I finished a few evening shifts in the hospital (I asked for more, but we’ll see what I get assigned). I felt very lucky that they went all right. The roughest edges of the disease are felt in the emergency room, the intensive care units. There the doctors and nurses, the techs and janitors and sitters and nursing assistants, are accompanied by death and near-death. The typical hospital ward, on other hand, is usually (now as in non-Covid times) marked by large stretches of rhythmic tedium punctuated by frantic activity. 
The “bio” wards (as the containment units for Covid patients are called) do have a different feel, a churchlike hush, a procession of hooded figures, anterooms to don protective equipment and chambers to doff them. But even there, it was such a comfort for me to participate in the ordinary rituals of seeing patients in the hospital: low-wattage pleasantries and jokes exchanged with people at the nurses’ station; rumors of snacks; gossip about which hospital executive did what to whom and why.
Yes, there is death all around these days. There is the woman almost ready for discharge, whose husband is dying in another hospital’s ICU. [Identifying details changed.] There are the dashboards with the latest Covid statistics, which I and other doctors check obsessively to no great benefit. There is the vast gulf between models and statistics, on the one hand, and lived experience, on the other. R-naught is simulated. Fear is palpable.
To be an embodied human being and to fill a role (a small role, piling pebble on pebble as Newton had it), was a true joy. Working in healthcare can be joyful. That it’s scary and dangerous for so many right now is a product of the disease, but also born of our rapacious institution.
Wearing the face shield felt like bearing a priestly breastplate. As insufficient as I am, I felt like a healer when I leaned close to a man who was hoarse from the breathing tube that was removed from his throat just yesterday. “Thank you so much doctor,” he rasped. “It was nice to meet you.”
It was nice to meet him, too. And I squeezed his hand just because I could.
