Tuesday Morning, I'm awake

Tuesday Morning. I’m awake.  Thank you God.  Another day. I so appreciate the little munchkin room mate Madigan. He was irritated at me in the night when my feet crowded him. He sleeps at the end of my bed. My little puppy guardian. Well, we’ve not made it back to the bed. I’m sleeping on the couch because I’m afraid he might fall off of  the bed or pee and poop in the clothes I’ve piled at the side. I do laundry and bring it back in a bag a can’t say I’m very good at stowing. Now i’m stepping over pee pads and searching out poop that’s mostly on the pee pads but might still appears as an underfoot surprise.  He’s a very smart dog and learning house training okay.  Unfortunately with the rain and cold I can’t get him outside. He needs to be lifted down the stairs.  

I don’t know what’s going on internationally.  Everything I hear about Canada, the liberal government and Trudeau is appalling and frightening.  I feel my once fine country is being turned into a third world slum with communism and dictatorship looming.  The Covid continues to spread with the fear and hysteria. The lockdowns don’t make any sense from a scientific health perspective.  My patients are plagued with mental illness. The anxiety and depression and despair are palpable.  I daily reassure, prescribe meds and diagnose illness.  

It’s like all these administrations are one trick ponies. We had the ‘climate change hysteria’ with everything focus on the ‘the world’s dying give me money’ while every other aspect of life was belittled. “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”  says harry only to have Jill shreik, “Don’t you care. We’re all going to die.”  Now suddenly we’re oll goingto die for Covid.  But what about my job , what about church, school, music, the theatre company.  

I Know. 

The isolation is beginning to wear on me. I’m like I was solo sailing.  I spend alot of time alone. Writer’s do. Wilderness survivalists do. I have alot of experience. I don’t mind being a hermit. I like it here. I’ve this new funny roommate. Right now he’s chewing a bone which is so much better than when he’s chewing cable. Yesterday he found fishing reel and unreeled fish line all over the living room. I felt like a Navy Seal had booby trapped my place.  I had to cut my way through.  

I continue to pray and ask God for guidance.  

The future is so uncertain.

I wonder if this is any more true of any other time or just a product of the awareness brought on by Covid.  I am aging. I will die. We hear of people dying all the time.

No one I personally have known has died in months.  Patients have attempted suicide but every other patient I know has lost someone and grief is heavy in the air. What I fear is the torture and isolation of the nursing homes.  Deaths are great there. I remember Dad saying how horrible it was to be confined to bed blind with a hospital acquired infection. Solitary confinement, he called it.

I used to take comfort from the thought that I’d write the great Canadian novel. I thought to sail across the Atlantic retracing the path of my forefathers back to Scotland. I’ve looked forward to going to Aberdeen where my grandfather hailed from. Then I actually fell to the childish becoming of a ‘lord’ as a result of buying a foot square of Aberdeenshire land in Scotland for $50.  What a ruse!  Now I’m Lord Hay.  Some family probably owned that land one day as that’s the clan origins. If it’ had not been Aberdeenshire I’d not have fallen for the inspired money making venture. Now I’d like to visit ‘my land’.  

I have sexual thoughts.  Bisexual.  Romantic. Orgies.  I dream of Egypt and barges and fans and being fed grapes. I have strong young men and women serving me. I channel some ancient Gods or aliens or emperors.  Mostly I think of massages. What does one do after an orgasm.  There’s whatever leads up to it. I have friends. Even now I have to socially distance. I can’t have assistance with the function of orgasm anymore than I can hope to have someone scratch my back. I’m alone with my own bodily functions.  I imagine royal assistants and laugh.  How once there were chambermaids to the king. But then there was constant paranoia. Even now we don’t know what Gates plans to put in the vaccines he may well force on the world with the complicity of the weakling corrupt Trudeau.  I like Elon Musk. I’m delighting in his space age activties. Perhpas I’d like a plae on Mars.  This world has become too adolescent and bizarre.

But what really do I have to complain about. I m thanikful for the food, the fresh running water, indoor plumbing, heat, the intermittent good weather.  Christmas Advent is here.  The Coming of the King. There’s the renewal.  Spring isn’t that far off. Each day I plod. My back hurt. My joints complain but I’m moving forward, slouching towards bethlehem perhaps. 

I’ve so much to be thankful for but though I have a full belly I take no pleasure in the many who have not.  I want us all to be blessed. I don’t have the I win you lose trait . It’s always been for as long as I can remember, we’re all have to go through to the last one before we can all go through. There’s no hierarchy in the wisdom of the spirutual worldl. There’s no first. We all arrive together. so we might as well help the one falling behind.  I will die I supposed but I can’t get ahead.

I hear of all the deaths from overdoses and think of the luxury and poverty.  I could be captaining my sailboat across the cold Atlantic but I’d rather have a sex change and find pleasure inside out of the elements.  I see the street person getting some cheap short lived pleasure from drugs and can’t judge them.  It’s the same as abortion and euthanasia now. The ultra rich elite allow slum accomodation. The main problem is the courts. The judges allow the bullies thugs and gangs to terrorize the people. Sellig them drugs and taking the best for themselves with all the corruption of the legal system.  I idealize these matters only to know that everyone really isn’t corrupt but indeed is doing the best the can.

Everyone is doing the best they can.  

Everyone is doing the best they can.

Some are sicker than others.

I could do more but I’m lazy too., I fantasize about beaches in the tropics.  I long to sail in warm weather. I consider selling my offshore sailing vessle for a lighter rigged coastal cruise I can better handle. I’m happy smaller more constrained. My dreams are smaller. I’m thinking lakes rather than oceans. 

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

I am thankful for the puppy. I’m thankful for work and purpose. I muddle on.  It’s enough I suppose. I’d like to see the confusion lift. I’m afraid of the UN and the Great Reset and communism and persecution and dictators and poverty.  I fear aging in cockroach infested nursing homes.  I fear torture.  

But God is good and I feel distant from God.  I feel dsitant from my fellow man and woman.  

I was visitted by Laura on the weekend and it was comforting.  

I don’t know what I want at time even.  

I pray.  Thank you God for this creation. Thank you for the opportunities. 

I’m looking forward to another coffee and a shower and a walk with the puppy and my camera. I like taking pictures of birds.  

Checking In, Covid 19

When I was at sea alone in the North Pacific in the midst of hurricanes and storms, high seas and unbearable anxiety, I’d listen on the Hamm Radio for our daily contact.  The Hamm Radio operators liked making contact with us. Odd men in little rooms surrounded by electronics reaching out to solo sailors bouncing about in the middle of oceans thousands of miles from shore. The Hamm operators who managed these nets motivation primarily seemed was to be to check out their equipment’s capability and to play the Hamm Radio Game. Solo sailors like me were playing the Solo Sailor Game with a whole lot of moving parts and games in the Bluewater Solo Sailor Game. I was so thankful these Hamm Radio kindly Asperger sorts were out their on land.

There was always uncertainty. I was wedged in the aft berth with the boat rolling and tossing about. My dog and cat were crouched in beside me, their only comfort, the suspect security of my body.  I’d hear the crackly call and pressing the button on my receiver respond.  Across a thousand miles of empty sea the voice of a person I’d met in SAN Francisco or Vancouver would reach me. I’d pass on my Latitude and Longitude, give him my course, say that all was well when often it wasn’t but it was ‘well enough’.  The contacts were brief. We were strangers, relatively.  Casual friends brought together by mutual interests.  

I was one of a very lose network of adventurers. I was solo sailing across the North Pacific in winter, desperately staying alive, sometimes at all odds. By contrast he was enjoying the warmth of his home trying with arcane and modern equipment to reach out and touch someone bouncing signals off various waves of atmosphere.  I lived each day for the contact, some days more.  When I came more into tropical waters I was handed off to another person, this one a total stranger.I’d give him my lat and long and course. Someone would then record that on a map somewhere and family who followed such things would sigh. I’d once even made a radio telephone contact so that I’d be able to speak with family.  I wanted to reassure them, to let them know I was alive. They were glad and I was so thankful I had someone who cared. I’d doubted that I’d survive that hurricane and it was very uncertain. Surely they had their doubts.  The dog and cat and I continued on.  

One day I sailed into Radio Bay and anchored. The world stopped moving.  The rich scent of land and foliage and flowers enlivened my senses.  For 24 days on that passage I’d checked in.  I enjoyed checking in.

Now I’ve a group of medical colleagues and psychiatric colleagues. We’ve met together annually for a conference in different places in the world.  After we keep contact with a increasingly sophistical email list called ‘cyberdocs’.  Sometimes weeks go by when I don’t check in. Then I do.  I’ve a different dog today. The cat died to and another came and went.  I’m in the warmth of my home and the world isn’t on the lean and I”m not afraid of sinking.  I still check in though.  I feel good knowing I have friends, people who care for me , as I care for them.  It’s like the place where everyone knows my name. I’ve never known a bar like that though the community pub I visited when first I lived in South Putney had that flavour.  

I’ve heard they put bells on toilets in Putney now so the neighbours of elderly know that the old are still living. I’ m aging but years I hope before I get bells on my toilet. I’m still hoping to wear bells on my toes..  In our group we laugh a lot.  We cry too but mostly we laugh. We expresss resentments and gratitudes, share platitudes and stories and even a bit of wisdom. One of us who has now died wrote the book, “Spirituality of Imperfection’.  Some of us are famous like that but most of us, like me live in the mixed blessing of relative mediocrity. Walking talking accessorized worms with varying degrees of sentience.  

Locally we have now another cybergroup of like minded doctors who pride ourselves on our caring.  We value humility whether we have it or not. We share this common collection of character traits and values that we hold as true. We have mutual admiration as well. We know what it means to become a doctor. We don’t denigrate each other’s achievements. In our own lives we are too often encountering those who make themselves look taller by chopping their heads off.  Steal from the rich the mob cries thinking that things of value can be taken like objects.  The thieves and animals keen in the streets now looting and stealing. Our group doesn’t do that. We are workers and achievers. We appreciate things aged and pure. We believe in meritocracy.  We celebrate individual effort, thank our teachers, love the guild and apprenticeship, and respect the years that go to making that which is rare.   We understand we are not alone even if we forget it.   Checking in is a reminder.  

They asked me to be the organizer of the next checking in meeting.  We’ve sat around the province at our various computers looking like the opening of the Brady Bunch tv show, our our little squares of faces with varying backgrounds. So many of us are greying.  It surprises me when I see us. I’ve coloured dyed hair with vanity.  We’ve known each other,  many, 20 years or more.  I am reassured.  I  tell the really mensch organization folk among them that I can’t organize.  I’m right now very disorganized.  I’m thankful for the call. I want to rise to the occasion but it’s like when I was in my boat at sea.  I’d be asked for something like the wind speed and required going up  on deck. At that moment  I was afraid to go on deck, because it was so bad outside, I didn’t know I’d make it back, even tethered as I always was to the ship.

Now the word ‘organizer’ shocked me.  I reflected on the disorganization and uncertainty of my life today. In my garage I have two lap top computers, a flat screen monitor, a printer and a filing cabinet on wheels.  I’ve a cell phone and sometimes also use an iPad.  I’ve some books . The space is messy with flotsam, papers,  pens and debris. I’ve thrown this office and control centre together on a folding table. I didn’t know it would go on this long. I’d started it as a temporary solution to the announcement of a plague. We have all entered again into Camus, Plague.  Kafka is still struggling to get into the Castle. And I just want to make love in the time of Cholera while practicing social distancing. 

I’ve gone to my room and stayed for weeks, now months.  At first I was very afraid. I’d been sick early in the year and had been unable to breathe, coughing and panicking and believing that I was far from God. I’d been scared then. I’d thought how effective water boarding would be on me.  I am terribly addicted to breathe. I take it for granted too much though I love to breathe. I couldn’t then. Repeatedly I was humbled. This virus was announced weeks later and we were told we all could get it and that it would be best if we went inside for a while.  I was very relieved.  It was my fourth epidemic.  I’d already survived the Aids epidemic working in the main hospital emergency bled on, spat on and assaulted but I’d acquired tuberculosis serving up north.  A year of medications cured me after I still wheezed climbing mountains. Now I’m old and wheeze making love.  

We  know now the virus likes the old and sick.   Others are safe,.

Each day I phone or connect online on the computer with a dozen or so folk who so often sound or look like I must have looked to the Hamm operator. I have felt such love knowing that the mere connection has sustained them that day and that week.  I’ve repeatedly heard the tell tale tone of ‘cabin fever’ I’d first heard working in the Arctic. I’ve known too that just talking and checking in I’ve helped another human remain grounded. There’s such relief and gratitude in their voices.  I now know the Hamm Net Operators loved that connection as much as hearing from me the loudness and clarity of their transmission.   I’m glad to have reached my patients too.  I have so many to see and talk to. There are several staff in several clinics asking me to talk to more and more.  I’m feeling nails on a chalk board and the terror or just anxiety and irritability transfers to me even at a distance through communication lines and atmosphere. I have a satellite dish outside my home. I sometime talk to people around the world though mostly I’m just talking to people in this city.  It’s all about distance and time still.  I feel of service and that sustains me. I’m a part of this greater whole. I”m a contributing member of the community and I’ve touched another human and reminded them ‘we are not alone.’  I talk to pharmacists too and write letters to government,  employers and schools and send all these missives signed with my name and all the long line of letters aftert my name that once meant so much to me.  Now I don’t know.  Being alone myself in what the Rolling Stones aptly called ‘living in a ghost town’ I’m finding a lot is being stripped away that hadn’t already fallen away.  

Adventures do that.  Challenges do that. Expose the essentials.  Each day when I’m not working, I’m walking the dog and breathing in the rich scents and joy of nature. We have a trail through the woods by the river. I’ve taken my dog, my camera and love to catch pictures of wood ducks and herons and song sparrows. The blossoms I shot months back have given forth fruits now. My dog has a heart murmur, congestive heart failure, coughs like a 2 pack a day smokers,  is blind and injured his back . We don’t walk fast. My back is sore most days as well.  My heart weary but  still good. I don’t know.  It’s what my patient called the ‘season of uncertainty’. Friends are ill and sometimes I learn someone has died. Our hospitals are full or nearly full. They never empty.  People with covid fall and recover but I’m sure it’s sheer terror. I’m still afraid of being sick. I avoid people ,especially young people and strangers. I see a friend or two. We’ve begun meeting again on weekends.  She is loving and comforts my dog.  We laugh. I love to hung. 

There’s war and rumours of war.  The lies and misinformation are ubiquitous. Mobs in terror roam the streets.  The media has failed everyone, clanging bells of partisan bias and propaganda.  The leadership has so often lost it’s direction. There’s untold deaths of old caused by lizard brains and heartless leaders. I’m protected here. The local government is showing surprising wisdom. The insanity is at a distance.  Some guy is dementing while another talks about his socks.  I think of times of George III and know that I’m in the middle of the likes of the Charge of the Light Brigade.  Chamberlain insists the communists are friends. Still there are equally beautiful and profound hero’s.  A little boy saved his sister from a dog attack. I saw the picture and read the story on Facebook.  I liked the mother elephant rescuing the baby elephant on Utube.  The donkey sanctuary always makes me smile.  I harken back to the times I was a child and my mom and dad and older brother were there to save me, mostly from myself.

Now I pray. My God, My God, why.......I begin.....then change to,  gratitude.  Jesus commanded ‘Do Not Be Afraid’.  I told my sailing friend ‘worrying is wicked’ . He laughs whenever we are in desperate times and asks, “are we wicked yet, Billy.” 

Thank you for this day, Lord. Thank you for the joy that comes with checking in. Thank you for my family and friends and colleagues. Thank you for the example of my courageous little dog.  Thank you that I can still be of service. Thank you for the good leadership. Thank you for technology and networks that allow me to reach out and still the fear in others. Thank you for nature. Thank you for breath.  Thank you God of Gods, Creator, Sustainer, Lover and Friend  Help me to be less afraid. May my faith grow stronger. May I know you more dearly.  Thank you for checking in.

  

Sunday, Quarantine, Covid 19

Lovely sunny day.  At home.  I’m working from home now.  I just walked Gilbert along the river.  Social distancing individuals, couples and families. Only out of controls were a few dangerously speeding cyclist.  They need to be fined.  In my day we’d just put a rope across the trail.  Taught us all caution racing on the back woods trails.  Like land mines. If you want to race go on the road.

I read another arts student journalist whose got it wrong. This lock down and quarantine isn’t going to stop you from getting Covid 19.  In Iceland and on Cruise ships and in South Korea and now in area of Britain they are finding everyone is ‘getting it’.  The good news is a whole lot of people aren’t showing symptons ever. They might have a sniffle one day or a little feeling down.  70% of cases are mild. It might be more. The key is understanding as we get older we are more likely to need hospital or ICU to get through .
The disease lastS about 21 days.  Quarantines were for 14 because of a person likelihood of showing symptons within that time. There was one extreme outlier that showed the virus 57 days out.  Exceptions that prove the rule.  You get it and it passes. Only a few end up in hospital. Only a fraction of those need ICU.

For 10 years, maybe more, the government has stolen the money for health care and given it to terrorists and pet projects.  In Canada we have the most administration, the least doctors and longest waitlists.  As doctors and nurses and patients we have been seeing people in corridors because the hospital beds have not kept up with the population increase and aging population.  We are nearly 40 on the number of beds per thousand in the western world. All the talk of how good the Canadian health care system is compared to the US has overlooked the fact that the US has more beds for their population. Japan is the best.  The US made better decisions closing their borders and being absolutely candid about their decisions.

The virus was caused by nature. The pandemic was caused by the politics of the Communist Chinese government lying. It is still lying.  It is totally reasonable to say that Communists, if they didn’t plan the pandemic, capitalized on it. Communist Chinese killed a hundred million of their people in the past. They still enslave Tibet. There is no freedom of speech and no freedom of press. We in the west were only able to react to the pandemic because of a heroic Chinese doctor who was a whistleblower and soon after died a death like Epstein.  It’s only in democracies that individual lives count.   

The statistics of Communist countries and other dictatorships are conservatively estimated at a factor of 10 times deviant from the truth. China’s ally Iran reports a few deaths whereas families described all the doctors dead in a hospital and American satellites reporting mass graves.  These war lord nations always use stats as a weapon of their perpetual war.  The truth that followed the USSR fall was amazing. It only occurred because the only rising infant mortality in the western world, a statistics they forgot to conceal, showed that all their other glowing reports were skewed way off.
China has opened new quarantine centres.  

Black faced shame faced Trudeau called everyone racist for criticizing his policy of accepting thousands of Chinese from Communist china to land unvetted and move into the community without being quarantined.  Singapore and Taiwan are predominantly Chinese and did a magnificent job of vetting travellers and following up on contacts. Trudeau was the most racist, refusing to protect Canadians and lying about vetting as he had done regarding refusal to vet Migrants so that so many ISIS and disturbed diseased individuals continued to come legally and now illegally into Canada.  They want the increasingly rationed health care services.  Trump and the US were earliest to restrict borders saving thousands of lives by slowing down the demand on health care resources.

The Communist Chinese refused to share scientific and medical information until the now dead whistleblower did his wiki leak.  The pseudoscience of the Climate Change Alarmist industry with their hysterical adolescents screaming ‘how dare you’ and declaration the North Pole ice would be gone by decade ago or that we ‘d all be dead unless we gave them world control before 12 years, all was crying Wolf. There is Not and never was a ‘climate emergency’.  The language of terror coming from so called scientists and the communist and dictator dominated UN IPCC delayed the reaction to a real emergency with rising death rate and a need to act.
Thankfully the west did act.  It was estimated that there would be 1.5 million deaths by Covid 19 in the US by this summer.  Italy has 10, 000. Dr. Fauci is now estimating that with the protective measures and social distancing and quarantine the number of dead will be more like 100,000.  Dr. Bonnie Henry, Public Health Officer, British Columbia estimates the matter has halved the speed of spread.

Trudeau gave tens of tons of emergency medical supplies to China against medical advice and against Who advice.  Italy was overwhelmed because they didn’t have proper protective wear.  We needed n95 masks.  We needed respirators. Trudeau gave them away and the most harrowing thing I saw was nurses swabbing coughing patients in the test site wearing inadéquate surgical masks which solely protect patients from them not the other way around. China now is giving the west defective masks and thermometers. Who really is saving Canadians and who is the enemy?

Despite the national mismanagement, politicking, lying and rank obscenity, the Premiers especially NDEP Premier Hogan of BC and his government have been doing sterling work to managed this real ‘emergency’.  Hoarders were fined for reselling. Businesses were closed who wouldn’t follow public health laws.  

All of these measures are to ‘slow down the spread’.  They are working. We have now had time to produce tests and laboratories have ranked up their prodution. Vancouver has now got drive through testing sites and independent testing sites in Burnaby and Chilliwack.  Testing initially overwhelmed at 1000 tests a day, so given to the most needy, are now ramping up to a hundred thousand a day and like South Korea we’re testing more to see that so many are fine despite having the disease. Everyone is likely to get it in time. But that’is the key.
Without hospitals the rate of death in the elderly, the immunosuppressed or those with heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes, is 5 time greater.  This is not going to be the case here.  The College of Physicians and Surgeons has moved doctor resources and streamlined processes to address the problem. UBC Faculty of Medicine and the BC CDC have had time to get into action. These are the great minds that contributed to curing Aids and finding cures for cancer. Trials are already being done on the most likely cures.
 In the US the present administration is moving forward on treatments by removing beurocratic delays that would have meant years but now hospitals will have tools in weeks.  

Mr Trump was right though pilloried as usual. The sun and heat will slow the virus spread. There is a likelihood of a vaccine perhaps by fall.  I said we’d be out of the extreme medical crisis and need to quarantine and lock down by June. Mr. Trump says end of April. I hope he’s right. India just went into a 21 days lock down of 1.5 billion people.  The next crisis which some continue to fear was the Chinese communist plan is the economic crisis.
The world will not go back to normal. Not until we all have a safe vaccine and 70% of us at least get it.  That’s months away simply because of the fixed delay on trial of a vaccine in humans.  It’s not as quick as finding Hydroxychloroquine is an amazing treatment that reduces symptons and may prevent disease. India has recommended it’s frontline health care workers all take hydroxychloroquine. It’s not ‘proved’ by double blind controlled scientific studies but there is strong scientific evidence for it.  Vitamin C, D and zinc are all recommended. Now add sunshine to that.

The problem with our media today is that there is no objective ‘truth’ in this post modern world. Everything is going subjective and partisan. 

We are fortunate here at home. The question is now when to return to work. April, May or June. How and when. Also we must ensure our government doesn’t steal healthcare resources putting us all at risk for personal self aggrandizement. We also must celebrate the courage and great service we have seen from so many.

Thursday March 26 At home with Gilbert

7000 dead in Italy. We are into the third week and three weeks or so behind Italy.  We haven’t the deaths and the number of cases is rising solely because of the extension of testing.  The hospitals are full but not yet overwhelmed. It will be a close call. I think by next week we will see if we are going to have the resources.  The demand is increasing.  The key is in the percentages by age who need hospital and of those what percentage need to go onto intensive care.

In hospital they have IV fluids, O2 and suction as well as IV medication.  Other than that a whole lot of TLC from already overworked nurses and doctors there’s not much more than one can get at home.  811 is the emergency number to call to discuss going for testing and even going to hospital.  Obviously if you can’t breathe call an ambulance or a friend to get you to the emergency. Personally if I get sick I’m going to stay at home as long as I can because I like my space. I have chicken noodle soup. I always prefer my own bed and I won’t be spreading disease.  Gilbert is a good nurse.

The percentage of those in hospital who go on to need mechanical assistance with breathing is the key. This is a percentage of all those who are in hospital and where the bottle neck shortage really exists. There’s a finite number of resources and too many cases for the existing number of respirators. If the hospital and ICU resources are overwhelmed then the death rate jumps five times higher.  Considèr death rate of 10 to 15% for the over 80 crowd. Without hospital beds O2 etc or respirators this group’s mortality jumps to 50 to 60%. The same holds true for all the other groups. 

Social distance and isolation reduce the ‘run’ on the limited resources.  It’s just like toilet paper whereas in that case assholes hoarded it but in the case of respirators its not that people are choosing to use them.  The good news is that respirators can be bolted to the floors in hospitals. Otherwise we would have to fear the toilet paper hoarders and the sanitizers resellers would have stolen all the respirators in the city for their own personal greed.  

That’s why I’m thankful for the police and civilization and frankly what I’ve come to know as advanced Canadian culture. Canadians are caring, sharing, generous people who are known the world over as the best of killers too. Our women soldiers and men soldiers constantly get the sniper awards for longest shots.  We just are tolerant too.  As the majority of Canadians were taught the Christian value of tolerance and forgiving, turn your cheek 70 x 70 and judge not lest you be judged, that’s a finite number. Once we have shown forgiveness ‘enough’ we act.  So the police are thankfully arresting and confiscating and fining those people who are trying to take advantage of a bad situation.

I’m in a virtual office at home. It’s tough.  Yesteray 10 hours in front of the computer mostly listening to sorrowful tales and advising. I love telling people about the great leadership by our NDP Premier Horgan and Minister of Health Dix.  I think Dr. Bonny Henry needs the highest award for her calm and smart response to this public health crisis.  I qlove Dr. Oetter head of the College of Physicians and Surgeons and their quick responses and overall brilliant leadership.  UBC Department of Medicine has always been world renown clinically and in research so we’re seeing the Immunology Department, Infectious Disease and Microbiology and Pharmacology all responding letter perfect to an unprecedented crisis. The family physicians of this province have always been lauded across the country and they are showing their mettle. The Doctors of BC are just great.

India just went on lock down  1.5 billion people quarantined for 21 days except most essential services. I am blessed to know East Indians who are sharing what their families elsewheee are experience. Through this personal communication channel too we learned that Iran was lying like China had been but that France and Germany are facing the challenge stoically. Taiwan was as amazing as South Korea. It’s a bit like watching a Science, Politics and Intelligence Olympics. Iran right now is vying for the Darwin Award but Jamaica is doing well so far.

The Coronavirus will infect everyone until we have viable vaccines or herd immunity comes along.  Some very lucky rare individuals for reasons we don’t understand have natural immunity.  We saw this in Africa with these ‘truck stop hookers’. Truthfully I can’t remember what the scientific studies name was but it’s still being investigated because these rare individuals despite constant exposure to the Aids virus somehow didn’t get the disease but then did if they moved.  It remains a mystery.  Spontaneous remission is never something to be sneered at. Miracles happen. Grace exists but as my mother said “God gave you hands and a brain to use, so get up and help.”

Everyone now is helping by washing their hands and staying at home. I”ve loved Facebook. The Guppie Girl Dance routines in quarantine have been so funny and delightful.. I love the dogs nails painted red. I love the songs about quarantine It’s just great to see people coping and carrying on. That’s the same spirit which Britain was famous for in the great Battle of Britain.  We’re in a kind of Seige and our job is to survive and not go out where the enemy is waiting to pick us off.  Of course we have to go out for essentials and that’s the same in any seige.  Soldiers get shot going for water but they must go for water. So when I go out I try not to touch things, keep my social distance of 6 feet, and take off my clothes and shoes at the door when I come in. I put them aside and believe they’re ‘decontaminated in 12 hours’.  The virus stays on surfaces for 12 hours.

Otherwise Gilbert and I enjoy walking in the woods and don’t feel afraid in nature.

I’ve got to get ready for work. I’ve not devolved to staying in a house coat at the virtual office but I can see it might happen.  

Another great day in quarantine.  Singapore is already getting back to normal allowing more businessses to open.  I see Mr. Trump is saying we might be at that place by Easter.  India is hoping 21 days will control the wave and  ‘flatten the curve’.  I think Singapore might have been 6 weeks before they could loosen up. I believe we have at least another three or four weeks of cost to face because nationally we were so slow to react .  Thankfully our province and the Mayor of Vancouver took strict measures and we’re all working together with the help of our very fine and caring police.  

Thanks to everyone. God bless.  It’s great to be sober, clean and free and awake in these dire times.  I feel I’m ready to respond to what comes my way with the help of my faith and family and friends. I do pray for their safety and look forward to getting to the other side.  Hallelujah!