Spanish views from a small town

This new year is starting off the way last year ended, with illness everywhere. The good of it, is that most people are now vaccinated. The bad of it, is that the Omicron variant is now dominant, guaranteeing exploding contagion, even if most of it doesn't end up in the hospital. The further bad of it, is that after two years, we still haven't shored up our health system to withstand the shock. With the incredible numbers going up, we've been left more or less on our own. Protocall has changed, and I really have no idea what to do anymore if I suspect I've come down with Covid. Buy an antigen test at a pharmacy (if they have any)? Call my GP (if he or she answers)? Search for a special number that I have heard talked about (if it's still working)? Protocalls have changed because pharmacies can't keep enough antigen test kits on hand, and the labs are overwhelmed with the number of PCR's sent to test. Of course, knowing that Omicron was coming, nothing was do...

Last fall, the regional president of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, ordered the construction of a hospital specifically for Covid patients. She argued that Madrid needed a hospital that specialized in pandemics and other large emergencies, such as plane crashes. So, at a cost of 135 million euros (a tad more than the original 50 million that it was supposed to have cost), a warehouse was built. Because that is what it is, a warehouse. It has different sections that are compartmentalized, but most of them are open to the roof, high up in the distance. There are no operating theaters, no laundry, no kitchen. If a Covid patient needs emergency surgery for anything else, they have to be sent elsewhere. Laundry and food come from outside, private contractors, chosen by Ayuso, rather than picking the best offer. There have been complaints about food, with patients uploading to Twitter pictures of dishes that even my cats would turn their noses up at; strange looking broth, a tired tortilla on a bed o...

Last night was our first encounter with the hospital Emergency Room during the pandemic. Last week, my husband jumped the wrong way down from his company's truck, and his bad knee became swollen and tender. On Friday evening, since it wasn't better, we went to the local clinic after hours. He was given an anti-inflammatory medication and told to return if it didn't get better. Last night, it seemed worse, with his lower leg swollen and red, so we returned to the clinic. The same doctor was there, doing the night emergency visits, and she gave him a paper and told him to go to the E.R. at Santiago's Clinical Hospital to get it checked out. Our clinic may be new, but it has neither radiology nor blood lab. So, we drove up, paper from the doctor at the ready in case we were stopped when we reached the township of Teo, en route to Santiago and also quarantined. But there were no obvious green-blue lights, nor bright yellow reflective vests. In fact, I've never seen such...

Everyone has a routine. Everyone creates their own daily schedule, whether consciously or not. Get up at this hour, eat this for breakfast, leave the house at this hour, on Thursdays get a doughnut, Saturdays watch this program, etc. A routine helps cement our lives and anticipate what comes next. It gives us a sense of safety and control.  Sometimes, we feel stifled and want to break with our daily routine. So we go on vacation, or do things slightly differently, like go out to eat on Friday instead of Saturday. Even then, we create a new routine. It's extremely difficult to give in to total serendipity and do things on impulse for any period of time longer than one day. The first day of vacation can be serendipitous, but it sets the precedent for the second day, with a few variations inherent to the vacation itself.  Those are the pleasant changes in routine. Then there are the changes imposed by illness, hospitalization, and unemployment. It becomes demoralizing to have...

I am once again accompanying a family member in the hospital, because illness does not take into account the seasons nor the weather. From one hospital, the family member has been taken to another. This is all absolutely normal. There are three public hospitals in Santiago. One is the the Clinical Hospital, also a teaching hospital. Then there are two other small hospitals, the Provincial, also known as Conxo because of the neighborhood it’s in, and the Gil Casares, whoever he was. They take the overflow of admitted patients and also have outclinics for the able. The Clinical is about twenty years old, large and with modern fixtures. It replaced the original Hospital Xeral, the original building of which was opened in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, that old building is all that’s left of the Xeral. The others, which were built some years later, were demolished soon after the hospital was shut down. The building boom was at its height then. But the crisis arrived and no...

My father used to be strong and healthy. Used to be. I only remember him sick once in my childhood, when I was already a teenager. He also once had a broken foot, but that was it. But the work he did when he was a child, teenager, and young adult finally caught up with him; stonemason, breaking up stones and carving them. But without any protection, so all the stone dust finally settled in his lungs. What also caught up with him was a smoking habit of over three hundred cigarettes a week. I remember sitting on the floor in the darkened living room with only the bluish light from the black and white television making the smoke cloud glow. I would end up lying on the floor on my stomach to avoid the cloud which would hang lower as the evening progressed. I tried to escape from that cloud as a teenager by spending the evenings in my room with the door closed. The mother of a friend thought I was a smoker, and never quite believed me when I said it was my father. My clothes reeked like ...