Dec 10,2021

Sleep escaped me as my mind wandered endless corridors of restless confusion. I cracked my eyes open and saw the clock – 5:15. I confirmed inside my head, yes that was am. I rolled over and snuggled with the cat. She was there searching for some love. I wasn’t ready to get out of bed so kitty snuggles were a good second choice. My mind kept stirring and I thought about the day ahead. 

It was going to be a great day on the slopes. 

But not for me. The T bar was opening and so was the Powder Chair. Big White called to me. 

Except work was getting in the way. 

I rolled over and looked at the clock again – 6:00. Time to get moving, lying with the cat and my wife was not getting me anywhere. It was time to go, I had a job to do in Kamloops at the hospital. Might as well get an early start.

It’s been a week of working at the two largest hospitals in the Interior Health region. Kelowna General Hospital in Kelowna is run by a different management company than the Royal Inland Health Centre in Kamloops. So I should not have been surprised that they are run differently.

What surprised me was the fact at RIH I couldn’t enter the hospital without showing my vaccine passport. I showed them my bar code and they let me in, no question about health, just make sure I’m vaxxed. At KGH I needed to fill out a covid health survey every time I came. One place wastes paper and the other wastes time. Neither seems to be all that effective. 

I felt sorry for the ladies that sat at the entrance to RIH. We chatted while I waited for my helper to go back to the truck and grab his phone – he forgot the phone needed to show his vaccine passport.

The guardian of the hospital has a tough job in the health care system. She is a front-line worker in the worst way. In Kamloops, if you have a loved one who is sick, you can’t go see them unless you are vaccinated, except if the department says it’s ok, or if they are palliative. Even the girl sitting there admitted the inconsistencies are the toughest part. 

As a contractor for the hospitals, I was warned by RIH that I would need to show proof of vaccination to work there. But at KGH, I just needed to be healthy. And both those hospitals are in the same health region. Kamloops makes sure you are vaxxed, and KGH wants you to be healthy. I’m sure both systems are flawed. Does anyone admit they are sick if they have gotten to the point they are filling out the form? I also know of a couple of people that have fake vaccine passports… we are living in a world where lying and deceit have become much more common.

Sad days indeed.

But I had a job to do. And that job didn’t include worrying about the protocol to enter the hospital. When I arrived at RIH and saw the size of the laundry chute they needed to fix I knew that at my age and size I was no longer the guy to hang down inside a one-metre steel tube. Thankfully I knew a guy in Kamloops that was very capable of sliding down the shaft and doing the repair. 

At 23 years old and 165 pounds, Justin was built for the job. 

I made sure he was safely tied off and down he went. For 60 plus years the laundry chute accommodated bags of laundry to be sent from the 8 floors above to the laundry room in the basement. 

Until they got a new contractor. The new contractor advertised eco-friendly products. That included the bags they used to put the laundry in. Something about the bags was different and they no longer slid down the chute and out the bottom with the ease the former plastic ones had.

Unintended consequences –  the world is full of them.

Three times the shaft broke apart before they had to call me in to help repair it. The breaks kept going higher until they needed some dope on a rope to slide inside. I’m sure glad that dope wasn’t me – although I miss those days when I would fit down the shaft. 

Those days are long gone now.

In the world we live in, change is the only constant. Sometimes we change things and everything gets better, sometimes like the new bags at RIH, things get worse.

All we can do is our best and hope that things work out. Even in our largest hospitals in the Interior Health region, they try their best to deal with things as they come. It’s obvious no one has all the answers and we won’t know what the right one is until afterwards. 

I just hope the so-called experts guess right and we can get out of the coronaverse stronger than before.