Last Saturday's storm seems to have precipitated a deleterious compounding situation at area hospitals, both rural and urban, whose emergency departments are seeing unprecedented numbers of emergency admissions partially a result of the electrical grid failure during that ferocious storm. There is an existing shortage of nursing staff in all hospitals. People are feeling burnt-out because of the special demands of the pandemic plus the fact that so many health professionals have had their own very personal bouts with COVID-19.

 

The province has capped wage increases for nurses who are stressed and fed up with the demands of their profession and many have left their positions leading to an extreme shortage. Now, with inadequate staff on hand hospital emergency departments are under deep duress to the point where they have issued an alert that they're barely managing to cope and should the situation continue, that coping will come to a screeching halt.

 

Some people whose health conditions required the use of equipment operating through the electrical grid realized an interruption in their coping therapies leading to a steep dip in their health balance. Things most people could never imagine. The ER MDs are sounding the alarm now, and it isn't a pleasant sound to anticipate since no one knows when an accident or an unforeseen event could lead to an emergency visit, only to be turned away.

 

 

We're so fortunate that all we have to cope with at this point are insignificant little annoyances; that's what the storm last Saturday and its aftermath meant as far as we were inconvenienced; no power for less than 24 hours. Other people in the city are still awaiting the return of their power. Thousands of homes sustained damage to their hydro stacks and lines and the equipment linking them to the grid must be repaired before their power is restored. Our distress as nature lovers over the loss of so many trees in our forest will be remedied in time by nature. And we go about our daily routines, thankful that we have those routines.

Irving is still struggling to remove the stump of the Yew tree that he finally had to cut down last week. Yesterday he used an electrical saw, then a precipitating saw, and finally today, an old fashioned tough hand saw with a handle shaped like a bow, and of all the saws, it worked the best. I wanted him to just leave the damn thing; I would plant around it and eventually the hostas he brought home yesterday would mature and cover the presence of the stubborn old hard-as-nails trunk whose protruding height was only about a foot. He took a break now and again to cross the street to talk with Melanie, looking after her precocious little grandson.

 

 

I baked a cheesecake and put on a chicken soup to simmer for dinner, made some bread dough, and did some light general clean-up, though Irving had done the vacuuming earlier. And then we were prepared to take Jackie and Jillie out to the ravine. From early morning, last night's heavy rain just carried on until early afternoon. It was at that point, a pause in what looked to be an ongoing all-day event, that we felt it was now or never.

 

Although there were some light sprinkles and times when we were certain wind-swept, fast-moving black clouds would surely release their watery burden, no such thing happened. And because thunderstorms were once again forecasted for the afternoon we decided we'd make it a shorter-than-usual hike through the trails. We only encountered one other hiker with her dog who rushed forward to greet Irving with effusive expectation. 

 

The creek was running high, wide and muddy. Everywhere, the forest was completely inundated with more rain than it could possibly retain, and it washed down the hillsides into the roiling creek. There was a heavy smell on the humid atmosphere of greenery and somehow it seemed to us there was a whiff of vegetation distress in the engulfing and not unpleasant smell; no swamp gas at all.