Day 15

I don’t have anything smart to say today. 5am mornings catch up to you after awhile, especially after a second shift with kids, and today, a third shift grading and submitting exam results.

The main development today is the news that SLPs and audiologists have been authorized to conduct swab tests for Covid-19. Will “authorized” come to mean “required”? We’ll see.

Day 16

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Final Thoughts

I never planned to keep these daily posts going so long. What started as venting became a tool to help me process, and at some point, it occurred to me that there would be some value in documenting my experience in real time, rather than waiting to construct a narrative out of it after the fact. If you’ve stuck with me all this time, thank you. This whole business of forced redeployments will be such a small footnote in the history of Quebec’s COVID-19 response, but I hope it doesn’t get forgotten. It’s always interesting to think about how current events will be judged in retrospect. Was it a strong, unpopular but decisive action that ultimately brought the crisis to heel? Or yet another example of government taking advantage of an emergency to violate personal freedoms? Did it solve or create more problems in the long term? Those are questions that remain to be answered (although I have some guesses). What about me, was *I* ok with all this? The answer to that is still no. I...
Read more

Day 12

Day 12... Or, Day 1 of my new job! What is it exactly? The doctor says to ask the recreation coordinator, but she’s not in today. I ask the nurse but she’s preoccupied: “I guess you could go talk to people?”, but not right now because breakfast is in progress. I hunt down the social worker to see if she has any ideas. “Oh that’s great,” she says. “Mrs. P is the sister of the resident who died last week. She could use a check-in.” Ok, that got heavy fast. I’m adding social work to my expanding list of qualifications. I find Mrs. P in her room, sitting in her wheelchair. She’s slumped over but when I ask how she’s doing she perks up a bit and smiles sadly. “Oh, you know.” By the standards around here she is very coherent, although she chides herself for forgetting names and details. “You know, I never thought my sister would go like that. I went to see her, she recognized me but she couldn’t talk. She’s younger than me. I always thought she’d be the last one. I could have gone first...
Read more

Day 5 Addendum

A Helpful Hint for Employers If you are an employer and you sense that your employees are exhausted and stressed, you might think that offering them a chance to “talk to someone,” via an employee assistance hotline, is the thing to do. It’s well intentioned, and these programs are certainly essential. However, you should know that under certain circumstances, this suggestion can actually be received as insulting. Here’s how it feels: It feels like I’m walking home from the grocery store carrying 15 heavy bags, when a friendly neighbour approaches. “It looks like you are struggling with all those bags,” she says. “Would you like to talk about it? I can teach you a meditation exercise to help you cope.” The problem is that at this moment, I don’t want to learn to cope. I want someone to take some of the bags. You might not be able to help, and you might feel bad about that. But in that case, you’re honestly better off just walking on by. Especially if you’re the one who handed m...
Read more