Pandemic Parables: Behind the Scenes
Pandemic Parables: Behind the Scenes
Thursday June 11th 2020
I have been discovering things that have been going on behind the scenes in the hospital in Frederick, where I am working as a Resident Chaplain until the end of August.
One was in the bowels of the basement.
Let me explain.
At Christmas the chaplains acquired an electric tea kettle. We weren’t allowed to have one before and I was never able to discover why. The answer was way above my pay grade.
But the previous banning made the gaining a delicious thrill.
I travel with an kettle in the trunk of my car and use it frequently when I am on the road at Storytelling festivals and the like.
An English woman hates to be caught short when it comes to a boiling hot cuppa.
As I use a kettle incessantly I was happy to be the one in charge of filling up our new prize.
This turned out to be a more difficult task than I expected.
I couldn’t find an ordinary spigot anywhere.
The water in the taps in the restrooms only comes out when you wave your hand in front of a magic spot and only lasts for short spurt - which is not conducive to kettle filling.
There is a wall contraption to replenish drinking bottles with filtered water, which is a couple of football fields away near the front lobby.
And there was a regular bend over and slurp water fountain near the Chaplain’s office with a high arc of a jet.
Aha! The answer!
I discovered the best way to capture this water was with my old, tall, blue, plastic jug with a lid.
Stay with me folks!
All went well for a time. I regularly and happily trotted out to fill the jug until one day I realized that the water wasn’t clear, it was decidedly murky.
Algae looking murky.
Green round the gills.
How long had it been like that and I hadn’t noticed?
Had I poisoned the chaplains?
Had boiling the water been enough to stave off premature death?
I scrubbed out the jug.
From then on I made the trek to the front lobby frequently, armed with my trusty blue container.
My Fitbit daily registered 10,000 steps in no time.
Then construction started and the passage with the abandoned fountain was a no go area for everyone until a few days ago.
Now groups of people are wandering around admiring the changes.
I suddenly realized I should save future fountain drinkers from inadvertent disaster and inform maintenance of their possible impending doom.
I headed for the basement and the works-op office, took a wrong turn in the labyrinthine maze below, and got lost.
Very lost.
And I had no breadcrumbs with me.
I passed by curtained off areas that to my surprise revealed glimpses of an abundance of plastic shrouded hospital beds, many that were already made up.
I presumed this hidden supply was preparation for a wave of virus patients that we continue to pray will not come now or in the future.
I trudged past open steel doors that held a myriad of hissing gurgling pipes and mechanical wizardry.
Then I walked by a room that had many huge, white bags piled on top of each other. From a few of these, soiled cloth gowns spilled.
I recognized them as the PPE that had been made to replace the disposable garments that seemed to disappear nationwide at the beginning of Coronavirus.
Even though I didn’t see machines I realized that this must be the laundry.
I knew that gowns were being made. I had seen a few nurses wearing them, but I hadn’t thought much about the logistics of cleaning them.
I did vaguely know that hospital used to have a designated laundry. Then they started to send sheets out to an outside facility and began to use disposable gowns. The in-house laundry was no longer needed and was dismantled.
However the commercial facility couldn’t cope with the additional work of cloth PPE.
I had heard that somehow the hospital had fixed the problem and the gowns were being washed in-house.
I presumed the laundry was back.
This must be it.
By chance I turned the right way, stumbled upon the maintenance office, told of my water fountain fears, and, with their direction, headed back upstairs.
Later I passed by the volunteer conference room. There, on the enormous table that can seat twenty four well fed people, were several huge, white bags. The same laundry bags as downstairs but with clean gowns. The volunteer department secretary and a fellow worker were folding and folding and folding a never ending supply of cloth PPEs on top of that huge table. Then they stuffed them in bags to be distributed to the medical teams.
“What an incredible job you are doing” I gasped, my eyes agog.
“What a huge amount of work.”
Without breaking her rhythm the secretary responded:
“We’ve been doing something with these gowns for weeks. I used to be a master seamstress so I came up with a basic pattern. Then for eight hours a day for many days a group of us were ironing sheets. We gave those sheets and the patterns to cutters. Then the pieces were distributed to people in the community who could sew. Four thousand seven hundred gowns were cut out.”
“Four thousand seven hundred?” I gasped “That’s incredible!”
“And five thousand face shields, and five hundred goggles,” the secretary continued.
“The hospital has a new annex a few miles away that used to be a State Farm office. We took over the cafeteria, which is huge. We had plenty of room to social distance. It’s been great fun. We’ve all really enjoyed the work and the company.”
Her friend nodded in agreement smiling happily.
I noticed that the gown she was folding had a pretty blue and white trim around the neck.
“How lovely” I said pointing it out. “What a pretty addition.”
“At first the volunteers didn’t have binding and so they used what they had at home, said the friend. “So quite a few of them have a touch of something around the neck. But some have appliqués on them. Occassionally volunteers went all out and added rabbits or lambs. Something to make the nurse smile when they opened up the gown. Something different.”
I came by the volunteers office the next day at noon. They were still folding. The lovely volunteer director had joined them.
“What a never ending task” I said. “You are all incredible!
“They use nine hundred of them a day,” said the director. “So that’s how many we are folding. We’ve been at it since eight this morning and we’ll keep on going until the end of the day. And we’ll be doing it again tomorrow. And the next day.
Of course at some point the volunteers will be allowed back in and then we’ll have to go back to our former jobs. But until then we fold.”
“I saw the bags of used gowns downstairs in the basement,” I said.
“Yes,” responded the secretary. And do you know they clean them all in one ordinary sized washing machine and an industrial sized drier? They have people running those two machines twenty four hours a day.”
I left slacked jawed.
I saw the maintenance man that I’d met in the basement.
“I went up and looked at that water fountain,” he said. “It’s not used much, even before the hallway was closed down, so it’s got a build up of acid, of minerals. That’s what was causing the green tinge. It’s not harmful - but I cleaned it out anyway.”
I thanked him, relieved I had not poisoned the chaplains.
Somehow the fountain, the laundry, the volunteer office, and the sewing community all started to flow together in my mind.
Like the fountain, I realized, we have had fears of death and doom that haven’t come to pass.
Impossible problems have been resolved.
The PPE situation looked dire. But thanks to the ingenuity, creativity, and generosity of so many people in this wonderful community working behind the scenes, a solution was found.
A friend of mine often quotes a saying from her Quaker background.
“Way will open.”
May that be true for all of us.
May the fears of the future that have rocked our worlds and kept us awake turn out to be as harmless as sediment.
In every situation where there seems to be no way, may doors swing wide giving us a hope and a future.
May we come to know in new ways that the Lord of the universe, who loves us more than we could dream or imagine, is working behind the scenes of our lives. He wants us to be fulfilled, to be fully alive, even more than we do.
And that means a way will indeed open.
And it will be good.
Amen.
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