Final Thoughts

 I'm inside Heathrow now. All cleared for flight and confirmed covid negative. I've been testing 2-3x every week since arrival (daily on weeks when I've been wrecked and paranoid) and not once have I had a positive or equivocal positive test. 

When I left work on Friday morning, a third of the anaesthetists were down with it, three of the midwives had been tested overnight after showing up to work with symptoms. One tested positive and went home.

The hospital had been winding down resources, closing the covid ward, coincidentally the PCR machine had broken down and there was limited actual testing possible and a fair amount of delays and strain. I went to ED this week and it was grim - I've never seen so many people parked in the hallways and I remember the days of North Shore hospital in the early 2000s. 

I feel like when we imagined a wave, we thought of it all like one Taranaki shaped peak, climb up and over to the other side, then done.

But its more like waves waves. beach waves. Some are fine. Some are awful. Some smash you against the rock. But they will keep coming at health systems for a while yet. 

I don't have any fancy tips for surfing. I really don't. 

I think we just have to keep plugging at things and keep looking after each other, in all the new and different ways that things get hard.


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