I slept an extra half hour this morning. I was tired from my 12 hours in the city, and trying to get closer to the recommended eight hours of sleep, instead of the five or six I normally operate on. I joked with my wife that most of the signs and symptoms of COVID–headache, malaise, […]

My wife met me at the door when I came home from working in the city last night. She made me strip in the foyer, dropping all my clothes – my jacket, my work shirt, my work pants, my tee-shirt, my socks—in the laundry basket she placed next to me. Then I was marched, clad […]

It is just eerie. I hear about what went on in China, what’s going on in Italy, what’s happening in New York. Covid is up here too, no doubt. But it is just his advance spies. The battalions haven’t reached us yet. At the hospital my office is on the left as you come in […]

A couple weeks ago, they cancelled my daughter’s basketball championships.  Her team was in the state semi-finals and had a good shot at winning it all.  The championships were going to be in a high school gym where maybe fifty people would come to watch her sixth grade Catholic league  team play.  The NBA was […]

Many prison systems in the United States are admirably releasing low risk prisoners to try to prevent an epidemic of COVID-19 from ravaging the inmate populations, particularly in crowded prisons. Neglect of Prisoners During Coronavirus Pandemic Threatens to Further Escalate the Current Crisis US jails begin releasing prisoners to stem Covid-19 infections While a great, […]

When I started in EMS in Massachusetts in 1989, in only one of the three towns I responded in were their first responders and in that town, the fire department first responder was a single fireman in a bronco, not an engine with a four or five man crew. (For those not in EMS, a […]

It was slow at the hospital, only three patients in the ED when I got to work. A doctor said to me, these past two weeks have been like low tide, when the water recedes way farther out than normal, so far out that all you can see are rocks. But you know that when […]

My friend Rosie is hanging out in front of El Mercado, surveying the street. She smiles and hurries over when she sees our ambulance pull to the curb. I give her an apple, which she starts eating like it is all she has had to eat today, which it likely is. I also give her […]

I was dispatched to intercept with a BLS unit for chest pain. I met them on the side of the road where the EMT told me the patient had a severe chest pain that’s worse when she coughed. She said the woman had a COVID test the day before and it was negative. I nodded […]

You know the five second rule. You drop food on the floor and as long as you pick it up before five seconds have passed, you can still eat it without worry of getting sick from the bacteria that was on the floor. That is because the bacteria as a fellow living species gives us […]