We had righted the ship. The day team came on shortly after and they couldn’t believe that 1) we had finagled our therapy out of ad-hoc supplies, and 2) that it worked so well. But work it did and it gave us all hope. The patient still has a long way to go, but even with everything stacked against him we made progress. We made things better. And we were now motivated to keep up the good fight, to keep fighting this horrible, stupid virus and all the hell it’s caused us.

The photo above is of the day and night team during our shift change. One of my colleagues had a friend laminate a picture of herself so her patients could see what she looked like under her mask—very clever.

The next is a patient writing to me that he was “scared.” The next line is him writing 30 minutes later after I spent some time talking to and reassuring him. “The air is good now.” Funny, we didn’t “change the air.” We made no changes to his breathing machine and gave him no medications during that time. He just needed to know he wasn’t alone, I think.