Work Life Balance (Montgomery)

Work

Now, it’s quiet.

Two and half weeks ago, as data and recommendations rolled in we had plenty of business in the clinic, folks with respiratory illnesses that may or may not have been mild COVID, folks still trying to take dream vacations and needing clearance, folks coming for routine preventive care. I think often about the kid with mono I saw during the beginning of March. At first, he was missing everything, the bummer of having mono as a high schooler. And then cancellations began and boom! FOMO evaporated. Silver linings are found in the weirdest places.

Outpatient medicine, looped in with ERs and hospitals, is an essential business, though our primary task is to keep people out of ERs and hospitals. That isn’t new. Now, we keep people out of our clinic, too. And it turns out, much of what we did in person we can do by phone or over video chat. We refill medications. We answer questions. We tell people to stay home. Many of my patients also work in essential businesses and I hear stories of how worksites are or are not following the rules. I try to talk people into quitting: smoking, eating junk food, drinking too much beer. This is harder to do now, over the phone.

The hospitals have rearranged themselves in preparation for a surge. I add my name to a list of volunteers and hope I don’t get called.

Our clinic shares an office building with clinics from one of the big Cleveland health systems, and the lobby is staffed by a pair of yellow-gowned, masked, gloved, shielded staff who take temps and ask how I feel when I walk in.

It’s really nice to be asked how I am feeling, to feel the touch of the thermometer.

They are bored and I over hear their gossip. Upstairs, in our office, we are bored and also gossip. If we need a patient to come for in-person visit, it’s cause for celebration and more cleaning. I wonder if we scare the patients with our enthusiastic welcomes, our overly expressive eyebrows and turned-up voices trying to compensate for what’s lost behind masks. 

Two years ago, I took a graduate course in Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. Taught by friends of mine, an anthropologist and a historian, the class was mostly filled with smart kids out of college, taking a master’s to augment their applications for medical school. Over that semester, while also practicing clinical medicine, I wrangled with the notion that clinical medicine is socially constructed; that is, definitions of health, illness, disease, while having some foundation in biology, are nevertheless infused by the culture in which they reside. Indeed, the sciences are like this, too. It seems to me that COVID-19 has pulled back the curtain on these matters.

In that class, I learned that the golden age of biomedicine, where a society’s wellbeing could be improved by scientific and technological innovation, was already on the wane.  And seeing how a virus—microscopic material that isn’t even unicellular—has thrown the world back to relying on solutions from a century ago underscores that point. Sure, compared to a hundred years ago we have more tests, ICUs, medications, but it would have been better to have less poverty, fewer structural inequities, less pollution.

Sometimes I think about how this pandemic will change our so-called health care system.

There’s always a surplus of hubris.

Life

At home I do:

More

laundry dishes cleaning watching TV sleeping

Less

driving spending planning

I live with two teenagers, one home from college, and we agree to give each other even more space—physical, emotional, cognitive, lyrical, metaphysical. Time stretches as well. Our old Dutch Colonial on a tree-lined street used to be in Shaker Heights but now sits on the outer rim of a black hole, where these changes are to be expected.

I follow the governor’s press conferences, read local and national press, check the Hopkins heat map. Sometimes I clean cabinets while listening to the governor. Other times I stare at the corner where the walls meet the ceiling. Today I answered a robocall from 212 area code and the message was in Mandarin. It made me smile. 

I worry a little more and a little less than usual. I try to enjoy the lessons of being shut in:

If you really think about it you do not need that trip to

            Starbucks

            Brassica

            Cleveland Heights 
            Puerto Rico

            The Moon

Old friends who live faraway reach out to me, because, among other things, I am a doctor. They ask me what I think. You know how old friends will always tell it like it is? I reach out to doctor and scientist friends (old ones), for the same reason.

What I long for most is a serologic test with good reliability – I would love to know whether the sore throat I carried silently for two weeks was It. Frivolous and also a blessing to know you’d already weathered the storm without impact. I do not touch my children. I wash my hands. I review my health care proxy, ask my attorney, and he says it’s not a bad idea to make the list of proxy people longer.

I start to think about summer and my children’s coming academic years. Only vaguely. Only theoretically.

Lynda Montgomery’s writing has appeared in december magazine, The Masters Review, Belt Magazine and Los Angeles Review of Books. The Ohio Arts Council awarded her an Individual Excellence Award in FY 2020 for fiction. She works as a family physician and lives with her children in Shaker Heights, Ohio.