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embeanwrites · 4 years

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Finding Home Gavin Reed x Reader

Chapter 23

Masterlist

It took Gavin and me a total of 30 minutes to get dressed and head to the hospital my dad was at. I tried calling Connor in the car, but he didn’t answer, which caused me to worry even more.

Gavin was driving and he had one hand firmly on my leg that kept bouncing up and down. How did this happen? I kept asking myself as I stared out the window. I thought he was taking care of himself more. Why did this have to happen now? Right when things were getting better between us. Gavin pulled up to the hospital and stopped the car at the emergency room front doors.

“Go find Connor. I’ll park and catch up.” I nodded and jumped out of the car, practically running into the hospital. I followed the signs for the surgery waiting room. I looked through the door window and saw Connor sitting in a chair with his eyes forward. When I pushed the door open he quickly looked over and got up. I ran to him and hugged him tightly, trying not to cry. He held me equally as tight.

“What happened?” My voice was raspy, while my mind was racing the rest of my body was still trying to wake up.

“He got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and I heard the glass drop from my room. I called the ambulance right away. They’re performing an atherectomy right now.” He pulled out of the hug and I reluctantly let go of him.

“Have…” I paused trying to stop myself from crying. “Have the doctors given you any updates?” I heard the door open again and in a second Gavin’s arms were around me. I grabbed his hands and held them tightly, welcoming the warmth and comfort. I noticed my hands were shaking, so I gripped his hands tighter in an attempt to steady them.

“No, nothing yet. I have only been here for an hour. The surgery takes about two and recovery is about three hours, but that’s according to averages. I don’t know if it will be shorter or longer.” I nodded. “I didn’t mean to make you rush here. Humans need sleep, (Y/n). You can go home and I can call you the moment I get any update.” Connor said softly, I quickly shook my head.

“No, I’m staying here with you.” He started to argue. “Connor, I’m not budging on this.” I untangled myself from Gavin and turned to look at him. I gently took my hands and cupped his cheeks, running my thumbs across his stubble. “Gavin, you have work in a couple of hours, you should go home and get some rest.”

“I’m staying with you for as long as I can. I’ve run on less sleep before.” He put his hands over mine and gently pulled them down. He squeezed my hands and I nodded, grateful he was willing to stay. Connor sat back down and I sat next to him. I grabbed both of their hands and held them.

I woke up still in the waiting room. I must have fallen asleep at some point. Groaning, I sat up and wiped my mouth. I looked over at Connor.

“Oh my god, Connor. I’m so sorry I drooled on you. You should’ve woken me up.” I looked over to my left where Gavin had been.

“He had to get to the precinct. We both decided it would be best not to wake you.” I nodded and yawned. “There have been no updates, but I expect we will hear something soon.” I laid my head back on Connor’s shoulder.

“Are you scared?” I asked softly.

“The surgery has a high survival rate and the ambulance got to the house in under five minutes. Despite those reassuring facts, I still find myself worried.” Connor whispered. I noticed his LED for the first time since arriving. It was red.

“He’s strong, survived a lot. This won’t be any different.” I tried to reassure him, but I knew he could tell I was equally worried.

Another half-hour passed before a doctor finally came to talk to us. Both us stood up and met him halfway. I had my arm wrapped around Connor’s to keep myself from shaking too much.

“Ma’am, are you a part of the Anderson family?”

“Yes, we’re both his kids,” I answered quickly, the doctor gave Connor’s LED a quick glance, but decided not to say anything.

“He got here just in time. The surgery took longer than expected, but there were no major complications. He’s in recovery now.”

“Can we see him?” I asked.

“He’s resting right now. He’ll be in recovery for a couple of hours and then he’ll be moved to an inpatient room. I can have one of the nurses come to get you when he’s been moved.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Connor said. He gave us a tightlipped smile and walked away. We both sat back down. I felt exhausted but relieved. “Maybe you should go home and get some rest.” I shook my head and pulled out my phone.

“No, I’m not leaving.” I went to my email and sent my students an email.

Hi everyone,

Due to a family emergency, we will not be meeting in person on Tuesday. Instead, I am going to post a movie, and then on Thursday, we will discuss how the themes of the movie apply to what we are learning. Don’t worry, the film’s target audience was kids so we should have no problem discussing it. If you’d like to get ahead the film is “The Iron Giant.”

I will see you all on Thursday,

Dr. (L/n)

I decided to send Gavin an update text while I was on my phone.

Dad’s in recovery, the surgery went well. We’ll be able to see him in a couple of hours.

thats good. how r u feeling

Tired and worried. I canceled my class on Tuesday.

im going to talk to fowler, see if i can get time off

You don’t have to.

i know

on a case, ill stop by on my lunch break text me the rm #

Okay, stay safe

I took a deep breath and looked at Connor, his LED was still red.

“Have you told Fowler?” Connor remained to look forward.

“Yes, I alerted him last night. He put us both on leave so I can stay with Hank while he recovers. Nines has also offered to help cover our cases.” I nodded.

“I'll be there for him too, you don’t have to do this alone. My class is only two days a week and I can do my research from home.”

“I appreciate that, (Y/n).” Connor gently reached over and held my hand, I gave him a small smile and squeezed his hand, hoping to show him that he’s truly not alone in this.

We both sat in silence waiting for the nurse to come get us. After what felt like 10 hours she finally came over and led us to his room.

It was weird seeing dad in a hospital bed. It reminded me of my mom. When she was sick I got so desensitized to hospitals. We were in and out so often that it almost became a second home, a lot of the nurses even knew my name and kept up with my life. However, being here now makes it feel like the first time all over again. I hadn’t realized I had still been holding Connor’s hand until he gave me a light squeeze. Dad looked to be waking up.

“Hey Dad,” I said softly, letting go of Connor’s hand to sit in one of the chairs near him. I reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

“Hey kids,” Dad said hoarsely. “Sorry for scaring you two.” I shook my head back and forth quickly, afraid if I tried talking I would start crying again. I looked up at Connor who took the seat across from me.

“We’re just glad you’re okay, Hank,” Connor said softly.

“Connor, I think we’re pass you calling me Hank.”

“We’re just glad you’re okay...dad.” The three of us smiled and my dad gave a light chuckle.

I’ve been staying at the house for about two weeks now. I had only seen Gavin briefly on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he would stop by my office on his lunch break to check in on me. I can tell that everyone around me was walking on eggshells, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I felt as if I was coasting and I couldn’t seem to break out. Gavin was being extremely understanding of this whole situation. He’d even sent flowers to my office and some flowers to my dad. He also sent a bottle of whiskey that Connor immediately confiscated.

Connor ended up giving up his “room” so I could sleep there while I was helping him with dad. I tried to talk him out of it, but all he really used it for was to store clothes since he didn’t need sleep. He didn’t mind going into stasis on the couch. Connor seemed grateful that I stayed around to relieve some of the burden, besides it was nice being able to spend time with just Connor. I also think dad appreciated me being here to stop Connor from going crazy about his health and what he was eating. I did agree to an extent, but blanched chicken breast with no seasoning, not even a little bit of salt, is crazy.

Connor and I were sitting on the couch watching some forensics show, that Connor enjoyed picking apart, while dad was resting in the other room. He seemed to be doing a lot better, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back to my apartment except to get clean clothes.

do u wanna come over tonight? connor can handle taking care of ur dad for one night

I don’t know, I have a phone interview tomorrow for my research.

tomorrows saturday

I know, but I’m interviewing Chris and that’s his day off.

u can do a phone interview from my house tho

i know u dont want to leave him yet but its one night and u need a break

ask connor he agrees with me

I bit my lip and looked up at Connor. His brows were furrowed as he rolled his eyes at something the “detective” said on tv. I kicked him softly with my foot to get his attention.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked tentatively. Connor gave me a gentle look and a small smile. He turned towards me and folded his hands in his lap.

“I think a break is healthy, (Y/n). You only leave the house to go to your class and office hours. I can handle things here. Plus I’m sure you miss Gavin and he misses you.” He said softly. I groaned.

“I don’t like you and Gavin planning things behind my back.” He smiled.

“It’s for your own good. Just go out for one night and come back tomorrow, even if you two decide to just hang out at Gavin’s home. You need to take a break.”

“Just one night,” I whispered looking at my phone.

Pick me up in 30 minutes?

got it pipsqueak. nines is coming over too, something about not wanting to stay at the precinct all night again. is that ok?

Of course!

Some part of me did agree with Connor and Gavin. I was antsy in the house, but I was still worried about not being there when I’m needed. What if something else happened to dad while I was gone? What if Connor needed help and I wasn’t able to get back in time?

“You’re biting your thumb, (Y/n).” Connor’s voice broke through my thoughts and I moved my hand away from my mouth. Connor had begun calling me out whenever I was becoming overly anxious, which was both sweet and annoying.

“Sorry, nerves.” I gave him a wobbly smile.

“He will be fine. I know you’re worried, but I promise I will contact you the moment I fear something may be wrong. He’s been doing really well, it won’t be long until he’s cleared to return to work for desk duty.” Connor put his hand on my shoulder and I nodded.

“I know you’re right. It’s just hard sometimes to turn off that part of my brain.” I gave a nervous chuckle and he nodded his head.

“You should pack a bag, I’m assuming Gavin will be here soon?” I laughed.

“Wow, you sure are in a rush to get rid of me!” Connor rolled his eyes and shook his head. I stood up and stretched.

“Self-care is important, (Y/n).” I waved him off as I headed towards Connor’s room. Grabbing my backpack I filled it with some clothes, a laptop, and my phone charger. I sat down on the bed and fiddled with my bag. The room was just as bare as last time. Once dad was better I wanted to take Connor shopping so he could make the room more his. It would be interesting to see what he would pick out.

Snapping out of my thoughts I put on my backpack and walked back to where Connor was watching tv. I knelt down and started petting Sumo. He was lazing on top of Connor’s feet. I looked up at Connor, he was still entranced by the tv.

“Hey, Con?” I heard him hum. “Once things calm down do you want to go shopping for some decorations for your room? To make it more...you.” He glanced down at me with a small smile.

“I think that could be fun.” I smiled back at him. Things between us felt so natural as a brother and sister duo. Sometimes it felt like we grew up together, I guess for Connor’s case that wasn’t too far apart since he’s only been around for about a year.

“What kind of things do you like? Like what would you want in your room?” His brows furrowed for a moment, but it quickly turned into a smile.

“I would like a lava lamp.” I laughed abruptly, causing Sumo to jump a bit.

“A lava lamp? Connor why?” I said in between laughs, where had he even seen a lava lamp? His face flushed a light blue.

“They look cool. One of the characters in this show has one.” He responded sheepishly. I shook my head and let out another laugh.

“You are the biggest dork I’ve ever met.”

“You’re the one showing her students old movies because she thinks they’re underappreciated.” He teased back.

“Wow, look at you! You’re learning how not to be so uptight all the time.” He frowned.

“I’m better than Nines!” Connor crossed his arms across his chest and huffed in defiance.

“Well, you have had more time as a deviant than him. I’m sure he’ll pass you at some point.” Before Connor could respond my phone went off. “Ah, Gavin’s here. Are you sure you’ll be okay for the night? It’s not too late for me to cancel.” Connor’s expressions soften.

“Everything will be fine. I promise” I nodded and got up.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, text me updates?” I nervously fidgeted with the front door handle.

“Of course, (Y/n).” He gave me a reassuring smile. I took a deep breath and walked to Gavin’s car. Nines was already moving to the backseat, I briefly wondered if he had decided to do that on his own or if Gavin had asked him. Gavin smiled and waved at me. It really had been a while since we’ve relaxed together. I smiled back and got into the car.

“Hey, pipsqueak.” Gavin greeted me, leaning over to give me a kiss on the check.

“Hi Gavin, hi Nines.”

“Hello (Y/n). Thank you for letting me spend some time with you two. I appreciate the break from the precinct.” I nodded, as Gavin started driving.

“Do you always stay at the precinct?” I asked, turning around to look at him. He was sitting up straight with his hands in his lap. As always he looked overly formal.

“Yes, there has been an android apartment complex go up and I have been thinking about getting an apartment there, but as of right now I am perfectly content at the precinct.”

“Except tonight.” I teased, for a brief second his LED flashed yellow and then back to a calm blue.

“If I’m honest I also wanted to check up on you and make sure you’ve been taking care of yourself.” I groaned and closed my eyes.

“Great now I have two overbearing androids worrying about me.” Gavin let out a small chuckle.

“Would you really want it any other way?” Gavin asked. I could hear the smirk in his voice.

“No, I wouldn’t,” I responded softly.

#gavin reed x reader #gavin reed #detroit become human #dbh #rk800connor #Connor dbh #hank anderson #x reader

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coppicefics · 3 years

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Masked Omens: Week Five

[Image Description: Image 1 - A simple rendition of the Masked Singer UK logo, a golden mask with colourful fragments flying off of it. The mask has a golden halo and a golden devil tail protruding from either side. Below, gold text reads ‘Masked Omens’.

Image 2 - A page from the Entertainment section of the Capital Herald, dated Saturday, 23rd January 2021. Full image description and transcript below cut. End ID.]

Read the fic here!

The Capital Herald - Saturday, 23rd January 2021 Entertainment, page 15

Top section: Stream of Consciousness: Shows To Make You Think A whole host of great documentaries, old and new, have just been added to streaming services Who doesn't love a good documentary? You can learn all sorts of things, and you don't have to do any of the research for yourself. Over the last couple of weeks, loads of people seem to have been tuning into the wealth of documentaries available on various streaming services; here are a few I particularly enjoyed. Green Planet (2020) is not your standard nature documentary; while there are some extremely cute shots of animals (including gorillas, whales, and giant squid) the main focus is on sustainable practices people are experimenting with in all sorts of industries and contexts, and the way they allow local wildlife to flourish. It's thought-provoking stuff. We're As Folk (2019) takes a look at the contemporary folk movement, interviewing figures from the second British revival right through to the present day; contributors include Seth Lakeman, Frank Turner, Anathema and Bellowhead. With folk-festival anecdotes aplenty, the documentary explores the intricacies of the genre and culminates in all the contributors performing a once-in-a-lifetime rendition of 'She Moved Through The Fair'. Gadget If You Can (2015) might be a little outdated now, but that's what makes it such a compelling watch. From watches that tell the time in 21 capital cities concurrently to hoverboards that actually, well, hover, this is a fascinating look at the new devices that seemed to be just on the horizon when it was released more than five years ago. Some have since appeared; some remain pipedreams. All are interesting! Making Fast Friends (2012) is the oldest documentary on this list, and the narrowest in scope. It was released alongside the SEGA charity single 'Fast Friends' and gives us a behind the scenes look at what happened when Sonic the Hedgehog teamed up with a whole bunch of children's TV presenters to make the record. Although largely factual in nature, it does also feature animated 'interviews' with Sonic and Knuckles, so it's entirely suitable for watching with your family. And P-White fans, in particular, will not want to miss this a second time around. A War Without War (2021), by contrast, is both up-to-the-minute and extremely disturbing to watch. It is composed of a mixture of expert analysis of the situation developing on the ground in Celestan and grim footage allegedly smuggled out of the country by fleeing residents. Moreover, with more episodes promised, it forces the viewer to acknowledge what is happening as the country breaks apart, and asks us the difficult question: can you have a war without war? Dinosaurs: The Punchline (2013) is frequently mistaken for a mockumentary thanks to its tongue-in-cheek title. It is, in fact, a thoughtful exploration of how religious groups respond to apparent conflicts between scientific facts and the tenets of their faith. Without shying away from the realities of science as we know it, this film takes a surprisingly sensitive approach to investigating how science and religion intersect in the modern world. By The Numbers (2018) looks back at the history of the televised National Lottery, along with its competitors on other channels and the entertainment chosen to appear directly after it. Featuring clips and interviews with stars from Marjorie Potts aka Telepathic Tracy, whose show aired after the draw for over a decade, to Marvin O. Bagman, whose sports-based quiz show had, at the time of the documentary’s release, the corresponding Channel 4 slot. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is very entertaining. CITRON DEUX-CHEVAL Have I missed any amazing documentaries you think I should be talking about? Drop me an email at [email protected] or leave a comment on our website and I might feature your recommendations in a future issue.

Centre left: Memory Lane: Kilcridhe Now there’s a vicar I’d have loved to meet at the altar Ask any male-attracted person of a certain age – well, my age and up, really – if they remember Kilcridhe, and you'll be met with flushed cheeks and a glassy expression. We remember Kilcridhe, all right – or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we remember Father Jacob MacCleod. It's hard to believe that heartthrob Jacob was Anthony Crowley's first major role on television, and harder still to believe that he was also one of his last. The show ran for only two six-episode series, between 2005 and 2006, but in those twelve hours I think it's fair to say a fair few of us fell irrevocably in love. Kilcridhe was named for the fictitious Scottish village where it was set, and largely revolved around the goings-on of the local church and its new minister. Much of the series' drama centred around Father MacCleod's ongoing attempts to fill the pews, which saw him trying everything from hosting a bake sale – for which he ended up baking everything himself – to arranging a community talent show, with predictably bizarre results. But during the course of these adventures, each episode also introduced us to one or more of Kilcridhe's residents. We got a glimpse into the little struggles and joys of their lives – most of which quickly became Jacob's struggles and joys, too. My main memory of this show is that it was pretty. Not just Jacob, but everything about it, from the location they chose for the exterior shots, to the tone added in post-production; everything was just slightly more saturated and colourful than real life, not enough to be jarring but enough to give the whole thing a strangely dreamlike feel. In fact, as Jacob remarked as he prepared to leave for Edinburgh at the end of series one (not knowing if he would return or if the show would be cancelled), “leaving [Kilcridhe] feels like waking from a dream, like going back to reality somehow”. It was, perhaps, for the best that Kilcridhe was cancelled after only two series. Shows originally envisioned as limited series rarely keep their charm past a second extension, and the central actor was to encounter personal problems not long after the end of the show. That's not to say that a revival couldn't work, perhaps with a completely new protagonist. But Father Jacob MacCleod lives on in the hearts of his many fans, smiling that enigmatic smile of his, and when that's not enough, there's always online fanfiction. So much fanfiction. SARAH JEUNE Memory Lane is our regular feature, looking back at the books, shows and films of yesteryear through a nostalgic lens. Do you miss something you’d like to see featured? Just send the show name (plus channel and airdates if you know them) in an email to: [email protected] - your prayers might just be answered!

Centre right: Correspondent’s Corner Stop talking about it Anathema is making waves again as she does the talk-show circuit to promote her new album, Narrative Devices. It's a very pretty album from a very lovely girl, but she does keep getting hung up on one point. Every time somebody describes her music as country, she interrupts to tell them it's folk. Well, I'm no music expert, but even I know that folk is a very European genre, and the United States' equivalent is country, or country and western music, to give it its full name, and to continue to argue to the contrary is simply courting controversy for controversy's sake. It is unbecoming of a young lady – even, or perhaps especially, a young lady with Anathema's obvious talent – to continue to argue with her elders on the subject, and even to correct the likes of Graham Norton and Giles Brandreth. These sage bastions of broadcasting deserve more respect, and they couldn't be more gracious in accepting their 'mistake'. But surely a young musician in the first flush of success should take the time to learn about what she's actually doing? It doesn't seem very much to ask. It’s not entirely her fault, of course; the youth of today are given far too much freedom by their parents and, on top of that, are often propelled to disproportionate success with no chance to prepare for it. Is it any wonder that it all goes to their heads? But there is no excuse for not making an effort to keep their egos in check and defer to their betters on matters of terminology and best practice. Naturally, we all hope that Anathema will enjoy a long and successful career making the music she enjoys the most and , more importantly, music we can all enjoy too. And I also hope that she will, eventually, acquire the humility so rarely found in young people these days and accept that she does not always know best. If she listens to the counsel of older and wiser heads than hers, she might even learn something. ANDY SANDALPHON What can’t they do? If there's one thing that's becoming apparent with every passing week of The Masked Singer UK, it's that celebrities are no longer to content to stay in their lane. No, these multi-talented marvels seem determined to push themselves to the limit in every possible field. So far, we’ve seen sergeants become singers, rugby players become rockers, doctors become divas and authors become, er, audible. And with weeks still to go in this competition, we still have eight masked celebrities to guess. Eight people whose day jobs probably don’t include getting on stage and belting out pop standards are still waiting to impress us with talents that aren’t even their thing. I mean, if I could sing and dance like the contestants on the show, you can bet your life I’d be making a living from it. It would be my number one talent, and I’d be rubbish at anything else, because most of us only get one main skill. Not these jammy gits, though. For them, this is a sideline. It's not just The Masked Singer, of course – from proving their talent for trivia on Pointless Celebrities and their wordplay wisdom on Celebrity Catchphrase to demonstrating their culinary qualities on Celebrity Masterchef and The Great Celebrity Bake Off, it seems that wherever you look someone is adding a new string to their bow. Being a phenomenally talented actor, singer, or footballer is all well and good, but more and more stars are now keen to show us that they really can do anything and everything. And why shouldn't they? It's phenomenally entertaining television to watch. And for those of us who sometimes feel inadequate compared to our famous idols, it can be very reassuring to watch, for example, a comedian weeping into his cupcake mix on Bake Off or an Oscar nominee fall on her face on Dancing On Ice. When they do well, it's amazing; when they do badly, it's life-affirming. That said, I've been blown away by the talent of the contestants on The Masked Singer this series. It's so inspirational, in fact, that I might take up watercolours. EDWARD BIGGS Bottom right (in blue box): Citron’s Quick Picks Fast favourites from Citron Deux-Cheval Look: Sea Change by Hastur LaVista There's never been a journey to to the top quite like P-White's. This authorised biography charts a course from children's presenter to global superstar through interviews, pictures and anecdotes. While the research sometimes seems a little slapdash, the story at the heart of the book is more than interesting enough to hold it together. And since it's authorised, Maputi themself has contributed plenty of private insights and observations. [Image description: A book, its cover featuring a blue-green gradient with black, dripping lines spilling across it. The title reads ‘Sea Change’. End ID.] Listen: Narrative Devices by Anathema Anathema's first album was well-received both within the folk community and beyond it. Now her second album, backed up by an obvious increase in resources, looks set to enjoy similar mainstream success, and deservedly so. The theme this time seems to be the act of telling stories, but it's also a story in itself. You'll have heard the singles, but it takes on new meaning when you play it in order! [Image description: An album cover featuring hands holding a book. The words “Anathema” and “Narrative Devices” are printed on it. End ID.] Laugh: Newtral Stance by AutoTuna on YouTube It's not the first time beleaguered commentator Newton Pulsifer has had his words edited into a supercut. It's not even the first time his frequent disagreements with the VAR have been autotuned – including by YouTube user AutoTuna. But this new edition adds an extra dimension in the form of a flat, robotic voice duetting – and duelling – with the frustrated human, taking the hilarity to a whole new level! [Image description: A screenshot of a young woman wearing a call centre headset (specifically, the woman who cold-calls Crowley in Good Omens and gets Hastur instead). She looks extremely bored. End ID.]

Advertisement, bottom right: IS THIS YOUR CARD? [Image Description: Two business cards with a white-to-yellow gradient, overlapping so that they are slightly fanned out. Printed on the left-hand side of each is ‘This is to certify The Amazing [blank] as a [blank] training under Mr A.Z. Fell.‘ The one behind is filled in with ‘Your Name-’ and ‘Sorcer-’. The front card is filled in in a more child-friendly font, with ‘Your Name Here’ and ‘Junior Magician’. Below this is space for a start and expiry date, filled in with ‘08/20′ and ‘08/21′ respectively. On the right-hand side of the card, a logo shows a rabbit emerging from an upturned top hat, and below it are the words ‘Harry’s Junior Magic Academy’. The word ‘Junior’ is in the same child-friendly font as before. End ID.] IT COULD BE. Membership is open to under 12s and 13-18 year-olds at www.harrys-magic.com

End of transcript.

#masked omens #mo week five #very much fake news #good omens fic

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Coronavirus Live Updates: Beijing Sets Stringent New Quarantine Rules https://nyti.ms/2P8fTVJ

Coronavirus Live Updates: Beijing Sets Stringent New Quarantine Rules

The mandate came as the Chinese government disclosed that hundreds of medical workers who had been helping combat the coronavirus outbreak had become infected and at least six had died.

RIGHT NOW: Beijing demands that all who enter its boundaries isolate themselves for 14 days, or “be held accountable according to law.”

READ UPDATES IN CHINESE: 新冠病毒疫情最新消息汇总

Here’s what you need to know:

Seeking to protect the city from a major outbreak, Beijing imposes new quarantine rules.

Chinese state-run television announced on its website on Friday evening that everyone returning to Beijing would be required to isolate themselves for 14 days.

Anyone who does not comply “shall be held accountable according to law,” according to a text of the order released by state television. The order was issued by a Communist Party “leading group” at the municipal level, not the national Communist Party.

It was the latest sign that China’s leaders were still struggling to set the right balance between restarting the economy and continuing to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the country’s top officials met and issued orders that included a mandate to help people to return to workplaces from their hometowns. Tens of millions had gone home to celebrate Lunar New Year holidays before the government acknowledged the seriousness of the epidemic. They have faced local government checkpoints on the way back to work and then lengthy quarantines upon their return to big cities.

But while national leaders may be worried that travel restrictions and quarantines may be preventing companies from finding enough workers to resume full production, that did not stop Beijing municipal leaders from further tightening controls on Friday evening in the city.

The policy may reduce the chances that people returning from the hinterlands could infect the country’s elite.

The new rules also require those returning to the city to give advance warning of their arrival to the authorities in their residential area. China maintained extensive controls on citizens’ movements under Mao, and some of the institutions and rules from that period have been re-emerging lately.

Even before Beijing issued its new rules, so-called neighborhood committees had been playing an increasingly assertive role across the country, including in Shanghai. They have been demanding that recent returnees isolate themselves for 14 days upon arrival, venturing out for little except food.

On the front lines of China’s war against the coronavirus, doctors face grave risks.

In the hospital where Yu Yajie works, nurses, doctors and other medical professionals fighting the new coronavirus have also been fighting dire shortages. They have used tape to patch up battered protective masks, repeatedly reused goggles meant for one-time use, and wrapped their shoes in plastic bags for lack of specialized coverings.

Ms. Yu is now lying at home, feverish and fearful that she has been infected with the virus. She and other employees at the hospital said a lack of effective protective wear had left medical workers like her vulnerable in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the epidemic that has engulfed this region.

“There are risks — there simply aren’t enough resources,” Ms. Yu, an administrator at Wuhan Central Hospital, said in a brief telephone interview, adding that she was too weak to speak at length.

Chinese medical workers at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus epidemic are often becoming its victims, in part because of government missteps and logistical hurdles.

The strength — or vulnerability — of China’s medical workers could shape how well the Communist Party weathers its worst political crisis in years. Li Wenliang, a doctor, died from the coronavirus last week, after he had been punished by the police for warning friends of the outbreak. His death ignited a wave of fury in China, where he was lionized as a medical martyr to officials who put political control ahead of health.

[THE TOLL ON MEDICAL WORKERS: SEE BELOW: The Chinese government has for the first time disclosed the toll the outbreak was taking on hospital employees.]

More Americans could be tested for coronavirus.

Health officials in the United States will begin testing some people with flulike symptoms for infection with the coronavirus.

Patients in five cities will be tested if their flu tests are negative, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said at a news briefing on Friday.

Health officials will use a nationwide surveillance network already set up to track influenza, she said. The five cities are Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

“We need to be prepared for the possibility it will spread,” Dr. Messonnier said.

So far, there have been 15 coronavirus cases in the United States.

Two bloggers who criticized China’s response to the virus have vanished from Wuhan.

They had recorded dozens of videos from Wuhan, streaming unfiltered and often heartbreaking images from the center of the outbreak. Long lines outside hospitals. Feeble patients. Agonized relatives.

Now, two video bloggers whose dispatches from the heart of the outbreak showed fear, grief and dissatisfaction with the government have gone silent.

Videos made by Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi were another manifestation of the dissatisfaction that the government’s handling of the outbreak has unleashed among ordinary Chinese citizens.

A 40-minute video about the coronavirus outbreak propelled Mr. Fang, a local clothing salesman, to internet fame. Then, less than two weeks later, he disappeared.

Friends and family of Mr. Chen, a lawyer from eastern China, said they believed he had been forcibly quarantined.

[ NO LONGER SILENT: The videos reflected a growing call for free speech in China in recent Weeks. SEE BELOW]

Africa has its first confirmed coronavirus case.

The first coronavirus case on the African continent was reported in Egypt on Saturday when the Egyptian health ministry reported that an infected person had been placed in isolation in a hospital.

In a statement, the ministry said the patient was a foreigner but did not specify a nationality. The World Health Organization in Egypt said on Twitter that the person was carrying the virus but had not shown any symptoms.

Several African countries have stepped up screening at airports and other ports of entry in recent weeks over fears that nations with weak health care systems, especially those already battling diseases like malaria and ebola, are particularly vulnerable.

Sixteen countries have the capacity to test for the coronavirus and another 20 will come online by Feb. 20, Dr. John Nkengasong, director of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Friday.

China and Africa have become intertwined in the last two decades as China has expanded its political, economic, and military ties to Africa, attracting large numbers of Chinese workers to the continent and increasing the risk of the virus spreading there.

[ ANGST IN AFRICA: Experts worry that the coronavirus outbreak could overrun already-strained health systems in Africa. SEE WEBSITE or My TIMELINE]

As the Summer Olympics in Japan approaches, Coronavirus concerns inject uncertainty.

International Olympic Committee officials on Friday said that the Summer Games in Tokyo would go on as planned, citing discussions with the World Health Organization.

“Certainly the advice we have received externally from the W.H.O. is that there is no case for any contingency plans or canceling the games or moving the games,” John Coates, the head of an I.O.C. inspection team, told reporters. Asked if he was “100 percent confident” that the Games would take place, Mr. Coates said “Yes.”

A spokesman for the World Health Organization said in an emailed statement that the organization was not advising that large gatherings be canceled.

Dr. Michael Ryan, the head of the W.H.O.’s Health Emergencies Program, told reporters at a briefing on Friday that experts were monitoring the situation and no final guidance had been given on the matter.

“It’s not the role of W.H.O. to call off or not call off any event,” Mr. Ryan said, adding that the organization was offering technical advice about risk assessment and response measures.

The Games are scheduled to take place between July 24 and Aug. 9 this summer in Japan, the country that has endured the largest number of coronavirus cases outside China — over 250, including 218 aboard a cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama. On Thursday, Japanese authorities announced the country’s first death of a patient who had contracted the virus.

And on Friday, Japan’s health ministry announced that a local government official who earlier this week helped transfer patients with the coronavirus from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Most of the 3,400 anxious passengers and crew of the ship remain onboard in quarantine. More are getting sick — possibly infecting one another — and health officials have raised the possibility of prolonging the quarantine, now set to expire next Wednesday.

The government official, a man in his thirties, helped transfer infected patients from the cruise ship on Monday afternoon, the health ministry said in a statement. The transportation process took about 40 minutes and the man was wearing goggles and a mask.

(SEE MY TIMELINE FOR THE PREVIOUS UPDATES FOR TODAY.)

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China’s Doctors, Fighting the Coronavirus, Beg for Masks

Confronting a viral epidemic with a scant supply of protective equipment, more than 1,700 Chinese medical workers have already been infected, and six have died.

By Chris Buckley, Sui-Lee Wee and Amy Qin | Published Feb. 14, 2020 Updated 1:33 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 14, 2020 |

WUHAN, China — In the hospital where Yu Yajie works, nurses, doctors and other medical professionals fighting the new coronavirus have also been fighting dire shortages. They have used tape to patch up battered protective masks, repeatedly reused goggles meant for one-time use, and wrapped their shoes in plastic bags for lack of specialized coverings.

Ms. Yu is now lying at home, feverish and fearful that she has been infected with the virus. She and other employees at the hospital said a lack of protective wear had left medical workers like her vulnerable in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the epidemic that has engulfed this region.

Chinese medical workers at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus epidemic are often becoming its victims, partly because of government missteps and logistical hurdles.

After the virus emerged in Wuhan late last year, city leaders played down its risks, so doctors didn’t take precautions. When the outbreak could no longer be ignored, officials imposed a lockdown on Wuhan that expanded across the surrounding Hubei Province and then swathes of China. The vast travel cordons may have slowed the epidemic, but have also slowed deliveries into Hubei, leaving medical workers short of protective wear.

On Friday, the Chinese government for the first time disclosed the toll the outbreak was taking on hospital employees: 1,716 medical workers had contracted the virus, including 1,502 in Wuhan, and six had died.

The strength — or vulnerability — of China’s medical workers could shape how well the Communist Party weathers its worst political crisis in years. Li Wenliang, a doctor, died from the coronavirus last week, after he had been punished by the police for warning friends of the outbreak. His death ignited fury in China, where he was lionized as a medical martyr to officials who put political control ahead of health.

“Of course I’m nervous about getting infected,” said Cai Yi, head of the division of pain management at Wuhan Central Hospital, the same hospital where Dr. Li had worked. “But if we let ourselves be nervous, then what would happen to the people?”

China’s president and Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, has praised hospital workers in Hubei as heroes, and mobilized the country in a “people’s war” against the coronavirus. But hospital workers in Wuhan said they often felt frustrated and alone.

Some have scrambled to buy protective gear with their own money, begged from friends, or relied on donations from other parts of China and abroad. Others have avoided eating and drinking for long stretches because going to the toilet meant discarding safety gowns that they would not be able to replace. Younger staff are assigned to the more critical cases, with the expectation that if they get sick they would be more likely to recover.

Even as Chinese officials disclosed how many medical workers had been sickened and killed by the virus, key questions remain, experts said, including how the workers became infected and whether the rate of transmission was slowing. Such omissions could make it more difficult for other countries to assess and reduce their own risks.

“Clearly it would have been useful for other parts of China who are beginning to struggle with this outbreak as well for the rest of the world to have these types of data as soon as possible,” said Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said it is seeking more information about the time period and circumstances surrounding the infections of health care workers.

“This is a critical piece of information, because health workers are the glue that holds the health system and outbreak response together,” Dr. Tedros said.

Doctors and other hospital workers have also come under pressure not to speak out. But many do, out of desperation.

“For the first time, I felt helpless confronting the system,” Chang Le, a doctor at Hankou Hospital in Wuhan, said in an online message pleading for more medical masks. His plea was deleted by the censors. “It’s only today that I’ve grasped just how hard it is for us front line medical workers.”

The Chinese government has acknowledged problems in medical supplies for Hubei, and repeatedly promised to accelerate deliveries.

Strains in medical supplies may have been unavoidable as the virus spread at a pace that seemed to catch the government off guard. But the sweeping restrictions across China to contain the virus also slowed production and delivery of much-needed medical equipment, said doctors, factory managers, and aid workers.

Pervasive road checks and travel restrictions have held up shipments. Factories have faced difficulty increasing production because workers and raw materials have been blocked by lockdowns. Local governments have hoarded supplies. China’s state-controlled Red Cross has dominated distribution of donations, creating a bottleneck that infuriated hospital employees.

With medical supplies so scarce, many health care workers in Wuhan also said they had to accept substandard gowns, gloves and masks. Outside the Wuhan Fourth Hospital, medical workers waited near a truck as a delivery man in a full-body medical suit handed down boxes of masks and gowns. One hospital worker explained that the gowns were not of a high enough grade to withstand a viral contagion.

“But this is all we could get,” she said. She declined to give her name. “We just have to accept what they send us.”

Life has become a scramble, many said: treating patients for much of the day; hunting for protective gear for the rest. The shortage has forced employees, like Dr. Chang, from the city’s hospitals to appeal for donations of N95 masks — a type of respirator best suited to guarding against viruses — and other personal protective equipment on Chinese social media sites.

Dr. Peng Zhiyong, 53, head of the department of critical care medicine at Wuhan University’s Zhongnan Hospital, said in an interview this week that his team was running dangerously low on full-body medical suits and masks. “We can only get one break during the entire day,” he said. “Just one, to drink water and eat. Because if you leave, you don’t have any new suits to get back into.”

The first time the authorities publicly acknowledged a problem with medical worker infections was on Jan. 20, when an official expert revealed that 14 had been infected by a single patient. Until the government released details on Friday, details were scattershot, emerging in studies and news reports.

Dr. Peng and other researchers wrote that 40 health care professionals at his hospital had been infected in January, a third of the cases included in a study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A 61-year-old doctor died nine days after contracting the virus from a patient, according to a report by the newspaper China Philanthropy Times.

Another doctor had started to show symptoms early last month, before medical professionals knew to take extra precautions, according to the state-run Health Times newspaper. He died this past Monday.

During the severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS outbreak of 2002-2003, infections of medical workers became a source of anger after the government suppressed information for months. These workers made up 15 percent of confirmed cases, according to an expert, Xu Dezhong, quoted by Xinhua, China’s official news agency. About 1 percent of the medical workers infected with SARS died.

The pleas from hospitals across Hubei have inspired an outpouring of donations from Chinese businesses, workers and charities. But the surge in demand for medical equipment has been hard for suppliers to meet, especially under the lockdown.

Officials in the city of Xiantao in Hubei at first told some companies making protective medical clothing and masks that their factories could not reopen until Feb. 14. An outcry followed, and the city’s officials relented on Monday, saying that 73 of the companies could resume operations.

The roads to Hubei are also full of hurdles. In theory, the government has created “green channels” to speed through trucks carrying masks, gowns and equipment. In practice, local officials and police can hold up journeys.

One truck driver recounted being stopped 14 times for body temperature checks when he set out from Wuhan to pick up medical supplies, The Beijing News, a state-run Chinese newspaper, reported.

Guo Fei, a 27-year-old entrepreneur who has been helping to buy and deliver supplies to hospitals in Xiaogan, a city in Hubei, said his team was held by the police for around eight hours in a neighboring province, Jiangxi, when they went there to pick up an order of hygienic gloves. The police seemed to be acting for local officials who wanted to retain the supplies for their area, he said.

“I can accept government controls,” he said, “but not local protectionism.”

Doctors also criticized bureaucracy for clogging up distribution. Many donations of medical supplies must be funneled through the Red Cross, and the organization — understaffed and overwhelmed — has struggled.

In a furious social media post, Dr. Chang, the doctor at the Hankou Hospital, described his experience trying to get 10,000 N95 respirator masks from the Red Cross. He was eventually given more than 9,000 masks of inferior quality, he said.

“I just wanted to cry,” he said at the end of his video message.

Premier Li Keqiang of China, who oversees a policy team for the crisis, said in early February that “unified national management” would help overcome equipment shortages.

Just a week later, China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top most council, said problems with insufficient beds, medical personnel and other medical resources persisted across Hubei. According to official data from the province, deliveries of high-quality masks and other items have accelerated in recent days.

The country’s health facilities are not only facing an acute shortage of personal protective equipment — they may also be using the wrong gear.

Health workers in China generally have been following the W.H.O.’s guidelines to use so-called “standard precautions” which include surgical masks, rather than more expensive N95 masks, to cover their mouths and noses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, has instructed health care providers to use N95s, which block out much smaller particles than surgical masks do.

Until conditions markedly improve, medical workers will still be forced to make hard adjustments. Dr. Cai, from Wuhan Central Hospital, said he has assigned younger medical workers to treat coronavirus patients to avoid endangering more seasoned employees. “To be honest, if older doctors get infected, their immune system is much weaker,” he said.

Dr. Peng of Zhongnan Hospital said more attention had to be paid to the fate of medical workers. “Because when the country doesn’t have any more medical workers, then what hope is there left?”

______

Sui-Lee Wee reported from Singapore. Elsie Chen contributed research from Wuhan. Roni Caryn Rabin contributed reporting from New York. Amber Wang, Wang Yiwei and Zoe Mou contributed research from Beijing.

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They Documented the Coronavirus Crisis in Wuhan. Then They Vanished.

Two video bloggers whose dispatches from the heart of the outbreak showed fear, grief and dissatisfaction with the government have gone silent.

By Vivian Wang | Published Feb. 14, 2020 Updated 6:16 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 14, 2020 |

HONG KONG — The beige van squatted outside of a Wuhan hospital, its side and back doors ajar. Fang Bin, a local clothing salesman, peered inside as he walked past. He groaned: “So many dead.” He counted five, six, seven, eight body bags. “This is too many.”

That moment, in a 40-minute video about the coronavirus outbreak that has devastated China, propelled Mr. Fang to internet fame. Then, less than two weeks later, he disappeared.

Days earlier, another prominent video blogger in Wuhan, Chen Qiushi, had also gone missing. Mr. Chen’s friends and family said they believed he had been forcibly quarantined.

Before their disappearances, Mr. Fang and Mr. Chen had recorded dozens of videos from Wuhan, streaming unfiltered and often heartbreaking images from the center of the outbreak. Long lines outside hospitals. Feeble patients. Agonized relatives.

The footage would have been striking anywhere. But it was especially so coming from inside China, where even mild criticism of the authorities is quickly scrubbed from the online record, and those responsible for it often punished.

The appetite for the videos reflects, in part, the shortage of independent news sources in China, where professional newspapers are tightly controlled by the authorities. Earlier this month, the state propaganda department deployed hundreds of journalists to reshape the narrative of the outbreak.

But the videos also reflected the growing call for free speech in China in recent weeks, as the coronavirus crisis has prompted criticism and introspection from unexpected corners across the country.

Several professional news organizations have produced incisive reports on the outbreak. A revolt against government censorship broke out on Chinese social media last week after the death of Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who had tried to warn of the virus before officials had acknowledged an outbreak.

Mr. Fang’s and Mr. Chen’s videos were another manifestation of the dissatisfaction that the government’s handling of the outbreak has unleashed among ordinary Chinese citizens.

“When suddenly there’s a crisis, they want to have access to a wider array of content and reporting,” said Sarah Cook, who studies Chinese media at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States.

The disappearance of the two men also underscores that the ruling Communist Party has no intention of loosening its grip on free speech.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said last month that officials needed to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.” While Chinese social media has overflowed with fear and grief, state propaganda outlets have emphasized Mr. Xi’s steady hand, framed the fight against the outbreak as a form of patriotism and shared upbeat videos of medical workers dancing.

More than 350 people across China have been punished for “spreading rumors” about the outbreak, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group.

Mr. Chen, a fast-talking, fresh-faced lawyer from eastern China, was already well-known online before the outbreak. He traveled to Hong Kong during the pro-democracy protests last year and disputed the Chinese authorities’ depiction of the demonstrators as a riotous mob.

The Beijing authorities summoned him back to the mainland and deleted his social media accounts, Mr. Chen told his followers later.

But when the coronavirus led officials to seal off Wuhan last month, he raced to the city of 11 million, citing his duty as a self-declared citizen journalist. “What sort of a journalist are you if you don’t dare rush to the front line?” he said.

In his videos, which drew millions of views on YouTube, Mr. Chen interviewed locals who had lost loved ones, filmed a woman breaking down as she waited for care and visited an exhibition center that had been converted into a quarantine center.

He was blocked from WeChat, a major Chinese social media app, for spreading rumors. But he was adamant that he shared only what he himself had seen or heard.

As time went on, Mr. Chen, usually energetic, began to show strain. “I am scared,” he said on Jan. 30. “In front of me is the virus. Behind me is China’s legal and administrative power.”

The authorities had contacted his parents to ask for his whereabouts, he said. He teared up suddenly. Then, his finger pointing at the camera, he blurted: “I’m not even scared of death. You think I’m scared of you, Communist Party?”

On Feb. 6, Mr. Chen’s friends lost contact with him. Xu Xiaodong, a prominent mixed martial arts practitioner and a friend of Mr. Chen, posted a video on Feb. 7 saying that Mr. Chen’s parents had been told that their son had been quarantined, though he had not shown symptoms of illness.

Unlike Mr. Chen, Mr. Fang, the clothing salesman, was fairly anonymous before the coronavirus outbreak. Much of his YouTube activity had involved producing enthusiastic videos about traditional Chinese clothing.

But as the outbreak escalated, he began sharing videos of Wuhan’s empty streets and crowded hospitals. They lacked the slickness of Mr. Chen’s dispatches, which were often subtitled and tightly edited. But, as with Mr. Chen’s videos, they showed a man growing increasingly desperate — and defiant.

On Feb. 2, Mr. Fang described how officials had confiscated his laptop and interrogated him about his footage of the body bags. On Feb. 4, he filmed a group of people outside his home, who said they were there to ask him questions. He turned them away, daring them to break down his door.

In his final videos, Mr. Fang turned explicitly political in a way rarely heard inside China, at least in public. Filming from inside his home — he said he was surrounded by plainclothes policemen — he railed against “greed for power” and “tyranny.”

曾錚 Jennifer Zeng@jenniferatntd

Virtually imprisoned at home, #FangBin, who shot that viral "8 bodies in 5 minutes" video of #Wuhan hospital, says the only reason the police hasn't broken in is the world's attention. He cannot stop speaking out. "If they don't come to me, they'll turn to you." #Coronavirus

9:46 PM - Feb 7, 2020

His last video, on Feb. 9, was just 12 seconds long. It featured a scroll of paper with the words, “All citizens resist, hand power back to the people.”

Despite the worldwide audience for Mr. Fang’s and Mr. Chen’s videos, it is hard to know how much reach they had domestically, said Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both men relied heavily on YouTube and Twitter, which are blocked in China.

But unlike the torrent of grief and anger online in response to the death of Dr. Li, news of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s disappearances has been swiftly stamped out on Chinese social media. Their names returned almost no results on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, on Friday.

Still, Ms. Cook said the power of Mr. Chen’s and Mr. Fang’s videos, as well as the reporting done by professional journalists in Wuhan, should not be underestimated.

She pointed to the Chinese authorities’ decision this week to loosen diagnostic requirements for coronavirus cases, leading to a significant jump in reported infections, as evidence of their impact.

That decision might not have come “if you didn’t have all these people in Wuhan sending out reports that what you’re hearing is an underestimate,” Ms. Cook said. “These very courageous individuals can, in unusual circumstances, push back and force the state’s hand.”

Mr. Fang, in one of his last videos, seemed struck by a similar sentiment. He thanked his viewers, who he said had been calling him nonstop to send support.

“A person, just an ordinary person, a silly person,” he said of himself, “who lifted the lid for a second.”

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your-dietician · 3 years

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How to start a business without money ... and in five steps

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/business/how-to-start-a-business-without-money-and-in-five-steps/

How to start a business without money ... and in five steps

June 24, 2021 12 min read

This article was translated from our Spanish edition using AI technologies. Errors may exist due to this process.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

STEP ONE: THE MOMENTUM

Image: Depositphotos.com

In my case, the impulse started one morning, at 3 in the morning. I looked at myself in the mirror, my face wet, breathing noisily, like Darth Vader in pajamas. I was angry. I was disappointed. I was confused. Above all, he was afraid.

He didn’t know how he was going to get out of this one. I was terrified. And it was not for less -or at least he believed-. Until a few hours ago … I had a job. The salary was good and the future looked fabulous.

But everything turned to nothing when I received the dreaded call: the main investor in the business, after a terrible year in Colombia, decided to cancel the project in Mexico. Thus, without further ado. Goodbye. Thank you. Good work and see you later.

Yesterday he was “director”. Today he was unemployed . Suddenly that impressive title that adorned my little cards seemed inappropriate and ridiculous. The truth is that he was the director of nothing.

To make matters worse, my wife was pregnant and huge debts haunted me. That night was a very bad night. I prayed – stammered – before trying to go back to sleep.

I already knew that my wife trusted me; and that he saw in me a man capable of providing for the home. That should have been a cause for reassurance; but at that moment it was a heavy piano on my chest. I didn’t want to fail him … but tonight I doubted everything, especially myself.

Only one question was floating in my mind as my eyelids closed. If I was a supposedly educated man, prepared, with a career, mastery … How did I get to this desperate point? One of two: either the world was a fraud … or I was.

The next day I did what I had to do. I organized my resume and sent it to everyone I knew, applied to some online positions, made several calls. After a few days without an answer, my calls became more desperate. He was willing to work on anything to make it to the next fortnight. After two weeks of attending various job interviews, without success, I was already questioning everything: my ability, my intelligence, my preparation … everything . What could I do?

And in my own business? For me the drive was desperation, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You could even start a business without leaving your current job. What moves you to start a business? When the urge hits, heed the 5 minute rule and move on.

STEP TWO: CHIP CHIP

Image: Depositphotos.com

The situation took on desperate tones. I thought that if I couldn’t find a job, I would have to start a business. It is not like this? Whatever. I looked online and in magazines about good business to get started. I found hundreds of business opportunities, products and franchises … but all required some type of investment: 20 thousand, 30 thousand, 100 thousand or more. But when one does not have money or work, it is impossible to think of those amounts. Also, whatever money he could receive, he soon disappeared in basic necessities: food, doctors, rent … and in paying past debts.

I thought about taking out another loan, but it would be impossible – and also seriously irresponsible – to borrow more. I thought about selling my car… but they would give me very little for it and I really needed it.

The answer came from Salvador, a good friend (with whom he would later write a book, precisely, about entrepreneurship and personal finance). “You don’t need money to start a business,” he told me, “you need an idea. If you don’t have money, invest your intelligence and your time ”.

I returned home agreed with this idea and sat at a table to put ideas on paper. That day, nothing was off the table. I thought about washing cars, tutoring, walking dogs, and painting houses. I didn’t know how to do any of these things , but I thought it would be a way for me to move around and start “something” temporary, where I got a serious job. I could not come up with an idea that would excite me.

A new inspiration came from my wife: “You have always told me that you like to write. Why don’t you do some business with that? Indeed, I have always liked to write and I even had a very advanced first novel, but that would not give me money for long, even assuming someone wanted to publish me. But the idea made me rethink everything. I was asking myself the wrong question!

Until then I was wondering where can I earn easy money? And I still couldn’t find a way out. But my wife’s comment made me change the question. The new question, the correct one, was: There are some things I know how to do well. How can I make money from these things?

This new question cleared the way because it left out thousands of impractical ideas, and limited my options, making my choice easier . That same afternoon, I decided that I wanted to start a writing and copywriting business . There was still a lot to do.

And in your own business ? Ask yourself the right questions and find your talent: the things that you know how to do well and that you like. My thing was writing, but perhaps your thing is animals, computers, sports or cars. Do not look for “a good business” but build a good business from who you are. And now, start where you are .

STEP THREE: LAUNCH THE BOAT INTO THE SEA

Image: Depositphotos.com

When I made the decision and shared it with my wife, our creative juices started to flow. I had almost no money, so we did everything at home. In one morning we came up with a name for the business, made a simple logo, opened a Facebook page and a free site on Wix. We also devised a “menu” of services that it could offer and we priced it.

This was all new to me, and I set prices that I later learned were too low. I also did not consider many services that I would later discover as important. But we already had what they call in entrepreneurial jargon an MVP, a “minimum viable product ”; something I could start promoting, selling and working on.

That day in the afternoon I sent a message to all my contacts by mail and on social networks. Perhaps, in total, about two thousand people. To all my friends, acquaintances new and old, and even people I didn’t remember. I sent them all. The email was very simple:

“Hello, how nice to greet you! I am Francisco and I am telling you that we have just launched these new services. If you have creative writing, editing or proofreading needs, don’t hesitate to call us! ”, Then a kind farewell and… SEND! And then … wait.

Fortunately we didn’t have to wait long. The next day a first customer arrived (who needed a brochure) and then another (who needed a website). The first week we charge 3,000 pesos for two services. It was still little, but it was something. We could breathe. We were in business!

And in your own business? Do not wait for the ideal moment, or until you have everything assembled and planned perfectly. Right now, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Try to have an MVP and then make changes and iterations according to the response of your market. Stay open, be flexible, and listen to your customers.

STEP FOUR: SYSTEMATIZE

Image: Depositphotos.com

The first months were learning . Still our earnings were low (but they helped us get ahead). We discovered new needs, new niches, and products that we could explore. We started offering advertising copy services, social networks, translation and strategic communication. Each client brought a new problem that we had not thought about before. Then we gave ourselves to the task of investigating, learning and solving what we put on the table.

Little by little we were finding our space in the market , and leaving behind the products and services that required us a lot of time and little profit. Clients – thank God – kept coming and within a few months it became evident that we needed more hands on the business, better management systems and systematizing processes.

We also thought that we could be a company with a human sense, that would help people. We launched a call for writers who could work from home: housewives, men who take care of their children and people with some type of disability. At the end of the year, we went from one collaborator (myself), to eight collaborators with flexible times. We also launched programs to help people in need, doing our bit, no matter how small.

That involved us implementing payroll, tax, customer control and process control systems to ensure that everything went smoothly and in order. We learned to hire, train and sell. We made a lot of mistakes and we learned from them; but most of our clients accompanied us during the process.

And in your own business? This third step is the most difficult in the leap from self-employment to a formal business, because it involves delegating functions, investing, trusting people and “letting go” of direct control of all steps of the business. Find systems that work for you and find people you trust who want to work. Little by little you will find your answers.

STEP FIFTH: GROW

Image: Depositphotos.com

Once the systems started working, I found that my hands were freer. In the beginning I spent all my time doing the essays, even the simplest ones. Now, with a team of writers, I had brain freedom to rekindle the creative drive; think about new clients, bigger projects and look for new business for my business.

Eventually we were able to serve larger national and international clients and launch new lines of products and services that attracted new clients. We open a publishing division. The business today has different areas, different sources of income, managers and operators that work even when I am not present. That is to say: it is a real business and not self-employment. Later, in effect, they offered me an excellent job, which I still maintain today. I accepted it because I liked it, and not just because I was desperate. As the business goes on, I can attend to both.

We are still very, very far from the Forbes 500 lists. We are still an SME with a great desire to continue growing. But, above all, I no longer be the way I felt that day at 3 in the morning. I have other concerns, but I have freedom, I live where I want, I do what I like and I can’t stop dreaming. I’m tired? This sold out! But it is a burnout of the one who knows that he is in the right race.

I have had the help of fantastic people in my family and outside of it and, in addition, my family has grown quite a bit. Trust me, it’s worth it.

And in your own business? It recognizes that there is a market and space for all types of companies, products and services. Don’t be afraid to grow up. Sure, it’s scary and sometimes lazy. But on the other side of fear is freedom. It is freedom and passion (not money) that move the soul of true entrepreneurs.

Your first business may not lift, but if you have invested your time and your intelligence, then there is no way it is a total loss. You will have grown, learned, undertaken and faced. You are not the same as before. Time to start again! Once you have learned to undertake, you will not be able to stop doing it.

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leftpress · 7 years

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After Officials Sign Off, Cleveland Clinic Doctor Secretly Returns Home

Suha Abushamma had been forced to leave the United States after President Donald Trump’s travel ban. She sued, and high-level discussions led to her return yesterday.

Charles Ornstein | Feb. 7, 2017, 1:08 p.m.

In a clandestine mission that had the makings of a hostage rescue, the Cleveland Clinic and its lawyers arranged for medical resident Suha Abushamma to fly back to the United States yesterday, more than a week after she was forced to leave because of President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

Abushamma is being introduced at a news conference at this hour at the Intercontinental Hotel in Cleveland.

Abushamma was among the highest-profile people affected by the president’s executive order, which banned visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. A first-year resident at the Cleveland Clinic, she was forced to leave the U.S. hours after landing at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Saturday, Jan. 28.

Abushamma, a Sudanese citizen, was given the choice of withdrawing her visa application “voluntarily” or being forcibly deported and not allowed back to the U.S. for at least five years. She chose to withdraw her visa application, meaning she did not have a valid document with which to enter the U.S. She flew back to Saudi Arabia, where her family lives.

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Her return to the U.S. resulted from high-level discussions between lawyers for the clinic, outside lawyers working with them and officials at the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York. Even though Abushamma’s visa was cancelled, the U.S. Attorney’s office secured permission for her to return yesterday without problem, said David Rowan, the clinic’s chief legal officer.

Abushamma said she hadn’t lost hope, even when her situation appeared most tangled.

“I knew from the beginning that things were going to resolve,” Abushamma said in an interview with ProPublica on Tuesday morning. “I didn’t know when exactly, but I knew it was going to work out in the end and that I would be back.”

Rowan would not discuss specifics of the Cleveland Clinic team’s conversations with the U.S. Attorney’s office.

“There were a lot of behind-the-scenes activities,” Rowan said in an interview. He said the U.S. Attorney’s office communicated with the Department of Homeland Security “as far as the unique circumstances here and having the necessary paperwork ... We had to have authorization to let her board a flight in Saudi Arabia.”

Even when a federal judge in Washington state issued a stay late Friday, preventing Trump’s executive order from being enforced, the ruling did not apply to Abushamma because she didn’t have a valid visa in hand. Other doctors and family members returned before she did.

Rowan said the legal team explored a variety of options to get Abushamma back. For one, she sued Trump and other federal officials, seeking her return. The lawsuit contends that Abushamma was denied access to legal advice and was unlawfully removed.

Abushamma will be filing a notice to dismiss her lawsuit this afternoon, though that was not a condition of her return, said Jennifer Kroman, an attorney for Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which represented Abushamma in the lawsuit pro bono.

Abushamma took off from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at about 6 a.m. Monday morning, which is about 10 p.m. Sunday in New York. She landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport a little after 11 a.m. Monday, where she was greeted by lawyers and a team from the clinic. They returned to Cleveland later in the day.

Her trip back was not assured. Although lawyers for both sides had agreed that she would be allowed back in, they kept it quiet. Even airport workers were not fully clued in.

Abushamma said she booked her ticket to return on Saturday. And on Sunday night, she flew from Yanbu, where her family lives, to Jeddah. After resting at a friend’s house for a few hours, she returned to the Jeddah airport at 3 a.m. There, a ticket agent looked at her passport and, not seeing a valid visa, alerted an airline supervisor.

The supervisor told Abushamma that he had received an email about her and said, “I knew you were going to be boarding the plane.” But he, too, was confused and took her documents for 35 minutes before giving her a boarding pass and allowing her to proceed.

Once through security, Abushamma said, she was asked for her passport again and had to wait five minutes. Finally, she said, while boarding the plane, when the ticket agent scanned her boarding pass, she saw “high-risk passenger” pop up on the screen for a split second before a light turned green allowing her to board.

“High-risk passenger, that’s what I’m considered, I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t nervous at all. I’m a very calm person.”

She remained in contact with her legal team until the plane took off.

When she landed in New York, Abushamma said she was greeted by Customs and Border Protection Agents “with smiling faces.” An agent said, “We’ve been waiting for you” and then escorted her to the room in which she was held for hours when she arrived on Jan. 28 before being sent home. “My favorite room at JFK,” she joked. “But this time, it literally took one minute.”

They gave her a form to sign, stamped her passport as if she had a H-1B visa (her original visa type before it was canceled) and escorted her to get her luggage.

Reporters were waiting outside customs, so Abushamma was let out a side door where she was greeted by Cleveland Clinic colleagues, including Dr. Abby Spencer, program director for the internal medicine residency program.

In a court filing, Spencer had said that Abushamma “has been a stand-out physician and colleague. She has repeatedly and consistently demonstrated the utmost ethical standards and continued to prioritize patient needs.”

“It was just really emotional,” said Eileen Sheil, a clinic spokeswoman who was among those to greet Abushamma in New York. “Everyone was trying really hard to keep it low key because there was a lot of media around.”

The Cleveland Clinic’s chief executive, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, is a close advisor to Trump. Cosgrove and the clinic “have been very concerned about the effects of the executive order on health care itself, education and research, and Dr. Cosgrove has put forth proposals” about how the order could be applied, taking into account the unique issues in health care, Rowan said.

Abushamma said the experience has been unforgettable.

“The support that I have received is just amazing. It is incredible,” she said. “From the Cleveland Clinic, from friends, from residents that I’ve never met before … from people in Cleveland itself, from people across America as well. Just the support I received is the one thing that I will never ever forget about this experience.”

Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter for ProPublica covering health care and the pharmaceutical industry.

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Portrait of a Pandemic

During the first two months of 2020, Herine Baron was in a pretty constant state of bliss, driving around Miami accompanied by the pulsating rhythms of Caribbean party music. A new mother at 28, she was enjoying her chubby-cheeked baby, Malcolm, and making plans to build a house. As she returned from maternity leave to her hospital nursing job, she had only one big question hanging over her: should she continue her education with an eye toward administration or more advanced nursing?

Little did she know what lay ahead. Little did anyone.

In Boston, Josee Matela, 21, was juggling: six part-time jobs, three senior-year college classes and two extracurricular responsibilities. It was a grind, but she was buoyed by the end in sight. In May, Matela, the first member of her Filipino immigrant family to attend college in the U.S., would graduate from Boston University with degrees in journalism and international relations. And then, she thought, she would launch.

Mahum Khalid, 27, a hotel worker and student in San Francisco, also felt on the cusp of something life-changing. After years of abusing alcohol and drugs — especially heroin — she had been frightened in late January by a weeks-long manic episode triggered by mixed drug use. Coming out of it, she read on Twitter about Kobe Bryant’s death and the deadly virus in China. She felt like the world was upside down, and she desperately needed to make a change. After entering treatment for the first time, she started collecting days, then weeks, of sobriety.

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In Brooklyn, Parker McAllister, 29, was seeing signs that 2020 would shape up as a year he could present to his parents and say, See? It was all worth it. They had honored his wishes to attend an elite conservatory to study the bass, even hosting fundraisers in their Bedford Stuyvesant brownstone to send him there. Now he had booked 60 shows through the summer, including tours in the Bahamas and Europe. Soon, he believed, he’d be able to help out his parents – who were struggling to hold onto their home in a gentrifying neighborhood – and buy himself some breathing room to slow down and invest in his artistry.

Also in New York City, Ngoc Cindy Pham, 32, had by early this year finally settled into her life as a Brooklyn College business professor. She had grown up in Vietnam, where her parents worked long hours to send her to graduate school in the U.S. Here, she had regularly devoted 18 hours a day to her master’s and doctoral studies, ignoring her personal life for fear she would squander her parents’ sacrifices. She did feel she was living a one-dimensional existence in her “bachelor apartment,” and promised herself she would start dating in 2020. But, before everything changed, she was focused on helping her students move up in the world, much as she had.

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Kara Frey, 26, and Nate Morris, 24, meanwhile, were laying the foundations for a life together in their new apartment in Toledo. They were starting to talk about marriage, and for once, their work lives seemed blessedly stable. Frey, a construction worker, was busy with a five-week installation project at Sephora stores in Southern California, while Morris had just landed a job as a patient registration specialist at a local hospital.

In Odessa, Texas, Jessica Fajardo’s year kicked off with a bang. After searching for work that suited her — trying out dental hygiene, daycare, arcades — she had found her calling as a phlebotomist and her ideal job at a small family medicine center. On Jan. 5, which was her 30th birthday, her colleagues decorated the office and gave her gifts. Then, at day’s end, her best friend, Maria Hernandez, surprised her with a dinner party at a new ramen restaurant. The youngest of five children in a close-knit Mexican-American family, Fajardo was surrounded that night by relatives and friends. When they sang to her, she became overwhelmed.

She wiped away a tear, then blew out her candles.

There existed a time before people spoke each day of deadly viruses and ventilators and mobile morgues; before they socially distanced and self-quarantined and sheltered in place; before, newly fluent in terms like PPE and N95, they clapped and banged pots at sunset to honor doctors, nurses and essential workers.

At the start of 2020, Americans were ushering in a new decade and what was shaping up to be a dynamic presidential election year. China was already reporting patients afflicted by a mysterious disease, but in the United States, many young people were writing New Year’s resolutions and setting what seemed to be reasonable goals.

On Jan. 1, there were about 75 million people in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 35. Some 3 million were expected to graduate with bachelor’s and post-graduate degrees in the new year, and step into what was forecast to be a healthy job market. At year’s start, the unemployment rate was at a 50-year low, and it was under 2 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or more. The sectors whose employees skew younger — like retail and food services — were looking robust.

Over the last couple of months, as the picture changed, we interviewed more than 100 young people about who they were before the pandemic, what happened to them when the pandemic struck, and where they find themselves now. For a rolling feature called Notes on the Pandemic, we spoke with college students and young professionals; artists and teachers; gig workers and restaurant employees; nurses, doctors, and other essential workers; incarcerated people and people in recovery; young parents and pregnant women who gave birth during the pandemic.

We wanted to understand how the pandemic has affected younger people at this formative time of their lives, just as financial downturns, war and other major events colored the lives of prior generations.

In some ways, heading into a protracted shutdown, this generation was better equipped. They are more accustomed to navigating the world through technology, to communicating primarily on devices, and to working from home.

Yet: they grew up in the shadow of 9/11. The oldest among them entered the job market after the financial crisis of 2008. The youngest grew up with lockdown drills and the fear of school shootings. Their social media feeds have long been filled with conversations about: the opioid crisis, mass incarceration, rising inequality, political polarization and climate change. It’s a generation in which two in three college students graduate with an average of about $30,000 in debt, and some 1.3 million have served in the military during a period of several overseas conflicts.

Before the pandemic, then, many of those interviewed were already in an unsettled state. And yet they were revving for a future — or at least a year — that seemed to hold promise.

The Pandemic Strikes

On March 11, the day that the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic, Herine Baron, the Miami nurse, was treating a patient who came into her emergency room with a fever. Fifteen minutes before her shift ended, the patient was moved to isolation, and she was tasked with doing his bloodwork. Only at that point was Baron given an N95 respirator mask, a gown and gloves, she said.

Herine Baron, 28, a nurse, spikes a high fever a week after treating a Covid-19 patient.

A week later, while working a night shift, Baron started feeling feverish. By the time she got home, her fever had spiked to 103, so she returned to the hospital. She was admitted with what would be diagnosed as Covid-19.

“I felt like my brain was cooking,” she said.

That same day, after BU announced its classes would be going remote, Josee Matela panicked about losing the jobs that she needed to make it through her final semester. Hunkering down in her campus apartment, she created a spreadsheet — “March Madness,” she called it — to track her finances. Six days later, she found out that students had to leave the university in five days’ time. She felt heartsick. She sobbed on a call to her family in New Jersey, and then proceeded to pack her belongings in trash bags.

“When I had to move out of BU housing,” she said, “it kind of created this shift where the life that I was working on was completely done.”

By March 11, Mahum Khalid had achieved 45 days of sobriety. Considering the negative milestones of her life — she started drinking at nine, taking pills at 13, using heroin at 20 — this was a significant win. But when San Francisco shut down a few days later so did a mental health program she needed after addiction treatment. Then her hours at her hotel job were cut. Suddenly, she was locked down inside her parents’ home, which she had found stultifying even with the freedom to come and go as she pleased to classes, work and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. A nerve-jangling mixture of boredom, frustration and family tensions began to test her resolve.

Parker McAllister, 29, a touring bassist, gets an email from his manager: “Prepare for all of April to be canceled.”

“Being at home is not a good place for my recovery,” she said. “Being stuck in the house is making me want to use.”

On March 12, Parker McAllister, the bassist, ventured to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to check out the band with which he’d soon be touring the Bahamas. Italy’s strict lockdown had already derailed his European tour, but, he thought, would getting stuck (and making money) in an island paradise be the worst thing in the world? He wouldn’t find out. The next day, the band leader called off the trip, and on March 17, McAllister’s manager sent an email: “Prepare for all of April to be canceled.”

After Brooklyn College moved classes online in mid-March, Ngoc Pham busied herself trying to help her students, but they were dealing with problems beyond her control, like canceled internships and family members dying of Covid-19. From time to time, she sent small

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gift cards to those who were clearly struggling. But really, there was little she could do. Alone at home in her sparsely decorated apartment, she felt a discomfort — a sadness — growing. It was exacerbated when, during Zoom meetings, she caught glimpses of her colleagues’ lives: kids, pets, beautiful houses.

“Before I had professional connections, so I didn’t feel too lonely,” she said. “Now all of those connections have disappeared.”

By March 22, Nate Morris had adopted a new routine when he returned home from St. Anne Hospital in Toledo, where his job was to check in patients at the ER. He’d go straight into the basement, remove and wash his scrubs, clean his hands, and then wipe down all surfaces he had touched.

That day, he felt a bit off, but it had been a long work week. The next morning, though, he woke up feeling awful. Neither Morris nor his girlfriend, Kara Frey, were shocked. They knew he was likely exposed to Covid-19 patients at work. But they weren’t worried. He was young, healthy and athletic — a competitive recreational hockey player. They anticipated a few days of misery with cold symptoms.

Nate Morris worked as a hospital worker as coronavirus spread.

Photo: Courtesy of Kara Frey

But Morris started running a fever, and when it couldn’t be broken, his girlfriend had a dawning realization: “I was, like, wow, this is really happening.”

By the time Frey took Morris to the emergency room, he was sick with pneumonia and so dehydrated his kidneys were shutting down. Days later, Morris was placed in a medical coma, intubated and hooked up to a ventilator.

In Odessa, Texas, Jess Fajardo, the phlebotomist, understood almost immediately that her symptoms — coughing, mostly — were bad news. Because she had asthma and diabetes and because she worked at a doctor’s office, she was worried from the minute the coronavirus started spreading across the U.S. She shut herself away in her room at her parents’ house, telling her mother, who’d leave her food outside the door: “Mom, don’t even knock — nothing.”

On March 17, she texted her friend Maria Hernandez: “I think it’s fascinating that the world is cleaning up by slowly getting rid of us. Mother Nature is like, nah, y’all, it’s getting too hot on me. Time to take care of some of y’all.”

But when Fajardo’s symptoms escalated, she wrote Hernandez a different kind of text, with instructions on what to do with her ashes, should the time come.

She finally went to a hospital to get tested on March 27; she was initially denied testing because health officials attributed her symptoms to her obesity, her friend Sarah Jarocki said. (Later, it would turn out that there had been at least 10 Covid-19 cases at the medical office where she worked, according to her boss, Dr. Madhu Pamganamamula. He believes that the chain of infection began with another employee, who then transmitted the virus to Fajardo and the others. He said he shut his office on March 19, the day after the first employee took ill.)

While awaiting her test results, Fajardo experienced a coughing fit so intense it made her cry. The next day, she checked into the hospital, and her test came back positive.

On March 30, she posted an update on Facebook: “I want to thank everyone for your kind words, prayers and encouragements,” she wrote from her hospital bed. “I plan to keep fighting this as best as I can.”

One friend, referring to the music video game Dance Dance Revolution, commented: “So … you don’t want to come play DDR now?”

And Fajardo, who by that point was incapable of talking “without almost hacking up a lung,” responded: “I’m still down for a ‘rona party.”

Before the country quieted to a whisper, one theme in news coverage was inter-generational squabbling. Pointing to spring-break partying and crowded bars in cities yet to shutter, some stories cited older adults complaining that young people weren’t taking the pandemic seriously. Some young people, in turn, said their parents were in denial as they refused to curtail their activities.

Soon, the pandemic erased the differences.

While older Americans faced a far greater risk of severe illness and death, young people started getting sick, too. About 1 in 10 patients admitted to hospitals for Covid-19 symptoms was under 40. By early May, nearly 400 people aged 34 and younger had died of the disease in the United States, according to provisional data that is likely an undercount.

Economically, the pandemic shutdowns hit young Americans hardest. From March to April, unemployment for Americans under 25 tripled. More than half of Americans younger than 30 lost their job or took a pay cut, compared with 40 percent overall, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Young people dominate certain sectors that have been most profoundly affected — like the food-service industry and the gig economy. Yet most young Americans — two-thirds of those under 30 — had no “rainy day” money set aside to cover their expenses.

Losing jobs, getting kicked off campuses and going remote for work, many young people relocated. Not only college students but many young professionals found themselves back in their childhood bedrooms. Many saw it as temporary, but the last downturn, the 2008 financial crash, drove many young adults back home for what became extended periods; even before the pandemic, one in six people between 25 and 34 lived under their parents’ roofs.

What Just Happened?

Lying in her Miami hospital bed, Baron switched roles and became a patient. Very quickly, she grew disheartened by the way her colleagues at Jackson Memorial Hospital refused to enter her room for fear of catching the virus themselves. In tearful testimony on YouTube, she decried what she saw as her hospital’s missteps; it got more than 220,000 views.

Jackson Memorial said it has investigated Baron’s situation and that “we remain confident that all Jackson’s caregivers are getting the best possible protection during a fast-moving and fast-changing health crisis.”

Herine Baron reunites with her son Malcolm after recovering from Covid-19.

Photo: Courtesy of Herine Baron

During her hospitalization, separated from her baby, Baron pumped, and dumped, her breast milk, fearful of passing on the virus to him. On the day she was discharged, she learned that her son Malcolm had tested positive for Covid-19. This made her sad, she said, especially because doctors had advised her to remain in isolation at home and she wouldn’t be able to nurse her own child back to health. Malcolm remained in the care of his grandmother for another couple of weeks.

In the month that she spent at home, she and her son both recovered fully. One day during that period, for which she was paid worker’s compensation, she had to return to her hospital for further testing. Stepping inside a place that she once venerated, she felt pangs of dread and anxiety. She worried about the day she’d have to return as an employee.

When she did return, it took her time to calm her nerves. But her concerns dissipated. As she saw it, the hospital had improved its handling of the virus and become more supportive of its workers. During daily staff meetings, managers asked her and her colleagues to speak up if they needed anything to help them perform their duties more safely. She began working closely with Covid-19 patients, grateful that she could understand their pain because she had experienced it.

The whole ordeal has left her certain about the decision that nagged at her before the pandemic. If in her carefree state back then, she was contemplating a career pivot toward hospital administration, she has now decided to continue her studies in advanced nursing, doubling down on her original motivation for entering the health field, which was to provide compassionate care to patients.

“I always looked at nurses as heroes, that’s one of the reasons that I became a nurse,” she said. “But I feel like we’re getting recognized more.”

After Josee Matela was forced to move off campus, she was thrown into a semblance of post-grad life, newly navigating bill-splitting and household chores with roommates. She was able to keep three part-time jobs — campus brand manager for HBO, marketing associate for FinTech Sandbox, and co-coordinator of her communications college’s ambassador program. For the time being, she can afford rent, but she’s very anxious about her future income because the job market is so bleak.

Boston University postponed its commencement ceremony. So when Matela completed her final exam for a public diplomacy class, there was nothing to mark the end. She doesn’t know when, if ever, she’ll be able to throw her cap in the air or give her family the joy of watching their first college graduate walk across a stage. To help herself and others like her appreciate how far they’ve come, she created a digital yearbook for first-generation college students.

Josee Matela is the first in her family to graduate college.

Photo: Courtesy of Josee Matela

For the last four years, Matela had been working hard to set herself up for a journalism or international relations career after graduation. At the year’s start, when the job market looked to be red-hot, she anticipated moving immediately to New York or Washington, D.C. Now, though, amid uncertainty, she’s staying in Boston. It is unnatural for her to play the part, as she described herself, of “a very driven bear in hibernation.” But, she said, “I’m willing to take a step back or just see what happens because that’s what the world’s doing.”

Staying home, and home, and home, with her family was challenging for Mahum Khalid at such an early point in her recovery. Before the lockdown, she depended on her hotel job to distract her during the day. At night, Narcotics Anonymous meetings kept her both psychologically and socially tethered; they’d spill over into long post-meeting diner hangouts every Friday evening.

Mahum Khalid, 27, a student and hotel worker, has achieved 52 days of sobriety.

Her hotel job, at first, disappeared completely. And virtual NA just didn’t do it for her. One night, she sneaked a bottle of a relative’s Adderall into her room, and slept with it for comfort — though she didn’t take any, reminding herself that she preferred downers to uppers. At the end of April, when her manager asked her to return to the hotel for five hours a week, she found the outside world brought back old urges. She clocked out of work one day, got in her car and ended up at a liquor store. But she just sat in the parking lot, for a long time, knowing that drinking would likely lead to using. Finally, she turned the car back on, made a U-turn and drove home.

Not long ago, Khalid couldn’t hold onto a job for more than two weeks; in one humiliating instance, she nodded off at her desk and woke up to find a sticky note in her hair saying, “You’re fired.” Sheltering in place, she said, has given her time to reflect on how far she has come from there. It has also afforded her time to dream about building a future once her world reopens: Could she work enough hours to save enough money to buy a farm? Could she build on it a sober living house for others addicts looking to start over? Could she find peace there?

With his performance calendar extending emptily into the future, McAllister wondered how far he could stretch his $1,000 in savings as his earnings slowed. For how long would he be able to pay his parents $800 a month to live in their guest room — which was, in turn, a way to help them pay their mortgage? His father had recently started home dialysis. Would McAllister be able to insulate him from the threat the outside world posed?

Soon, some checks for previous performances arrived, but, with the world now awash in out-of-work musicians, he knew he would need to expand his career beyond the plucking of his bass strings. He lugged his amplifier from his car into his parents’ parlor, so that he could produce something like studio sound. He got some production work, started creating samples for a music-production platform called Splice, and taught himself video-editing. He still practiced his instrument three to four hours daily, he said, but to be competitive, he’d have to learn to be “the engineer, the producer and the musician.”

If two months earlier McAllister had hoped to buy himself some slow-down time with the income from a busy touring schedule, he now had to regroup and hustle. But, he said, he was down to pivot.

Ngoc Cindy Pham, 32, a Brooklyn College professor, cries about quarantine loneliness on a call to her mom in Vietnam.

In mid-April, Ngoc Pham called her mother in Vietnam and broke down crying. The prior month of isolation had been far quieter than the spring she initially planned: preparing her students for graduation, lining them up with jobs and internships, and getting ready for New York Fashion Week as its director of marketing. Instead she was alone, trying to burn time cooking meticulous meals, eating what she could, but still having leftovers for days.

During the lockdown, her loneliness — the whole dating thing never really got off the ground earlier this year — surfaced. She yearned for someone other than her mother to call when she cried, for someone to hug at night.

“It’s really sad to not have anyone to talk to,” she said. “I doubt myself — why have I been working for such a long time? What’s the goal? What is happiness? I’ve tried to redefine what happiness means. Is it a successful career or family?”

Two weeks after Nate Morris started running an intense fever, Kara Frey sat alone on their living room couch in Toledo. In her head, she toggled between two images of her boyfriend: the sturdy, gregarious, hockey player and the unconscious patient lying in a negative-pressure hospital isolation unit.

Kara Frey’s partner, Nate Morris, 24, is placed on ventilator due to Covid-19.

With their cats curled up next to her, she realized it had been 11 days since she had heard her partner’s voice. “I’ve had a couple nights where I’ve missed him so badly, and I’ve just been scared,” she said. “Scared as hell.”

Morris’s hospitalization stretched longer and longer. He’d come off the ventilator for a few hours one day and be back on higher levels of sedation the next. “It really was a huge blow to my optimism,” Frey said. She became exhausted from seeing endless stories in her social media feeds about people refusing to practice social distancing. “I can’t help but think ‘Wow, that might be nice for your worst-case scenario to be staying home,’” she said. “My worst-case scenario is Nate dying.”

Finally, on a sunny Sunday morning, came a series of loud thuds on her bedroom window. Frey emerged from a deep sleep to find Morris’ stepmother standing outside with a message: Nate is trying to reach you. She rolled over and saw the missed calls on her phone. The night before, Morris had woken up and pulled out his breathing tube himself. When they spoke for the first time in three weeks, he asked if Frey had contracted Covid-19 while he was in a coma. She said no. “Good,” he said, “’cause this sucks!”

Nate Morris, 24, a hospital worker, comes out of coma, pulling out his breathing tube.

After Morris woke up, he had some residual issues: a cough, fatigue and paralysis in his left arm. But his personality remained intact. When he FaceTimed his girlfriend to demonstrate his ability to feed himself Jell-O, Frey breathed a sigh of relief. He was still a jokester.

Some things weren’t funny, though. Reflecting on the days before he got sick, Morris saw himself at his hospital’s reception desk, with no protective glass between himself and the patients. He wore a mask, but he was only issued one a day, he said, in a voice still hoarse from a trachea tube. (The hospital, in a statement, said its mask policy was consistent with federal government guidelines, and that it had installed protective screens “as an added precaution” on April 1, which was after Morris got sick. It declined to discuss his case, citing privacy concerns.)

Morris and Frey know there’s a long road ahead, physically, financially, and emotionally. But for now, they’re just happy that the road exists.

The day before she was intubated, Fajardo, the phlebotomist, sang “Happy Birthday” to her best friend. It was hard to do. She was crying, and her breathing was ragged. She tried again by text: “Happy Birthday bestie. Sorry that I’m dying.”

Over the next week, Fajardo’s condition improved, and doctors cleared her for extubation. When they tried, however, she fought them off — so hard one time that she fell out of bed. Over FaceTime, her sister tried to calm her before the next attempt. During the call, Fajardo was crying. She tried to lift her hand, as if to communicate something, but she was too weak.

The next day, which was Easter Sunday, doctors succeeded in removing Fajardo’s breathing tube. But she did not survive the procedure. Her mother, Elsa, said that her rapid deterioration had stunned them.

“I don’t know how long it will take us to recover from her loss,” her mother said.

The Fajardo family held a “drive-through viewing,” and broadcast her funeral live on Facebook. Instead of mourners, the room was filled with 66 gold and white star-shaped balloons, each bearing the name of a person who had attended the viewing. After the service, the balloons were released outside the funeral home. Tied in a cluster, they snagged on an overhead power line, creating a loud explosion and shorting power to the neighborhood. But a few managed to break free, floating off into the sky.

Jess Fajardo blowing out candles at her surprise 30th birthday party in January.

Courtesy of Abby Guerra

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from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/portrait-of-a-pandemic/

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mrsteveecook · 6 years

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coworker asked me to pose topless, how do I stop people from offering condolences, and more

It’s four answers to four questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker asked me to pose topless for an “anatomy textbook”

I work part-time in a small sales office of about 10 people. About a month ago, one of my coworkers approached me about doing a project for his graduate program at a local university. It was for some sort of anatomy textbook or similar: it would be a photo of my breasts with my face not in the photo for the textbook. I would be compensated for the photos.

There were some red flags in his proposition — the photos would be taken by him, in my home, and he never presented me with official paperwork about it. I called the university and they assured me that whatever “project” he was working on was not through their university, as there would have been extensive paperwork, screening, photos professionally taken, etc., which was what I had figured in the first place, particularly for such a large university and for a master’s program.

My question is this: Is this a matter that I should bring up to my boss? Is this something that she needs to know about?

Whoa, yes, absolutely, today.

Your coworker is trying to prey on colleagues to take topless photos of them under false pretenses. Tell your boss, tell HR, tell other women.

Frankly, even if his story were true, which it’s not, it would be have been really inappropriate for him to approach you, a coworker, about this. That’s not how anatomy photos in textbooks work. This guy is a creep and your employer needs to know.

2. How do I stop people from offering condolences?

My father is dying. Not as in “someday in the future we all go,” but as in his doctor told him to not invest in short term bonds. This does not come as a surprise to any of my family members, we’ve been aware of his impending demise long enough to have gathered multiple times for what may be our final goodbyes. The big change is we now have an estimated expiration date in six months.

And, while your first instinct is to offer condolences, I don’t want them. Like with so many parent-child relationships ours is complicated. It’s not that I’m eager for him to go, it’s that I’m not particularly broken up over it. And, more than that, I value quality of life over quantity. Yes, he’s going. Frankly, I hope it’s shorter than six months. It has been a rough go of it for a while already.

Normally I’d just continue to fail to mention this to my coworkers until the time comes when I need to leave town suddenly due to his passing. However, in the next couple of months I’m slated to be the face of my company at a major event and I need to make sure arrangements are in place in case my father’s death comes at an inopportune time. I’ve spoken with those who most need to know, and soon I’ll have to inform the CMO who may very well opt to replace me.

I think I can navigate most of the stuff, but I have a few areas of concern:

(1) I sincerely don’t want condolences. He’s not dead, and I’m not devastated. I know it’s human nature and generally considered to be the correct response. In my case, in this instance, it’s annoying, uncomfortable, and unwanted. How do I get ahead of this without sounding like a jackass? I get that there are many times when we just have to accept the well intended social pleasantries, but condolences feels like a thing I should be able to not accept.

(2) How do I convince the decision makers to not pick another spokesperson and that, really, I got this? And the chances that he goes that one week are *really* small. I’m super concerned they’re going to want to play it safe and sideline me, and this is a major career opportunity I don’t want to lose just because my father *might* die in exactly 7 weeks.

(3) Once I’ve told the individuals that need to know, I assume I probably have to tell the committee at large. Is this one-on-one conversations or can I just make an announcement like people do when they’re having other major life events?

When you talk to the CMO, say something like, “It’s very unlikely that this will happen during the few days of the X event, but I felt I should let you know that my father is very sick and there is a small chance that he may die right before or during the event. I think it’s quite unlikely that that will be the timing, but I wanted to mention it so that there’s a back-up plan.” If you present it that way, it’s unlikely that your CMO will insist on replacing you now, but if she starts to sound like she wants to, then say, “It’s very unlikely the timing will work out that way, and I very much hope we can continue with our current plan. The chances of that needing to change are slim.” From there, it’s really her call, but it would be a bit silly to replace you so far in advance and in this context. People have family emergencies and other crises, often without this much warning, and businesses make do.

I don’t actually know that you need to tell the entire committee. But if you do decide to, you can do it as a group announcement, but keep it vague if you don’t want sad faces and condolences — something like, “I’ve let Jane know that there’s a small chance that a health situation in my family may necessitate me flying home instead of being at X . I think it’s very unlikely, but I wanted to flag it now just in case. I’ll keep people posted if anything changes.”

As for avoiding condolences more broadly … I don’t know that you can, if you talk to people about what’s going on. You can certainly try saying things like “no condolences necessary” but people are going to express that they’re sorry to hear what’s going on, and you can’t head that off without seeming fairly prickly (or making them think there’s estrangement or abuse or similar). I think you’re better off just moving the conversation on quickly — something like a nod and a quick change of subject will probably serve you better than trying to explain why you don’t want sympathy.

3. Did my niece technically graduate college?

My niece is a recent college graduate — maybe. She “walked” at the ceremony, but I’ve just learned that she owes about $4,000 to the college and they will not release her transcripts until they receive the money.

Is she, in good conscience, allowed to say that she’s a college “graduate”? She has it on LinkedIn and on her resumes. However, if a prospective employer wants her transcripts, the jig is up. What do you think?

I think the question here isn’t so much whether they’ll release her transcripts (although that may matter too, if she interviews with employers who want them — most won’t, but in some fields they will) but whether the college considers her to have the degree or not. It’s pretty common for colleges to require students to be in good financial standing before they’ll confer a degree.

She can find out by calling the registrar’s office and asking … which conveniently will let her know what an employer who wants to verify her degree will be told. If she has not actually been awarded the degree (and won’t until she finishes paying), she shouldn’t list the degree on her resume without a caveat like “(all coursework completed, awaiting degree).”

(That said, if she hasn’t asked for your advice on this and/or you don’t have a close relationship where she’d welcome your guidance, you should stay out of it.)

4. My interview was canceled right before I was supposed to fly out for it

I am a clinician that was interviewing for a clinical consulting role with a large company. The interview process began with a phone interview with a member of HR and was followed by two phone interviews with three VPs. The feedback that I received was “very good” and I was moved on to the final interview stage, where I would meet with the two heads of the department. They booked travel and sent me a confirmation. A few days later, they added in a last-minute phone interview two days before I was scheduled to fly out for the final interview. The evening after the last phone interview, I received an email from the HR manager’s assistant that they were “extremely sorry but they were going to have to cancel the interview” and the lead was to reach out to me the following day with more information. I waited for more information for two days with no response. I sent an email in response to the cancellation email, as well as to the HR manager directly, inquiring about the status of the interview and I have yet to hear a response. It has not been a week.

In total, I spoke with five individuals in four phone interviews over the course of 1.5 months, emailed consistently with the HR manager and her assistant, and travel was booked for a final interview. It was canceled two days prior with no explanation. This seems very unprofessional. Is this a normal practice? If the last phone interview went terribly, and I don’t believe that it did, why wouldn’t they just inform me that they no longer believed I was a candidate? Please help me understand!

There are all kinds of reasons that could explain this happening in general: They decided to hire another candidate, they put the position on hold, they’re rethinking what they need from the position/the person they hire,they developed concerns about your candidacy, they’re dealing with an unrelated crisis, or lots of other potential explanations.

But in your particular case, the fact that they added in a previously unplanned phone interview right before you were supposed to fly out, and then canceled right after that, says that they probably did at some point develop reservations about your candidacy. That could be because a higher-level decision maker who hadn’t been involved in the process earlier expressed skepticism, or because they’d had concerns all along about your skill in X or your approach to Y and they realized they should dig in more on that before asking you to fly out. It could be that they realized they really needed someone with strength in Z, which they hadn’t realized previously and thus hadn’t screened you for in the earlier stages so they wanted to dig into it before flying you out. Who knows.

But the thing I think you’re overlooking is that if they determined in that last phone interview that you weren’t as strong of a match as they’d hoped you’d be, they actually did the polite thing by canceling. Having you invest time in flying out, interviewing, and flying back (possibly 24 hours or more of your time) when they knew they weren’t likely to hire you would have been tremendously rude and inconsiderate. They were right to cancel the interview, even on short notice, if they knew hiring you wasn’t likely to result from it.

That said, they should indeed have given you more information — if not on the spot then certainly within a few days, especially when you followed up — and they’re in the wrong not to have done that.

You may also like:

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coworker asked me to pose topless, how do I stop people from offering condolences, and more was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

from Ask a Manager https://ift.tt/2xUgJf7

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smalltowngirlbigadventures · 7 years

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collab w/Jesica pt. 2

If you’ve been following our collab posts, this chapter sheds a lot more light on what the crap we are talking about with this job fair thing. :)

“Chapter 2 - Waterloo (I couldn’t escape if I wanted to…)”

(editors note: I made us listen to Waterloo by ABBA many times on this trip. I will post a link to that so you may put yourself in our shoes and enjoys the 70s splendor)

During my student teaching in rural Minnesota, I would often get asked what my plans were for when I graduated and where I would like to teach. Most of those who asked me told me to apply to sub within the district that they were in so that I could sub for them when they were gone. One person, however, told me something different that really stuck in the back of my mind. We had a workshop day with all of the elementary music teachers one day and by my luck I got to talking to one of the other teachers. After hearing that I was interested in teaching overseas she was quick to tell me that she herself had taught band in India for three years. She told me that it was the best experience of her life and that she loved every minute of it.

“You have to go to the University of Northern Iowa International Fair,” she said. This fair had sounded vaguely familiar to me. “You go in, knowing you’re going to have a job by the end of the weekend, but you just aren’t sure where… it is so exciting!” After the day was over, I brought up this job fair to my parents and they said something along the lines of, “oh, yeah… Jay (my cousin) went to that!” For those of you who are understandably unfamiliar with the UNI Overseas Recruiting Fair, it is in a way like any other convention or job fair that you would go to, but in a way also completely different. There is an exhibit hall with tables set up with schools from all around the globe. You go, meet them, and sign up for interviews in rooms in the attached hotel. You could have upwards of ten interviews in one day. Deadlines for accepting jobs can overlap and it can be a stressful time for some candidates. This was not necessarily the case for myself and Laura.

After deciding to go to the job fair, I quickly asked if Laura would like to accompany me, as I know that she had wanted to pursue international teaching as well. After both of us cutting it quite close to the deadline, and Laura even technically missing the original deadline, we found ourselves in a hotel in the middle of nowhere- Waterloo, Iowa. In our room, we looked up online the list of schools and job openings. We both had visions in mind of which job would wanted to get. Those visions were quickly shattered when we arrived the next morning and saw that both of our “dream schools” had filled their open music positions. The opening meeting had many people telling us to keep an open mind about where we would take interviews, and we soon found that is what we had to do.

In the exhibit hall our spirits were not lifted either. We found that even the positions still available were not necessarily available to us. Of the roughly dozen open music positions, were could really only apply to about five given the two year teaching requirement held by many. I signed up for the interviews that I could, for Venezuela, Mexico, Kazakhstan and one other one that I ended up cancelling and can not even remember where. Laura set herself up with two interviews as well, also for Venezuela and Mexico.

Our first day of interviews for Mexico and Venezuela went by very fast and left us, yet again, with our spirits a little low - especially after the rejection letters, or lack thereof, came into our inboxes. I still had one more interview for a general music position in Kazakhstan in the morning. Our night was filled with snacks from Target and Netflix streaming. I woke up early for my interview for a country that I had barely ever heard of and came very close to cancelling. Laura assured me that I should at least go and minimum take it as interview experience, so I did. It is crazy to think that this tiny, seemingly insignificant moment of going or not going changed the course of my life… how dramatic does that sound?

I instantly hit it off with the interviewer, who would himself soon be moving to Kazakhstan. He said that he very much enjoyed my drive and would feel 100% comfortable offering the general music positon to me. As great as that was to hear, he then told me that even though he felt this way, they had already offered the job to another candidate from another conference, and even if they were to turn it down, there were more qualified people who had interviewed than myself who would be offered the job before me.

After several emails from him updating me of the status of the position, I finally received one late that night, around 10pm. The first two people had turned down the job and I was now being offered this position. This made me both excited and weary. I was glad to be offered it and wanted to jump to take it, but I wanted to research myself first and talk it over with someone close to me. Unfortunately, Laura was fast asleep by the time I got this news, so I snuck out into the hall to talk it over with my mother. After a vast amount of research in the dark of my hotel room, I found that this school, and this city was somewhere I could really see myself living and working. So I sent back an email saying I would love to discuss it more in the morning.

I got a call back from my interviewer in the morning while we were on our way back. Laura driving, myself chatting and scribbling down information. The more and more that we talked, the more and more that I was sure I would be moving overseas this fall. I have been putting all of the pieces together over the past few months of passport, contracts, visas, doctors appointments, verifying documents, planning my curriculum and now it is about to become a reality. In just about a month I will be in front my new students for the first time. I will be teaching all ages from three years all the way through high school. Now, I begin to make my final preparations before my departure.

To be continued...

#travel #blog #teaching #collab #music

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paulrousseauwrites-blog · 7 years

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“50 Pounds for $200,000

Fifty Pounds for $200,000

Justin graduated from college a couple days ago, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. He waits at Eric’s front step, rolling on the balls of his feet. Eric is Justin’s new boss. Eric makes a little beat on his pants, glancing over some email and recipes online.

Justin rings the bell. Eric hurries to greet him.

“I am so glad you’re here,” Eric says. Justin follows a few inches behind. They walk directly to the basement door, as agreed. There is a handwritten sign taped to it reading ‘The Backyard.’

“Justin, right?” Eric makes sure. He says there were numerous other candidates. Justin nods, tucking in his upper lip. Eric’s eyebrows are shaven off, but the rest of his hair looks fantastic in a ponytail. Justin looks young with unkept scruff on his face and big, beautiful, coffee bean eyes. “I know how tough it can be to find a good job after school,” Eric says. “I got lucky in life. But don’t worry, your hard work will pay off here.”

He leads down a straight unfinished staircase. Justin goes pale, using the handrail until his first shoe sole touches the basement floor. It is covered in green turf, mocking the look and feel of grass. There is only enough square footage for one wooden picnic table, Eric’s furnace, and the type of scale found at a doctor’s office, with three variable sliding weights at the top. Eric motions for Justin to take a seat on the bench. Justin obeys.

“Welcome to your new office,” Eric says. He leans over the table. Justin is silent. He looks at the poking blades of worn plastic grass. “The décor was my mom’s idea,” Eric says. “She wanted to give me a taste of what is was like to play outside. You know how little girls put on make believe tea parties?” Eric asks.

Justin nods his head yes. He thinks about the tiara and scarf he would wear while babysitting his girlfriend’s niece, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She would tip the toy kettle spout over Justin’s cup, giving artificial weight to the pour. Justin would ask why nothing was really coming out. Pretend, she would say. And he would take a sip.

“I did make believe Backyard instead,” Eric says. “BBQs and picnics. I fed all the little critters that made their way down here.”

Eric is a self-taught chef. He pays recent college graduates $200,000 to live in his basement and gain fifty pounds eating the food he makes. And he feeds them constantly. Once they gain the weight, they get paid in cash, and then they can leave.

***

Sara walks into Justin’s bedroom, a week before graduation. Justin is playing guitar in a swivel chair with his back to the door, unaware anyone has entered. The window is open, permeating the space in a perennial spray. It has gotten dark since he first sat down, but he hadn’t noticed. Sara pops the light switch upwards on instinct as she crosses over the doorway’s threshold. Justin’s pupils retract.

“Sorry! I figured you were in the bathroom,” she says. Sara is a Management major with a minor in Entrepreneurship.

She wraps her arms around Justin’s neck as if her limbs were an oversized sweatshirt, crisscrossing at his throat. She catches a breath of his cologne. He doesn’t stop playing or turn to see who it is.

They hold there for a moment. Sara squeezes, applying a little pressure to the tops of her boyfriend’s shoulder blades, his collarbone. Justin picks his guitar, looking at the fret board binding and headstock inlays. She kisses his hair before releasing him to claim a patch of carpet near his legs.

Justin nods. Sara looks up, grinning as if she is out to dinner somewhere waiting patiently for her food to be plated, or in line for something worthwhile, like the opening night of a movie.

He plays a little longer. It sounds new, or improvised, too slow for Sara’s taste, but she watches anyway for a cue that his is finishing soon. Her expression looks stitched on like a sock puppet, like she has something to say, but the hand working her is refusing to interrupt. Justin places the instrument onto its designated stand, turns off the light, and sits back down.

***

Eric has moved on to bigger and better things now. No more BBQs and picnics for the rodents and insects. No more crumbs, bed sores, or pretend. “I’m going to start you off with my famous baked mac and cheese with charred short ribs mixed in, grilled asparagus in a chipotle aioli smear on the side, and for a sweet, two fudge brownie cupcakes. You don’t happen to like cream cheese whipped topping, do you?” Eric asks.

Justin nods yes, his eyebrows parked up higher than usual. Eric points parallel finger guns at Justin’s torso, one slightly behind the other. “I thought you might,” he says. He scampers upstairs, skipping every other step, then shuts The Backyard door.

Eric himself looks like he doesn’t eat at all. He is very thin for someone who enjoys cooking so much, with a small tongue and flat lips. He has many dietary restrictions due to disease. He dips spoons in sauces and dabs out his stubby tongue to taste them, as if it were a dare. Forty-five minutes later, he returns to The Backyard with Justin’s first taste of employee business.

***

“Hey you,” Justin says. He stretches his spine over the back of his chair.

“Hi. I know it’s later than usual but I wanted to eat quick and shower before seeing you,” Sara says.

“Thanks, stinky,” he says.

“Well I was moving around a lot today! I get sweaty when I drive,” she says.

“How did it go with all the stuff?” he asks.

Sara coils with potential energy before the hand controlling her mouth finally bursts. “I got a call back for a second round interview with Northgate!”

Justin blinks in triplets. His eyelashes are longer than most people’s. “That’s really really great,” he says.

“The only problem is that it’s at 11:00 and I have another interview with a different marketing firm at 9:30 so I’m nervous about timing. GPS says if I leave there by 10:00 I should be able to make it regardless of how heavy traffic is,” she says, flicking through maps on her cell phone.

“AM or PM?” Justin asks.

Sara doesn’t look up. “Really?” she laughs. “I get more and more worried knowing I’ll have to cut the first interview short if it starts dragging on too long. Is that rude? Will they call Northgate and tell them I was rude and then no one will hire me?”

“If you don’t care about the first one why don’t you just cancel it?” he prods.

“I can’t! I need the experience. Plus what if they pay six figures? It shouldn’t take more than a half an hour right?”

“Tell them you have to leave ahead of time.”

“I suppose. I need that job at Northgate, Justin. Everyday, the front desk lady blares Brittany Spears. They get paid time off, health, dental, Thursday night drink specials with the entire staff, and a nap room. All we talked about in the first interview was Harry Potter and how much we love caffeine.”

“That’s really something,” he says.

Sara lifts herself up into Justin’s bed, on her side with her head propped up in the palm of her hand. “I need that job so bad.”

***

Eric sets the table with enough food to feed a family of five. He is wearing an apron imprinted with the text ‘in dog beers I’ve only had one.’

“And?” he baits, opening his arms like someone waiting at an airport terminal, expecting a hug.

“Okay,” Says Justin. He closes his eyes.

“What are you waiting for?” Eric asks.

“I’m saying grace,” Says Justin. He waits for Eric to leave.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Eric says. He hands Justin a bib, legs firmly planted on the imitation grass. Each coupling blade looks like a pair of arms, budding out of the floor to hold him down.

“Why?” Asks Justin.

“You gotta wear the bib,” Eric says. “Wouldn’t want to make a mess of your nice shirt.”

Justin shakes his head no.

“It is in the job description,” Eric begins. “It could be a month or more till your next change of clothes.” Eric loves seeing the transformation happen. He loves watching his employees fill out and eventually outgrow their clothing, new flesh bursting at the seams. “You all balloon up like circus tents eventually,” he says. Eric puffs his cheeks out with air and slaps his belly. He laughs. “I can help if you’d like? Do you up in the back?”

Justin doesn’t respond. His eyelids draw closer together as if someone were slowly sewing them shut, pouring sand in his veins. The same devastation that used to haunt him when he’d get called on in class. A professor could simply announce Justin’s name in roll call to get him afflicted.

Eric repossesses the bib and ties it around Justin’s neck as if he were a newborn baby, in a perfect shoelace bow. “This way you can be as messy as you want and it won’t stink you up.” Eric takes a breath of Justin’s cologne. Both hearts are throbbing. Eric pats down the bib to flatten it. “There, ta da!” He waits, arms raised high above his ponytail. “Now… dig in!”

Justin shakes his head no.

“I always supervise the first bite of my employees,” Eric says. He gets a Polaroid camera ready. “Consider it an orientation exercise.”

Justin fumbles with the silverware, hesitating between utensils, between fork and spoon, hesitating in his posture, where he is in space, and how he got there.

“The fork is for the asparagus,” Eric says. He gapes his nostrils in short bursts.

Justin scoops a spoonful of macaroni and holds it tentatively above its dish. Everything steams. He brings the spoon closer to his split crescent lips and cools it softly.

“Eat up! No need to be coy. I made it just for you. Give your body the nutrients.”

Justin feels naked, like the first time he took off his shirt to go swimming. He gathers some of Eric’s noodles using his front teeth, raking them onto the cupped pallet of his tongue, miming the action of a miniature farming tool. Justin chews making as little noise as possible. He wipes away excess run-off cheese from of the corner of his mouth that bungeed and curled there. There is a camera flash.

“Excellent. Thank you for the sweet satisfaction,” Eric croons. He ruffles the top of Justin’s hair. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes,” he says. He races upstairs again lunging over many steps at a time. Justin keeps feeding alone.

***

“What are you thinking about?” Sara asks, covering her legs in Justin’s comforter.

Justin steers with his feet, swiveling in little increments to each side as if he were skiing in place on his chair.

“Music,” he says. “History.”

“Still waiting to hear back from grad school?”

“Yes,” he lies. The email came last week, regretfully informing him, wishing him every success in pursing further studies elsewhere.

“You are a shoe-in,” she says. “You are way too smart. You are too smart for your own good.” She takes her shirt off. “I can’t wait until we live together. I am jealous of Kevin and your sister.” She touches her hands to her temples. “I want to buy a house with you.”

“They are older than us,” he says. “And almost married.”

“I know, but they are so lucky,” she says.

“I know,” he says. “I’ll hear back soon.”

“You’re so talented. Nobody could possibly turn you down,” she assures.

Justin crawls into bed with her using mostly his forearms. She rolls over, now on her back in a bundle of pillows. They lie side by side.

***

Justin eats it all, as agreed. Eric comes down the stairs at the thirty-minute mark, ringing a cattle bell and grunting some sounds a pig might make with his mouth, “oink oink oink.”

He takes a seat on the same side of picnic bench next to Justin. Justin pats down his forehead with paper towel and just now notices that the ceiling is covered in navy blue construction paper with crudely painted on treetops and clouds.

“Curiosity is gluttony. To see is to devour,” Eric quotes. “This isn’t necessarily a job requirement, but how was the grub?”

Justin’s sock puppet is stitched shut. It was the tastiest food he has ever had, better than anything his parents or grandparents have ever made for him in his own childhood home, but he admits to nothing.

“That’s fine, if you want to get paid, if you want to leave, you’ll eat it all the same,” Eric says. “Time for weigh-in numeral uno.” Eric points with his thumb over his shoulder at the scale behind them, propped up against a patch of drywall. His breath smells like hamster bedding. “Your new best friend, as I’m sure you are aware,” he says. He bites down repeatedly on his own teeth. The skin in charge of covering his cheekbones tightens like a snare drum.

Justin’s stomach hurts. He blinks in triplets.

“Giddy up partner,” Eric says. “Hop on.”

Justin obeys, stepping up onto the scale, holding his torso. The turf stabs through Justin’s tennis shoes as he walks, gabbing at his feet. Eric says Justin is lucky he doesn’t make his employees crawl on all fours anymore. It became too painful for them to eat salty foods with their hands. Eric nudges the three varying brushed steel counterweight blocks, fingering the smallest in little jabs to get the best possible measurement. He bobs his shoulders, dancing a little, waiting for the bars to level. They recalibrate, and he does it again. Justin weighs 168 pounds.

“I think I see a little tummy forming already, bud! I really filled you up,” Eric says.

Justin is hunched over a little. Eric pens the number on the wall with a black permanent marker. He smiles, not showing teeth, thinning his already flat lips, stretching them longways until the color draws out completely.

“Weigh-ins will be at seven o’clock every evening,” Eric says. He is rich. His dad invented the Rubix Cube.

“I need the money,” Justin says.

“I know,” Eric says.

Justin needs the money for student loans, and property taxes, and cell phone bills, and engagement rings. Eric doesn’t need money for much of anything except ingredients.

***

“I’m awful. You must think I’m awful, or a snob,” Sara says, covering her eyes.

“Why would I think that?” Justin counters.

“I’m bragging about jobs and interviews and you’re still in limbo waiting to hear back from school. You’d tell me if you were getting antsy right?” she says.

“It’s fine. Really. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine,” he says. “You can’t be awful for just being excited.”

“Alright. You’re going to get accepted anyway.” Sara straddles her legs around Justin’s V-lined hips, drawing micro French curves all over his chest. “I just can’t wait to tell everyone about my boyfriend, the big sexy historian, teaching the world all sorts of history related things. You’ll be making bank, I’ll be making bank, we can buy a huge house, get married, go on tons of exotic vacations, throw money at each other, get unlimited data plans…”

“That’s painting quite the picture.” He rubs her thigh with his nails.

“I can’t wait to bask in our success,” she says. “We are such a power couple.”

The hand operating Justin’s mouth creeps open, as if wanting to say something. Sara closes in. They kiss instead. She retreats, then presses her lips quickly on his nose.

“I love you,” she says.

***

“To snack on tonight I was thinking shredded chicken enchiladas tossed in a green chile sauce, pan fried walleye fish tacos, and beef empanadas with cilantro rice and refried pinto beans on the side.”

Justin shrugs knowing he has no real say in the matter.

He steps off the scale and tries to find the warm spot back on the bench’s wood grain. Eric hustles upstairs, again bounding over two steps at a time. He stops in the doorway, and pirouettes. He pats a rhythm on his legs before saluting diagonally to Justin from the top of the staircase.

“Adieu, see you soon! I’ll bring a bucket with me after your next course, you know what they say, what goes up must come down.”

Justin waits for the privacy. He thinks about his girlfriend and her little niece. When they taught him how to pretend. He wishes Eric’s plates were empty like the toy kettle, that he just had to add artificial weight to them, and then take a bite or sip. Justin masks his head in his hands, twisting his face in an attempt to cry without making sound.

***

Sara is sleeping. Justin starts to climb out of bed, pressing his hands on the mattress as to gradually release the pressure that his body held next to hers. He doesn’t want to wake her up, he doesn’t know how to say I love you too right now. He checks his inbox instead. There is a reply from [email protected] with the subject bar ‘50 lbs. for $200,000.’

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inbonobo · 7 years

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#corruption #canada #cdnpoli #healthcare #mri The prominent Manitobans flagged for "potential preferential treatment" while accessing #MRIs haven’t necessarily done anything wrong but are emblematic of broader #mismanagement in the #health-care system, the province’s #auditor general told the Free Press Tuesday. Ninety-two high-profile donors, sports stars, politicians and senior Winnipeg Regional Health Authority officials found themselves on auditor general Norm Ricard’s confidential list, which was obtained by the Free Press Monday.

The reason, he said, is more likely administrative failings than disreputable attempts to game the system.

"There needs to be stronger, consistent processes," Ricard said in an interview.

Ricard first called for an overhaul of MRI management across the province in an unsparing report released nearly two weeks ago. He said some patients — professional athletes with private insurance and patients "with influence" — were being prioritized.

Of those receiving possible preferential access, the report notes roughly a third got scans the same day as they made their request, a dramatic difference from the average Manitoban’s 23-week wait. Half of the request forms for "patients of influence" also lacked priority codes, and in the cases where there was one "it often did not support the quickness of the scan," Ricard wrote.

Politicians reached by the Free Press Monday expressed surprise and dismay their names were on the list. They made very clear they had followed doctor’s orders and done nothing to try to get special treatment. Yet their files could have been flagged because they didn’t have a priority code, so the auditor general couldn’t confirm, without discussing an individual’s care with their doctors, their MRIs were warranted at the speed at which they got them.

They also could have been flagged because they were slotted in to fill no-shows or cancellations ahead of someone with a greater medical need, Ricard said.

"We’re concerned that process is how some persons of influence, as well as just regular citizens, are getting quicker access to MRIs… over and above people who are on the cancellation list," he said.

He noted in his report some patients made clear they "could be available with as little notice as 5-20 minutes," and one facility didn’t even have a cancellation list.

Arguably more worrisome is some prominent officials could have been receiving preferential treatment without even being aware.

"There’s no evidence that persons of influence demanded expedited access," Ricard said, but that doesn’t mean an intake clerk or a scheduling clerk didn’t recognize them and "perhaps gave them quicker access to the system than they should."

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is adamant that never happened.

Chief medical officer Dr. Brock Wright told the Free Press earlier this week the authority conducted its own internal audit into a small sampling of the people flagged by the auditor general, specifically the four senior WRHA managers, which included WRHA president and CEO Milton Sussman, who was the deputy minister of health at the time. That audit found administrative issues were to blame, not misuse of the system, Wright said. As a result, the WRHA is focusing on the report’s recommendations, not looking more closely at the names on the auditor general’s list.

In his weekly note to WRHA staff sent Tuesday, Sussman denied seeking preferential treatment and announced an internal investigation into the leak, calling it a "troubling and serious breach of (the Personal Health Information Act)."

"I want to be very clear — I did not seek preferential treatment, nor was told I was receiving it," Sussman wrote. "I did not believe I was receiving preferential treatment. None of the other senior leaders identified asked for or were told they were receiving preferential care either."

Sussman took issue with the auditor general’s use of the word "preferential" given the lack of conclusive evidence of any wrongdoing. He re-iterated the WRHA’s position it does not "condone preferred access to diagnostic or any health-care services for anything other than medical reasons." The WRHA is in agreement with the auditor general recommendations concerning wait lists and centralized policies, he said.

"We recognize the need to reinforce the use of priority codes to ensure those waiting for scans are prioritized according to clinical need," Sussman said in his note. "We recently issued a directive re-emphasizing the importance of assigning priority levels to patients requiring an MRI exam to ensure booking is based on clinical criteria and that there is no preferential treatment for patients."

The auditor general recommended the province and the regional health authorities standardize and strengthen processes around booking, cancellations and wait lists, as well as ensure intake clerks know clearly what is expected of them. But, Ricard notes, some aspects of standardization will be tricky to finesse.

"If they tried to fill (an empty slot), couldn’t fill it and there’s someone in the building that’s there, then it seems better for that slot to be filled than unfilled," Ricard said. "It’s a difficult thing, for sure."

[email protected]

(via Possible MRI queue-jumping is a product of health-care mismanagement: AG - Winnipeg Free Press)

After spending five days at the Brampton Civic Hospital, Jamie-Lee Ball was begging the nurses to discharge her.

Sitting in the hospital’s emergency room, the 24-year-old had collapsed in extreme pain from internal bleeding in her abdomen. The nurses had scrambled to find her a stretcher while she waited to be seen. Ball didn’t know it at that the time, but she would spend the entirety of her five-day stay at the hospital lying on that same stretcher — in a hallway.

“People go to the hospital and expect it to not be a vacation,” Ball said. “But to see the people being treated the way I saw them being treated … my mom made the comment that she felt like we were in a Third-World country.”

Seven weeks earlier, Ball had undergone major abdominal surgery. When she arrived at Brampton Civic Hospital’s emergency room on March 25 at 10:30 a.m., she was suffering from complications due to that procedure. While she was waiting to be seen, a “Code Gridlock” announcement on the PA system revealed that the hospital was at capacity and rooms were no longer available.

Ball — and more than a dozen other patients who needed them — would not get a room. After being seen by a doctor, she was stationed in a narrow hallway.

After two gruelling days surrounded by cancer patients and even a woman who had just given birth, the nurses had good news for Ball. She was ecstatic to learn she was finally getting a room in the neurology department.

“Really it’s a spot in the hallway with a sign on the wall that says ‘Hallway patient #1,’ ” Ball explained, adding that five other patients followed her there.

Being stationed there was the worst part of her stay, Ball said. Dementia and other mental-health patients were allowed to wander in the hallways, she said, and frequently passed by her stretcher yelling at the top of their lungs.

Even a trip to the washroom wasn’t easy. Nearly unable to stand, Ball had to leave her stretcher and make a painful two-minute walk down the hallway to a public washroom, dragging her IV pole behind her. When she got there, she had to wait in line with hospital visitors and other patients.

“Honestly, it was shocking to me,” said Ball, who was discharged without ever having a room. “It almost sounds like a fake story.”

Ball isn’t alone in facing arduous wait times in Ontario hospitals. According to the latest auditor general report, only 30 per cent of patients at three Ontario hospitals were transferred from the emergency room to acute-care wards in under eight hours — the target set by the province’s Ministry of Health. Instead, some languished in emergency rooms for 28 hours before getting a bed.

Dr. Naveed Mohammad, vice-president of medical affairs at the William Osler Health System, of which the Brampton Civic Hospital is a part, said in an emailed statement that the hospital has seen an “exceptionally high number of patients in its Emergency Department over the last number of months.”

“We are trying to accommodate all patients and do use unconventional spaces for patient rooms, including the use of hallway beds, during these extremely busy times,” Mohammad wrote.

The hospital was built to attend to only 250 patients in a 24-hour period, the doctor said, but often sees more than 400. It’s still struggling with overcrowding despite the William Osler Health System receiving $25 million from the provincial government to help fix the problem. The opening of another hospital —Peel Memorial Centre for Health and Wellness Campus — in the city west of Toronto has yet to yield any significant results because it does not offer overnight beds.

Ontario Minister of Health Dr. Eric Hoskins admits there’s “more we can do” to open up beds for patients. Since 2013, 860 new beds have been added in hospitals across the province. Nearly $500 million was invested in Ontario hospitals this year alone, Hoskins wrote in an emailed statement.

Despite the investment, patients like Ball continue to endure long wait times for beds. Hoskins said he’s looking into Ball’s case to ensure “patients are treated with dignity and respect.”

“No patient or their family should have to deal with a situation like this,” he said.

(via np)

#healthcare #canada #manitoba #mri #norm ricard #preferrential treatment #preferential treatment #ontario #wait times #waiting times

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