A little bit of tobogganing fun….. our gravel pit.

 

I am sure we are all sitting, isolated, looking at what is going on in the world in utter terror.  Never before in our lifetimes… has something like this happened.  Perhaps if we were sitting in Iraq, we could say, we HAVE seen the likes of this…… OR maybe if we were in Afghanistan…. , we COULD say we have seen this…. but to our safe first world, we have never seen anything like this.

Sigh….. We are still working hard to get our motorhome up here, but somehow it all seems so irrelevant now.

We are fortunate to have a place to go to still be isolated.   I think of those “self isolating”in New York and I feel so fortunate to be somewhere that is totally isolated and kind of nice to look at too.

Because of shortage for the N95 masks, they are saving them for “acute care”, which means hospitals, and “long term care” facilities  are not getting them, at least yet.

So Ken and I went up to the property today and got into the storage Sea Cans and dug out our N95 masks, which we bought the year of the fires in BC 2017

quite a valued item now.   I had to go into facility and wore this and it felt quite comfortable.

We are starting a policy whereby the doctors of patients in the nursing homes will deal with issues that come up with the patients, over the phone as best they can. If a patient needs to be seen by a doctor, we will only have one doctor going in and out of the facility. So for Overlander, that will be me, and after Friday it will be me for both Overlander and Ponderosa. (another doctor is off for a few weeks).

So happy to have a mask.  I have heard that 5 nursing care facilities in the Vancouver area have positive Covid Virus cases.

I am not sure if this is a time for setting goals like this, but I want to make sure that we do not get one case of covid in our facility and if we do, that we act on it ASAP and prevent further spread.  My approach is to make sure that we think of everything we can possibly do to prevent the virus, so that some time from now, at the very least, no matter what happens, we will have no regrets…. That we did everything we could have done, with what was available.

So we are on lock down, only families of dying patients are allowed in to visit.  We have a volunteer at the door stopping everyone.  Nurses are having to change clothing when they arrive and when they leave. In Longterm care, nurses really are the front line workers, as doctors, we can manage things from a distance.  So of course I am mostly worried about our son Josh, who is a care aid at a different facility, a much smaller facility. HE is the front line.

We are working hard to make sure our facility is prepared for what is to come, that we can safely isolate any patients who DO end up with the virus , and ensure that we keep the staff safe.  We are planning for rooms where we can look after the coronavirus positive patients, our activity rooms.  For the most part, most patients in Long term care will not be transferred to a hospital if they become ill with the coronavirus, they will likely stay at the facility, and be cared for ther

I think that the reality hit home yesterday reading about the care homes in Spain where the staff had deserted patients, some dead, some severely demented, to tend on their own.  I can see that.  I am sure that the staff were scared, as they are here. None of us signed up for a job deemed to be dangerous.  It is hard to know how to confront that.  I feel that perhaps the best way to confront fear is to make sure that everyone is confident that we are doing everything we can.  The BC government issued a statement today stating that all nurses, doctors, care aides, anyone dealing directly with patients needs to be wearing a mask and PPE  (personal protective equipment), and gloves.  I am hoping by tomorrow we will have all of that in sufficient amounts.  VERY sadly in our area, there was a robbery of a large amount of this stuff, from a storage area…of the health authority.

The real bright light in our days is our wonderful baby Talon, who actually is MORE than one year old now and so apparently we can no longer call him a baby.  Somehow Toddler Talon just does not have the same ring.  He is just SOOO clever, here squatting down to examine a pine cone, having been “tricked” into wearing shoes for the first time.

I hope that everyone out there has a bright light in this otherwise dark and dreary time, even if it is only a small bright light.

Tucker is in the dog house tonite for chasing the turkeys that jumped into the yard.

 

Much love to all from Janet, Ken and Tucker the turkey chasing hound dog.