Dear Readers,

I swear. I’m going to end up catching the Rona and dying all because I have to go to doctor appointments due to my chronic health conditions. I’ve had appointments on back to back Fridays and I have another one on Friday the 20^th. When I went to my GPs office on Friday the 6^th, as is usually the case, I was met at the door by a nurse who took my temperature and asked me a series of screening questions before I was admitted into the lobby. But once I got inside, the lobby was overflowing with people. There was no way to socially distance. Furthermore, quite a few of the patients had their masks pulled down under their chins. The office keeps the door locked, and so one of the employees will unlock it to let people in and out. While I was sitting there (for about 30 minutes), one of the employees left the door unlocked which meant that four or five people came in, some without masks, and none of them got screened at the door.

At yesterday’s visit, I had to go to a different doctor’s office that is in a medical building, unlike my GP which is in its own building. I had to ride the elevator, though thankfully there were only two other people in there with me. This office doesn’t do any screening (though to be fair, they don’t see people that are “sick” in the traditional sense. It’s a pain management doctor). People were wearing masks, which is good, but the lobby was overflowing within twenty minutes of me getting there. Part of this isn’t entirely the fault of the office, as the DEA isn’t relaxing the rules regarding pain management doctors and so they cannot do telehealth visits like other doctors can do.

Any time I leave the house, I wear a mask (I have some N-95s to wear to doctor visits) and also some EMS gloves. And I sanitize my hands once I take the gloves off too. I have two medical conditions that, singly put me in the high-risk category, but when you add them together, creates a perfect storm for a bad outcome if the Rona comes calling. This is why I have to be so careful and why I have been so careful over the past several months. Despite all that caution though, I still have to go to my doctor appointments and so that is the most likely vector of infection for me, particularly when offices are not taking adequate precautions. It is getting bad in Texas. We’ve topped one million total cases, and our daily case counts are higher than even the surge we had this summer which followed the re-opening of the state.

The historian in me, who has long been fascinated with pandemics and their impact on the course of human history, has found this whole situation to be of great academic interest. I’ve been following the Rona since the middle of January, before our own government was talking about it. This situation is not only an interesting study of the impact of pandemics in the modern age, but it gives very good insight into human behavior in disasters. One hundred years from now, assuming the world and mankind is still here, historians, economists, psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists will be studying this just as the biologists and virologists. When I have the time, I’m going back to read and watch some of the very early coverage of the virus. So much has happened since then that I have a hard time remembering those days of early February.

While waiting on more rejections for Molly’s Song, I am working on my third novel. It has been slow going. Lately, I’ve found myself getting more and more distracted by any number of things from cats to shiny objects. I think this is more due to the fact that I haven’t written anything new in a year as I’ve spent the past eleven months editing Molly’s Song. It is going to take me a while to get back into my rhythm again. I’ll get there eventually and I hope to have the first draft of this book finished before the end of the year.

And on that note, I hope to have some publishing news for you soon as it relates to Molly’s Song.

Until next time, friends, take care of yourselves. And each other.

L.H.