Week 97

View from the Houseboats

Saturday morning we woke up to a tsunami advisory, a result of a devastating underwater volcano eruption in Tonga. The potential importance of this didn’t register as we made waffles (and sent Theo to my mother’s so he’d stop swinging a stuffed iguana in circles in the kitchen) until we saw a neighbor bringing valuables to their car and heard the evacuation sirens from East Bay (granted, we didn’t realize what they were at the time).

Instead of eating the waffles, we scrambled to assemble bags in case of evacuation. We brought our bikes upstairs from the “basement” because the waves were scheduled to hit us near high tide and potentially be a foot higher than our highest tides – if our ropes were not tied properly (plausible) our bow could have been towed under and flooded. Or we could have lost our connection to the dock (and therefore electricity, internet, sewage, etc).

Theo managed to pack all his stuffies and pajamas in a very efficient 3 minutes and then got a bit overwhelmed. I gave him big hugs, reassured him, and recruited him to pick nasturtiums from our pot out front to put on our waffles. We kept chatting with neighbors as we did all this, trying to figure out if we should stay or needed to evacuate, and were reassured.

We ate our tsunami waffles, then drank our coffee with the neighbors outside, measuring the duration and height of the water changes. Ultimately, it looked and felt like a series of mini-tides, changing a foot or two every 10-30 minutes, and continued much of the day. The only damage was our exhaustion as adrenaline subsided. Theo and I rewatched Encanto a few times (he’s memorized all of Bruno’s lines) that afternoon.

This week has felt similar – an series of unsettling mini-tides of frustration. COVID has visited the households of several friends and colleagues with kids under 5 (and for the rest of us, McSweeny’s articles have been a little too accurate). Two more classrooms at our daycare have closed. I’ve got some cold that’s given me a massive sinus headache all week but luckily negative PCR and antigen tests. The news is full of hate crime and antisemitism and blocked voting rights – I’ve taken social media apps off my phone again – which feels like ostriching but is also needed to reduce my reactivity right now. I’ve been encountering setbacks on multiple projects in a short time frame and am impatient with my ongoing minimal tolerance for challenges.

All I can do is keep returning to what seems to help me function amid chaos: extra sleep, hydration, lowered expectations, setting small goals based on time-sensitivity and cognitive load, and keeping energy directed where it’s flowing rather than where halting.

Gratitude

• A slew of sunny days

• Friends to bemoan the state of the world with

• Having a therapist

• Coffee deliveries by Sam in the middle of meetings

• The ability to get hugs on demand throughout the workday

• Theo’s ongoing creativity, this week about cheetahs (he’s drawn a cheetah walkie talkie and mask at school, and has a plan to help a mom cheetah with her cubs)

Small accomplishments from the week (the result of my small goals)

• Wellness: went to bed at 8 pm 4 nights, meditated 1x

• First author: prepared slides for a WIP

• Service: wrote a letter of support for a colleague’s promotion

Interesting things on the internet  

(also known as “tabs of my browser” or “things I bookmarked on Twitter to read later”)

• COVID parenting has passed the point of absurdity

• Why Women Physicians are Quitting

• Compassionate silence in the patient-clinician encounter

• A National Strategy for the “New Normal” of Life with COVID

• Impressively fast study & preprint re: US adult preferences for allocation of free COVID tests

• Essay by a neurologist diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia

• Power, Silence, And Debriefing: Hidden Harms When Palliative Teams Encounter Racism

• A Racial Equity Framework for Assessing Health Policy