Where are you Now?
Last time, it was so hard to tell up from down — having nowhere and everywhere to be, just floating. Or falling? Without gravity, it was impossible to know and eventually, I stopped looking — mostly just felt limbs that didn’t work as limbs ought to; stretching in multiple directions without me moving with them. The sensation of feeling both stuck within and distanced from one’s own body isn’t familiar for the majority of people — although for a moment in the pandemic’s onset, I think there was a collective consideration of it, which has long faded.
But this time is different as I have a container; I can stretch and hop and know how far I am from its edges. Or perhaps even a little past them. I can tell up from down because my limbs naturally fall in a certain direction every time — even when they’re scraped, I don’t worry about them floating away or whether they’ll be useful again. Counter-intuitive though it may sound, to me a container has been freeing, in contrast to last time having none and blindly fighting to keep everything.
From what I can tell, the difference is primarily three parts:
1) Somewhere I want to be.
2) Remotely suits me very much.
3) Most of ‘remotely’ is learning from people whose careers have been spent up close and personal with very real human frailties. Not for all teams, but mine works closely with clinical staff for whom life, health and quality of care can be directly linked to a 3-year history of names, diagnoses and medical atttention for >2 million patients, updated nightly - and I won’t soon forget my 3rd month in, seeing Covid numbers enter source reports and drastically alter our dashboards. They rarely take for granted what many (unintentionally, but often) seem to and excel in a certain, decidedly unclinical manner of observation and interaction with others, across a wide population of people. They call it Population Health — I call learning about this scope of managed care, including caring for myself, where I am now. I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else when even my being a privacy freak can be applied toward ensuring PHI masking, which is 100% mandatory. Imagine that: mandatory. Here, small things that matter to me and I admire aren’t too much and most days, though maybe not all day, I’m very glad for it.