MEDIUM RARE
Doctora Claire is a heart doctor, but four days in the week she is assigned to the hospital’s COVID ward. She begins her day when most people at home are just waking up, wondering how late the doctora got in last night.
It’s almost always a long, psychologically draining day. She takes two meals at home, a semblance of breakfast and a slow dinner (time to unwind more than to chew). No other meals or snacks in-between, and that’s because she doesn’t want drink and food in her stomach as she attends to her patients, COVID and non-COVID, the residents that she guides as a teaching doc, and the people who consult her, some of them so curious their questions go on and on, and the more they ask the more she talks, the more she has to stop thinking that she’s thirsty. Liquids induce peeing. Peeing is discouraged. Those hazmat PPE’s are so hard to zip into, the procedure could take half an hour from start to finish.
“But you have to eat something and you cannot subsist on one cup of coffee,” her mother has been nagging her. Doctora’s standard reply, “I’ll be okay, I know what I’m doing.”
That’s our problem, too. We presume our doctors are okay—they’re experts, okay? -- and we take their professionalism and their fortitude for granted, looking but not really looking at them as a tribe who happen to be made of sterner stuff. They’re not robots but we don’t see them as flesh-and-blood androids who need to drink, eat, pee and poo, stretch, work, rest, play, sleep, and dream like the rest of us.
Sometimes, Doctora and her mom communicate by cellphone. Lucky for Claire, the family driver drives her to and from work. When she comes home, she goes straight to her own en suite bathroom. In moments, her dinner arrives on a tray left on the floor outside her bedroom by her mother’s cook. A knock on the door signals that dinner is served, DIY. The other people in the house know they’re to stay away from Doctora and Doctora is not expected to socialize with them.
Her mother hopes the day is not far when life will be allowed to resume its niceties.