stayed with me is that the neurologist asked questions, sped her off for brain imaging, and then immediately started reassuring us about the financial implications of having brought her in to an out-of-network hospital. What a world we live in!
As he predicted, our insurance company transferred her to different hospital as soon as she was stable -- the Providence hospital up in Everett. That seems nuts to me. They had an ambulance transport her 40 miles just so she could get the exact same care from slightly different people, for paperwork reasons. Dad talked to the ambulance driver on the way there, and learned that that's ALL this particular ambulance does -- no rescue calls, just transferring patients between hospitals.
We were really lucky. Her symptoms went away quickly on their own, even as the imaging continued to show an evolving stroke. And she got to go home after 24 hours of observation. While there is visible damage to her brain, the only actual function she's lost is handwriting. Since she already gave up calligraphy when her arthritis got bad, that isn't a very disturbing loss to her. (Losing the ability to knit, on the other hand, would have been devastating.)
So that threw the whole year into disarray. They'd been about to fly down to see my sister in California for a couple months, but apparently you can't fly right after a stroke. So they started making plans for my my sister and (separately) my uncle and aunt to come visit us here.
Aaaaaaand then the coronavirus arrived.
And it arrived right where we were.
The day after mum checked out of the Proidence hospital in Everett, that man with the first US case of covid checked in.
And by Feb 10, people at the LifeCare nursing home in my own neighborhood -- south Juanita in Kirkland -- started falling ill.
I'll pick the story up there next time.
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