Grigory Lukin.com

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck.

Last night, gf started showing classic heart attack symptoms – fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath, feeling like someone was sitting on her chest. We drove to the nearest hospital (40 minutes away, given how remote this town is) and checked her in at 1am, with just two doctors and a single nurse.

It took some convincing to avoid getting placed in the covid unit. (With her asthma, catching it would be a death sentence.) They didn’t say how many covid patients they had, but all the protocols were in place: hand-sanitizing upon entry, masks and PPE the moment docs suspected a possible covid case, etc. They ran an EKG, didn’t find anything, and hooked gf to a heart monitor for the night before telling me to leave. The waiting rooms are all closed, so I spent the night in my car. (That’s precisely why I always carry a blanket and a sleeping bag in my trunk!) Got a luxurious three hours of sleep, while gf got just 30 minutes – she could barely breathe.

In the morning, she got a super-nice doctor, equally nice Quebec nurses who actually paid to download a translation app in order to communicate, an X-ray, and a full battery of blood tests. They didn’t find anything obvious, but they’re keeping her for observation for one more day. I spent the day in the parking lot – pacing, reading, texting her. I’d forgotten to drop off the phone charger, so her phone battery slowly started dying while I dropped off the charger at the reception. (No visitors allowed, even for non-covid cases.) They said they’d sterilize it for an unknown amount of time (minutes? hours?) before delivering it to her.

It’s 3:30pm – I drove home, showered, ate, and I’m forcing myself to catch some sleep. Once gf is discharged, I’ll drive back up for her. The worst part, aside from the horrifying health scare, is that after five weeks on the run, we ended up going to a hospital that has some coughing people, not all of whom are patients. (Though I suppose that could be said about any hospital these days.) All our hiding, all our precautions will have to be reset. Once we’re reunited, we’ll have to operate on the assumption that we got exposed, and spend at least two weeks self-monitoring for symptoms. All that matters is that she is alive and well…

Thursday evening. A mildly stressful day today: gf finally agreed that we’ll need to go to the hospital (but which one?) because her health issues can’t be fixed simply by mixing the perfect electrolyte cocktail. We’ll wait till we’re back in Ontario, or go to the local Quebec clinic sooner if we must, but the emergency room won’t do anything unless she’s in the middle of a flare-up…

I also learned that the education credential assessment miiiiight get accelerated if I procure digital copies. Hmm. Mixed feelings on this one: it’s great news, but it also means I’ve wasted a month by not emailing them sooner. On the upside, that does save me six-eight months, so huzzay! Next step: taking my own fingerprints for an FBI background check.

On top of all that, a work colleague disturbed my staycation with something they did… And to top it all off, I slept too long and got up at 12:20, so that’s half a day gone. Not a happy camper, though Stardew Valley helps take the edge off a bit.

World war oil still goes on – the prices hit an almost 52-week-low point earlier today before having a small bounce up. Trump’s deal with OPEC+ has failed to produce any results. 22 million Americans are jobless now, and that should get reflected in the stock market aaaaany minute now. Meanwhile, Amazon’s stock hit an all-time high of $2,461. Ho hum. I always expected it to go very high (internal goal: $5K; stretch goal: $10K) but it’s unusual to see it move so fast after two years of hanging just below $2K.

I’m a news junkie in case you haven’t noticed, but even I am finding it hard to keep up anymore. The grotesque stupidity keeps on coming… The mayor of Las Vegas begged the governor to reopen casinos because less than 0.5% of Nevadans died of covid. Can’t make that up… Not even looking at the news today after that.

Cumulative death total in the US as of right now: 34,450. In Canada, 1,259. Only 61 words written today.

Take care of yourselves, fellow hermits.

Wednesday night. Gf’s health is rocking back and forth: just when we think we’re close to figuring out the electrolyte misbalance, it hits again. Not as bad this time as in the past, but still worrying.

She and I spent about 12 hours last night and today looking at AirBnB listings that wouldn’t qualify as the banned short-term rentals (so at least four weeks), and the main requirement was location. We need to be in Ontario if gf requires medical attention: health cards from other provinces are honoured, but there’s always red tape. We finally ended up finding a luxurious condo being rented out for next to nothing ($780 USD for four weeks!) in Niagara Falls. (The Canadian side, obviously.) This pandemic is such a strange way to explore Canada… One upside (aside from amazing amenities) is that it’s right next to a hospital that has multiple specialists. If there’s a bona fide medical emergency, we’ll be ready.

Gf got bored and cut my hair last night, and it looks pretty funny – not unlike The Rock wearing a turtleneck. If and when this pandemic ends, folks will either start rocking homemade haircuts or grow their hair (and facial hair) out in weird and exotic ways.

Earlier today, I made a trip to a local grocery store. It was in the local village, different from the store in the adjacent town. The store was wide open, and though there were duct-taped direction arrows on the floor, a ban on children, and mandatory hand sanitation at the entrance, it was almost like shopping before the plague. So strange to consider how much the things for granted gladden us when we can get them back. It was almost as strange to see a grocery store without any sales. The prices were on the high end of reasonable, and occasionally above that threshold. I was in a rush, trying to avoid anyone else while I was the store’s sole shopper (slow day, I suppose), and didn’t notice that the yogurt I bought had passed its “best before” date four days prior, or that one of the cheese packages had been pierced. Oh well. We’ll just eat them first, I guess.

As of right now, the cumulative US death toll is 28,628; 1,011 in Canada. New York added about 3,000 more deaths to its total after deciding the undiagnosed deaths may have been due to the virus. The US hit approximately 2,500 new deaths today. The daily death toll inches closer and closer to the 9/11 totals. I hope at least one media outlet will have the guts to point that out when the time comes.

Zero words on my new novel: the outing to the store, the laundry day, the sterilization of groceries, and the hours spent on AirBnB drained me completely.

Earlier today, at yet another daily press conference circus, Trump floated the idea of adjourning the US Congress, something no president has ever done. It’s always hard to tell whether he’s serious or trolling. If this was an attempt to distract the media from his failures in the pandemic handling, then he succeeded: the political social media can’t talk about anything else. If, on the other hand, he was serious about adjourning Congress and defunding the WHO…

I remember my decision to move from the US to Canada. I’d been set on leaving since early 2016, when I saw a few too many disturbing trends. Three years and five attempts later (the UK, Poland, Canada, Australia, then Canada again), I received an internal transfer offer from an old colleague whom I’d never actually met. It wasn’t a hard choice, but it wasn’t a happy one, either. Leaving everything behind, taking a massive pay cut, abandoning my Search & Rescue crew, all for a chance of becoming a resident in a saner country. If I’d stayed in Seattle, I would’ve had more creature comforts, but I would’ve remained on a demoralized team in a doomed department, surrounded by high-strung and overworked colleagues, stuck in an expensive city filled with gloom and endless unsolvable problems. In the end, the Canadian team won me over with the simplest, most rudimentary emotional appeal, and that was all it took. A month after I crossed the border, my old department got disbanded: most of those who stayed had to start all over. It was a strange and muddy choice. Not good or bad, but tactical or strategic: limited immediate rewards and life under an incompetent angry clown, or a chance to spend the rest of my life in a civilized country, however imperfect it may be. I often wonder how different my life would’ve been had I stayed in Seattle, had that simple emotional appeal failed to work on me. I can almost feel my other self going through the same motions, running the same routine, riding the same bus to work, and going mad with anxiety that has neither an easy answer nor a release valve. I wonder if that other me can even imagine how very strange my life has become.

Good night, y’all.

Tuesday evening. The beginning of our second month of hiding out, regardless of how you define one month.

Gf woke up feeling unwell but feels a bit better now. We’re still experimenting with the electrolyte balances – one last try before going to a potentially virus-filled clinic. Otherwise, just a simple status quo day of hanging out and low-key relaxing. I’ve started watching the Handmaid’s Tale, and it feels strangely enjoyable to watch a show about a different, worse dystopia while living in the dystopia we have here and now.

This is either a slow news day or everyone else is getting the point of dystopian new overload. More people are dying. Current cumulative death toll in the US is 25,726; 901 in Canada. 643 new words in my little novel.

Stay safe out there. (Or in there, because you really shouldn’t go out.)

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?

Sunday evening. Hard to believe it’s already been a full month. It feels like the call from my gf (“we must leave – now”) happened only yesterday. I mentioned this many times before, but still: it feels altogether too strange to compare our cushy life in AirBnB getaways with the news reports of creepy (and creeping) chaos just outside.

Last night was excellent. We feasted on pizza and wine and chocolate, attempted to start a fire in the condo’s fireplace (it was only partially successful), and watched a movie, followed by a bath. (If I only kept my mouth shut instead of getting snarky at the very end, it would’ve been a perfect evening.) The new electrolyte drink mix seems to be working: gf is enjoying more energy and less dizziness than at any point since we’d left Toronto.

The world is still a mess. On the upside, Italy is down to less than 500 deaths per day. On the downside, today is Easter, and a lot of churches in the US are bringing together hundreds, if not thousands of people for the religious services. Utterly defiant and mostly old – there’ll be a new wave of infections caused just by these church services. (Some reports suggest that in some states, the police hung out in the parking lots and did nothing.) A woman in India drowned her five children. The White House skipped the daily briefing (useless though it may be) for the second day in a row. It’s unclear whether Trump is out golfing or feeling unwell… Boris Johnson seems to have fully recovered after facing 50-50 odds. Let’s see if this will finally get him to trust doctors and scientists more.

Finally making a little progress on my long-neglected sci-fi novel. Just 642 words today (30,116 total) but that’s a start. Here is hoping other holed-up folks are working on something productive while the pandemic rages on.

Saturday night. All is well and getting better: gf and I had a breakthrough last night. (“We’re supposed to be on the same team.”) Things are getting better, at least in this little corner of the world.

Fun thing about food-stockpiling for worst-case scenarios: there’s never enough protein. The local grocery store was out of ground beef last time I was there: I’ll see if they have anything meat-like next time I go there. We have more than enough food to stay put at least two more months, but it’s mostly carbs, and what protein we have is split (unfavourably) with saturated fat. Neither of us is on keto, so that’s not helping. Bottom line: we’ll survive but we won’t become bodybuilders anytime soon.

There are 20,641 cumulative deaths in the US as of right now, and 654 in Canada. The US has crossed the point of 2,000 deaths per day. About 10 days ago, a friend of mine on facebook told me the US would never cross 3,000 deaths per day. (One 9/11, rounded up.) Looks like I’ll win that argument, though I’ll hate being right in that particular instance… In other world news, Krakatoa has erupted again, as if this year wasn’t weird enough already. Ebola is back in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This will be a very strange and painful year.

In personal news, I’m going to try and dust off my old sci-fi novel draft: last time I worked on it was two years ago. Let’s see if I can log 2,000 words per day…

Friday night. Things aren’t improving with gf. Spent the night talking about our communication styles, doing Tarot readings on our relationship (her hobby, not mine), and reverse-engineering the electrolyte formulas of health supplements, as one does. Still unclear how this will end.

About 2,000 more dead in the US. Over 1,000 in one day in France – their highest ever. Almost 1,000 in the UK. Boris Johnson appears to have recovered – hopefully that’s not the headfake recovery that lands patients back in the ICU sicker than before. There are mass graves being dug on Hart Island in New York. Some claim that’s standard, and the island is usually used for pauper funerals. Others are saying these are legitimate mass graves. Nobody much cares about the truth of the matter – it’s all about the horrifying visuals.

Worst Friday night ever?..

Thursday night. Well, at least we’re talking again. Had a good sit-down talk about the importance of communicating exactly how you’re feeling instead of being a stoic badass on the outside (her), as well as not being a panicky dumbass (me). The fate of the relationship is still unclear, but at least this is some good day-over-day improvement.

Gf had another health scare today, on the verge of passing out… This is a strange time: if we drive to the hospital (40 minutes away), we’ll run the risk of catching covid19 in their waiting room. If we don’t drive to the hospital… Well, gf’s condition is bad but not life-threatening – at least according to her. We spent the evening reading studies on CSWS (cerebral salt-wasting syndrome) and the impact of long-term dehydration: there’s a lot of counter-intuitive science, and chugging a glass or two at once is far less efficient than sipping a few ounces every 30 minutes. We’ll try to do hydration and sodium intake smarter, not harder.

There’s some kind of religious holiday tomorrow. Passover? Easter? Never really paid any attention to that stuff. (In fact, still not entirely sure if Christmas is on the 24th or the 25th… Folks take 36 hours off for their alleged celebrations.) Either way, there’ll be an awful lot of Twue Believers (TM) flocking to their favourite megachurches, even despite all the warnings and admonitions, especially in the south. Especially in Florida. A whole lot of clusters will be traced back to this upcoming weekend.

Another 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment. That’s 17 million total thus far, making the Y axis of all the prior charts utterly ridiculous. Congress passed a $2 trillion (USD) bill to get some money going, but only $1,200 each will go to taxpayers. Not a whole lot, considering what all the other countries are doing. The stock market has been inching higher these last few days. No more 7% downswings. I think that’s a dead-cat bounce. Almost 2,000 more Americans died over the past 24 hours: the new total is 16,719 as of right now. (509 in Canada.) This will likely get worse. Wall Street appears to be convinced the worst is all behind us now. There’ll be no trading due to the holiday tomorrow, so it’ll be a long 3-day weekend for stocks. OPEC+ has just agreed to cut their oil production by over 20%, so the oil prices might bounce up by Monday: I have some money riding on that.

Almost forgot to mention: my car has been fixed. Reddit thought it was either the battery or the alternator. CAA drove up again (only an hour spent waiting in the snow!), confirmed the alternator was fine, and gave my battery another boost. I caaaaarefully drove to a mechanic six miles away and got a new battery in no time. (The price seemed reasonable, too.) Since I was in the actual town, I went to the SAQ and spent 10 minutes standing in line outside: they had rather strict rules that included “you touch it, you buy it” and 2-meter distancing, which everyone followed once inside, and abandoned once they got past the clerks’ field of vision. They didn’t have the Portuguese Dao wine that gf likes, but they did have some exotic cider I’d never encountered before.

The town’s grocery store was a whole different story: no one was allowed inside, and cars lined up in impromptu lanes, with shopping carts and homemade posters and “danger” tape separating them. The concept was ingenious: a guy would walk up to each car and give the driver the cellphone number of one of the store clerks. Then the store clerk would talk to you on the phone, picking your order for you as they went. You’d pick up the order outside once they called your name. I chatted with a fellow named Morris, whose English wasn’t very good: given their low stock (no baking soda, spinach, or ground beef), that made for an interesting conversation. I’m still not sure if Morris screwed me over or if that was an honest mistake, but later on, at home, I figured out that the $107 bill for the groceries was so high because he billed me for eight bags of tangerines instead of just one. I want to think that was an honest mistake, but 1 and 8 are nowhere near each other on the keypad… Low-key misdemeanors in the time of pandemic, eh?

Stay healthy, y’all.