Whitacre's "Sacred Veil ("I'm Afraid") always makes me cry. I saw and heard so much in my time working with AHS during COVID and I heard "I'm scared" or "I'm afraid" so many times as I was working on IT hardware.
Often it was moments before the doctor administered the sweet smell of sevoflurane via a mask, and that was the last time that patient saw light.
I watched a heart transplant in one theatre and a lung transplant in another.
COVID-19 is and was a time I can't shake. The patients, the loved ones interrogating me because I had an AHS lanyard on me in the waiting rooms. The misdirected anger. The patients that drowned in their own lungs.
Get your fucking vaccine. Please. From just an IT guy who lived through the COVID times in the ICUs, please. For your loved ones, get the vaccine.
I was up in Grande Prairie on the day the hospital opened and working in the Labour and Delivery department when a Code Pink was declared.
The crash team was coming up the elevator but thanks to the UCP, there were not enough scrubs available. So I stripped down to give my scrubs to the team.
I went down the elevator to the IT space in the basement of GPRH wearing just a blanket the nurses gave me. I was down to my underwear.
I went up later to deal with a workstation on wheels, and the charge nurse let me know that mom and baby ended up okay.
I'm telling this story and I don't know what else to say... I think about it a lot and I think about how there's a lot of Albertans that wouldn't take the shirt off their back to look after another. I'm not telling this story to say I'm better than someone else. I'm telling this story because I want better.