For the past few months, I haven't been able to write as much as I had wanted. Since August, I began working an extra day on the weekends to help cover the COVID hotline in my area. It didn't feel right just to let it go since I began the journey the October prior. Initially, I was the only nurse taking calls, assisting callers with quarantine questions, and gathering illness data on the weekends the prior school year. No one planned for the hotline to continue past summer 2020, but the virus had other ideas.
I plugged along until January, when I began classes to complete a degree. Working six days a week became extremely difficult. Something had to give. Everything became overwhelming because my outlet is writing and when I can't write, I'm unable to heal because the outside world can be so oppressive. Though I didn't want to, I feared that I might have to step down.
This time though, my luck kicked in. The numbers in my area fell so low after the enormous Omicron surge in January, that it made no sense to staff a team for so few daily cases. It was a big difference from January's 6500+ cases compared to a few hundred cases so far for February. It felt fitting that I received word during the snowstorm that the team was no more. It is my hope that when the mask mandates lift, people will continue to mask at least until the end of respiratory season so we won't have any additional surges.
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