Time for a Little Serenity

Time for a little break.  I feel like I have been banging the COVID drum hard and heavy lately.  For those of you who have been reading this blog every day, you understand that I absolutely feel that this virus deserves our utmost attention and respect.  However, it does not merit unmitigated paranoia. Common sense must still prevail and level headed thinking is a must if we are going to get through and past this ordeal.

Let me illustrate by sharing two examples that I came across today at the hospital.  The first was a specialist that I saw this morning who was just fuming.  He has a patient with a possible abnormality on a CT scan and he wanted to look at it together with a radiologist.  Normally, that would simply entail going down to the radiologist’s office, pulling up the images and looking at them together.  It is something that is traditionally done many times a day.  However, today the radiologist’s door was locked shut.  The specialist was told to leave the films so that they would be downloaded and they could then discuss it over the phone later that day.  I understand the point of wanting to limit exposure whenever possible, but where do you draw the line between careless and cautionary?

The other illustration was told to me when talking to one of the regular ICU doctors.  He said that his family had a refrigerator that was recently installed at his home.  As the technician was wrapping up, the doctor came down in his clean scrubs on his way out the door to go to the hospital.  The technician got a look of abject terror in his eyes and asked if he worked at the hospital.  He answered that he did.  He was then asked, “have you actually been around someone with COVID?”  “Well, yes, I have,” was the reply.  The individual in horror accused the doctor of risking his life saying that he should never have had him come to the house.  He got on his phone and told his boss that he wouldn’t be able to work for two weeks now.

I understand the fear.  I live it when I go to the hospital to see my patients.  I saw three of them today.  I don’t worry much about them.  They have tested negative and it is frankly pretty easy to be careful with them.  What I worry about is everyone else.  Who forgot to wash their hands?  Did they touch the door knobs that I touch?  The telephones, the keyboards?  It is easy to work my mind into a frenzy but I have learned to talk myself down.

Here are the lessons that I tell myself:
1. I am not going to get this from virus floating around in the air. I am not present during any procedure that will aerosolize the virus. If I am, extra PPE will be placed.
2. Coming in contact with the virus on intact skin will not infect me.  It has to get into my mucous membranes, meaning my mouth, eyes or nose.  This is where the basic mask comes in handy.  It keeps our hands out of our face.  If I touch a surface with my hands, I don’t panic.  I do what I need to do and then I go and sanitize my hands.

It is dangerous to be too cavalier and carefree.  Those individuals truly scare me.  Neither is it good to become so crippled with fear that we are not able to help those around us.  In the words of the serenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference.”