Computer desktop's littered with files: protocols, sign templates, phone scripts, meeting notes, financial spreadsheets, COVID-19 web clippings, desperate digital brainstorming sessions. Three weeks worth of figuring out how to keep patients and staff safe and the business from going under.

Everything I'd intended with my Year of Consolidation is out the window. We're now a world of mice, our schemes gang darkly agley. Even so, I have been consolidating at a record pace, just not the way I'd hoped.

Today's the first day at the office with just my wife and I. We set up two of the office staff to work from home last week and finished setting up the third yesterday. Doc's set up in a patient room doing remote telemedicine visits and working through digital messages and refills, and I'm here in my office taking a breather before cleaning up the great mess I've made before I figure out the next step to keeping the spice flowing. (You know, I do feel a bit like a Guild Navigator wannabe, trying vainly to bend space and time to my mutated will.)

We started taking our visits remote three weeks ago and locked up the office completely last Monday. Our patient population is largely older and immunocompromised, and the idea of us becoming a vector leading to any of there deaths was unthinkable. Quickly running out of protective gear and being unable to restock sealed the decision.

We are making concessions for patients whose treatment requires injections which can't be missed or delayed, and are trying to figure out lab draws for patients whose health requires close monitoring, but we've done our best to make sure those circumstances are both rare and as safe as possible for the patients and staff. I know I'm not ultimately responsible for the safety and wellbeing of patients and employees, but because I do have a slight measure of influence and responsibility for an area of intersection, it can be hard to keep my anxiety from spinning up to something far out-sizing the truth of my control.

Shreveport Opera cancelled their production of "The Marriage of Figaro" a few weeks ago, and earlier this week Texas Shakespeare Festival announced they were cancelling their summer productions. I'm strikingly disappointed, but doing anything else at this point would be irresponsible, in my opinion. That these things are my biggest losses so far in this thing is an incredible blessing.