All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day
Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It's not always going to be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away
-George Harrison
So, it's been awhile. Much has happened. A trip through snow, slush, and astounding traffic from Corning to Wyldswood before Christmas. P laid out with what was probably the tripledemic over the holiday, causing us to push back our trip to Europe for a day. Me coming down with the same thing, with the symptoms beginning to manifest over the Atlantic between Boston and Dublin, and hanging on throughout the trip and even to some degree as I write this. Misty cool days in Ireland, then Scotland, then Ireland again, then Istanbul, then Ireland again, then twenty-six hours of abject misery flying home on Delta, swearing never again to do this to ourselves. We're just too old.
Folks dear to us desperately ill all the while, causing us to check our phones uneasily whenever we received a message from the states, worried that the worst of news might be waiting.
But alas, the one very bad message came across Peg's phone not so long after we arrived in Europe. Her contract in Corning was not renewed. That adventure draws to a close.
And the hospital administration was too spineless to tell her directly, or even to tell her boss who'd counted on her to cover vacations in February. They just left a message with the staffing agency that handled her contract. A hell of a way to end the ride.
There's no ill-feeling toward her workmates, save maybe the one who likely brought this about. Their vocational life is bound to become a little more unpleasant, as they're done the same way most employees of big corporations are screwed over in America in 2023.
The staffing math of an operating room seems pretty simple to this dumb fighter pilot: A certain level of scrub techs and circulating nurses and anesthesia folks and surgeons and PAs and surgical device reps assemble, and there's a finite number of procedures that group can perform in a day. If the Man Who Runs the Hospital wants more procedures, he needs more ORs and more folks to staff them. But as folks have bailed out of the medical profession en masse, management has responded by hiring more locums like P to bridge the gap and keep the ORs churning out billable work.
So why now is P's deal coming to an end? Not so long ago, each practice group --anesthesia, orthopedics, ENTs, general surgeons--would all have their own stand-alone entities, and could negotiate at arm's-length with the hospital to make sure the group had hired enough staff to cover the OR without forcing folks to do crazy things like work a "normal" twelve hour day (the non-medical world has no concept of the hours these people pull) after a weekend of call.
But over the last decade or so, the hospitals have begun to hire the specialists directly onto their staff. No more practice groups, and no more leverage for the docs and CRNAs to work their own deal. And with everyone considered a professional on salary, no need to pay overtime.
You see where this is heading.
Ever since the pandemic began the folks who earn their living off the sweat of the professionals in the OR have been complaining about locums gaming the system, extracting what management considers extortionate rates to pull up roots in their hometown and come work to plug the gaps in our understaffed and failing health system. Now, however, the hospital administrators have come to realize they can just forgo that expense, and simply demand that their employees, doctors with spouses and kids and student loan debts that keep them in the game, just work a little harder for the same pay.
I reckon that's P's story to tell, and I'll leave it there. When people make faces about lawyers and what a pox we are on society, I just remind them that I have the last job left where we own ourselves, the last pirates before corporate America finds a way to shackle us to the oxcart with everyone else. I answer to no one. Not bad for a history major who drank his way through undergrad.
So the notion of a dual life in the Southern Tier and here in Florida draws to an end. I was coping pretty well with the whole thing into the weekend, until we started watching the Bills-Bengals debacle at the farm on Hulu. The app thinks we're still in Corning, and so all of the advertisements during the game came from the Elmira television station. We sighed at the hills in the background in the car commercials, at views of Market Street and even dingy downtown Elmira, and soon were drowning in, what, I don't know, grief, grief over saying goodbye to a dream we both knew was tenuous at best, all the while holding onto the hope that maybe someday we'll get to return and sit on our front porch at Tara, look down the hill, and feel that this time maybe we can stay a spell.
I took this photo as we pulled up at the Sinclaire Mansion on our first day together in Corning, in October of 2020, with no clue where the pandemic was heading or what we were doing, just making it up as we went along.
Now I'd look back on the next few months there and tell you that sojourn was about the happiest of my life. I also felt that, however, looking back at our six month quarantine at Wyldswood the preceding summer. And I felt grief at the passing at the end of that summer of something we'd never get back. Sort of like now, I guess.
It's a beautiful day here in Panama City. My friend the former editor of the paper passed me as I walked into the dentist's office for my semi-annual scraping. We swapped stories about deer--he has two at the processor already, and the rut's in full swing up above I-10. As I paused in the waiting room to admire an oil painting of downtown Panama City during World War II, an older gentleman pointed out that at the intersection where the Martin Theater and the old city hall still stand, there used to be an old oak that sat smack in the middle of the street. His father stood out on the covered sidewalk one day watching a road crew try to figure out how to grade the crossroads with mule-drawn equipment. When the foreman concluded they'd just have to cut down the tree, his father replied, "You don't need to cut down no tree. You just need someone who knows how to handle a mule." His daddy was hired on the spot, and the tree survived the project.
And the young dentist is the scion of a family full of people I love here in town, who've been a part of my life for a quarter century now.
This place has its charms. And I'm waking up next to P every morning, something I never take for granted after all these years of 5:40 wakeups so she can hustle off in the dark to the hospital. We'll figure it out, and try to find our joy again. It just hurts.
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