It’s snowing in Madrid! WTF???? We had a beautiful, sunny spring day yesterday (our first since March 15), but now as I look out of my window at the cold, gloomy day, there are snowflakes falling in the light rain. At first, they were tiny, but they seem to be getting bigger and more frequent. Crazy weather for a crazy time.
So yesterday, I did the unthinkable. I went to a large hospital to get my stitches removed. I really didn’t want to go there. Thankfully, I have one of the good masks that actually filters out the virus, but I felt like I was suffocating the entire time that I had it on. I kept fogging up my glasses and looked like Little Orphan Annie. I really can’t imagine what it must be like for health professionals to wear those masks for so many hours in a day.
My surgeon had told me to enter through a specific door of the hospital and gave me directions from that door to get to the orthopedic consulting office. However, my Cabify driver and I quickly realized that the door I was told to enter was also the entrance to the emergency room. The scene of a huge crowd of possibly infected people ran through my mind and I almost told the driver to take me home. Lucky for me, my driver spoke English and when I told him that I was going there to have my stitches removed in the orthopedic consulting office, he was able to take me around the side of the hospital where I could enter through another door that led to my surgeon’s office.
In that part of the hospital, it was like a ghost town. I guess so many doctors and nurses have been drafted to help with the crowds entering the emergency room that all other appointments have been canceled. Anyway, I eventually got to the place where I needed to be and a young doctor removed the stitches. The only downside is that I have to continue using my crutches to walk until at least April 6th, then switch to using only one of them. I have truly come to loathe those crutches.
Taxis were lined up in front of the hospital and I chose to walk the long way around the outside of the hospital, rather than through it, to get a taxi to take me home. As I passed the entrance to the emergency room, I saw exhausted doctors and nurses sneaking out to have a smoke.
So many people are working from home that many are experiencing slow internet connections, while others have already used up all of their monthly data plans. I am sharing my internet network with my neighbor across the hall, another teacher, so she can continue teaching online because she has no more data until April 1st on her plan.
I can hear my next door neighbor practicing new songs on his saxophone for his nightly 8 pm neighborhood recitals. He’s actually not bad, thank God! If he were horrible, things could get really ugly with me stuck inside having to listen to it.
We are not yet half way through our 30 days of lock down and the government appears to now be discussing two scenarios: 1) the possibility of extending the lock down, and 2) if it is not extended, how it will let us go back to normal life, or should I say “the new normal”. It sounds like it will be a gradual lifting of the lock down, with certain types of businesses allowed to open again and additional reasons given to us that allow us to leave our homes. I haven’t read any concrete details, but at least the government is starting to talk about life after lock down, which is a good thing. Until now, it has felt like we are all hunkered down trying to wait out a bombing attack and all we could think about was just surviving, but nothing more.
Dispatches From Madrid 