Monday night. Here’s a medical dilemma for you: gf has a condition that is not fatal but results in really bad complications. If we go to the local clinic, they may or may not be able to help (most likely not), and we may or may not catch covid-19 (also most likely not). It’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation… We’ll give the sodium/potassium rebalancing at home one more try before heading to this town’s clinic for a blood test. Everything carries some risk, now more than ever.

Today was good, except for the part with gf’s health flare that spooked both of us. We spent the second half of the day carefully monitoring the symptoms, sitting by the lit fireplace, playing video games, and eating chocolate bunnies in a late Easter celebration. She and I are doing well and back to normal – if only we could figure out how to help her heal…

Have I mentioned that the world has gone mad? Because it’s getting even madder. Trump has created “The committee to reopen America,” which consists of his friends and cronies. Two of the seven members are his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner. (Hello, banana republic.) None of the seven have any experience in medicine or epidemiology. If they force individual states to reopen (or at least convince Trump’s voters to come on out and shop), all the sacrifices will have been for nothing, and there’ll be many more waves…

Meanwhile, California, Oregon, and Washington created the “Western States Pact” to pull their efforts and resources. For years now, folks joked about the so-called Cascadia that those three states could form. If and when the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. The US is losing prestige and reputation with every passing day: nurses have to wear PPE made of garbage bags; PPE shipments for other countries get intercepted and sent to the US; the president is an angry orange clown who just started claiming that no one had warned him about the virus in January/February. When the dust settles, the US will no longer be the world’s leader, and a lot of states (such as CA/OR/WA) might have serious grounds to politely secede from the union. Strange times…

Pictures from a Detroit hospitals show bodies being double-stacked and left to lie in random rooms. There’s been no official comment from the hospital’s administrators. In Ecuador, more than 800 bodies have been recovered from their homes, and there’ll likely be more. As of right now, there are 23,675 cumulative deaths in the US and 781 in Canada. New York alone has more than 10,000 deaths. I haven’t been looking closely, but I think we’re approaching ~2,500 deaths per day in the US…

With all the health scares, the sci-fi novel word count went up by just 313 words today – but hey, that’s 313 more than there had been. 300 days of that and you have yourself a novel, eh?