10:30am: Totally alone on the 3 train to the Upper West Side. I have ridden this train innumerable times over the past 23 years, and I have never been alone on this specific line at any time of the day or night. The car remained empty, save for myself, for a good thirty minutes.
Just a day after meeting with the vascular surgeon who will be creating the fistula in my left arm to facilitate dialysis ahead of my inevitable kidney transplant, I received a call telling me I had to come in today for a COVID-19 screening, 48 hours before my thoracic echo stress test early on Friday morning. So, despite a night of little sleep and a mind unsettled by the state of the nation and its civil unrest, plus to say nothing of concern over my own issues, I hauled myself up to Mount Sinai's 114th Street location on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It's a two-hour round trip, and the COVID swab took all of maybe ten seconds.
You may ask why I made such a journey when there is an urgent care facility about nine blocks down the avenue from me, and the answer is simple. Mount Sinai knows and has worked with my various medical setbacks for about five years, so they know me inside and out and by having everything handled by them, there is less likelihood of crossed wires or misinformation with my lab results. Case in point: My prime donor for a kidney called me yesterday to inform me that she she would have to re-check her blood type, as her most recent info on it came from two different sources. (She'd had procedures at two unrelated locations.) The records at one shows her blood type to be O, a match for me, while the other states that she A-. It's stuff like that that makes me keep everything as centralized as possible.
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