Suddenly the front door opens and Beatriz’s father stalks in. “Ella no puede seguir haciendo esto,” he says. Abuela steps forward, putting a hand on his arm.
He makes a beeline for the bedroom door. Without thinking twice, I step directly in his path. “Leave her be,” I say.
Gabriel startles, and I realize he has been too furious and single-minded to clock my presence. “Porqué está ella aquí?” he asks Abuela, and then looks at me. “What are you doing here?”
“Can we talk?” I say. “Privately?”
He stares at me. “I’m busy,” he grunts, trying to dodge around me for the doorknob.
I realize I’m not going to be able to divert him, so I pitch my voice lower, assuming that Abuela cannot understand English any better than I can understand Spanish. “Do you know that your daughter cuts herself?” I murmur.
His eyes, already nearly black, manage to darken. “This is none of your business,” he says.
“I just want to help. She’s so … ?sad. Lost. She misses her school. Her friends. She feels like there’s nothing for her here.”
“I’m here,” Gabriel says.
I don’t respond, because what if that’s the problem?
A muscle tics in his jaw; he is fighting for patience. “What makes you think I would listen to a Colorada?”
I have no idea what that is, but it can’t be a compliment.
Because I was a kid once, I think. Because I had a mother who abandoned me, too.
Instead, I say, “I guess you’re an expert on teenage girls?”
My words do exactly what my physical interception didn’t: all the anger leaches from him. The light goes out of his eyes, his fists go slack at his sides. “I am an expert on nothing,” he admits, and while I am still turning this confession over in my mind, he reaches past me for the doorknob.
I do not know what I expect Gabriel to do, but it’s not what he actually does: He goes into the room and sits gingerly on the bed. He brushes Beatriz’s hair back from her face until she rolls over and looks up at him with her swollen, red eyes.
I feel a shadow at my back, and Abuela walks into the bedroom. She stands behind Gabriel, her hand on his shoulder, completing the circuit of family.
I feel like I am in the middle of a play, but nobody has given me a script. Silently, I back away and slip out the front door.
Isolation, I think, is the worst thing in the world.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Before the mayor closed all nonessential businesses in the city today, I went to Starbucks on my way to work. I was in my scrubs, and I was masked, of course. I don’t go anywhere without a mask. The barista was joking around. She said, I sure hope you don’t work with Covid patients. I told her I did. She literally fell back three feet. Just … ?fell back. If that’s how I’m being treated—and I’m not even sick—imagine how it feels to be one of those patients, alone in a room with nothing but stigma to keep you company. You aren’t a person anymore. You’re a statistic.
The Covid ICU, which used to be the surgical ICU, is just a long line of patients on ventilators. When you walk into the ward it’s like a sci-fi movie; like these very still bodies are just pods incubating something terrifying. Which is kind of the truth.
We’re trying to be more careful about intubating because based on our experience, once a person’s on a vent he’s less likely to get off it. By now, I could identify the lungs of a Covid patient in my sleep (and some days, it kind of feels like that’s what I’m doing). It’s this vicious cycle—if you can’t breathe deeply, you breathe fast. You can only breathe 30 times a minute for so long before you exhaust yourself. If you can’t breathe, you can’t stay conscious. If you can’t stay conscious, you can’t protect your airway, so you might aspirate. And that’s how you wind up being intubated.
We give etomidate and succinylcholine before we put the GlideScope down the throat and bag the patient, because there’s a slight delay before getting hooked up to a ventilator. Ideally, you want to keep the patient comfortable but able to open his eyes and follow basic commands. The problem is that Covid patients have such low oxygen levels they are delirious—and we have to sedate them deeper in order to control their breathing and make sure they’re not fighting the ventilator. So that means doses of propofol or Precedex or midazolam, some kind of ketamine for sedation—plus analgesics like Dilaudid or fentanyl for pain—and on top of that, if they’re restless, we will paralyze them with rocuronium or cisatracurium so they aren’t trying to overbreathe the vent, and inadvertently damaging themselves. They’re on a whole cocktail of drugs … ?and not a single one actually treats Covid.
Man. What I’d give to know what your day was like. What you’re thinking. If you miss me as much as I miss you.
I hope you don’t. I hope wherever you are right now, it’s better than this.