Honestly one of the most surreal kinds of intimacy. Medicine in general really. My job was less, ah, hands on. But it was still such a strange, raw, and utterly one-sided intimacy. I never met any of the people whose tests I processed. I never will. They do not know my name.
And yet, I know so much about them. Start with the database. Millions of patients, and each had an entry in the database, at my fingertips. An idle search, whether to check accuracy or (as some of us did, illegally) just browsing out of random boredom, and I had someone's whole world in front of my, stripped of meaning, emotion, or life. Name, address, phone, social security number, medical history, all rendered into just a series of fields in a database entry, cold and clinical.
And then, of course, the actual test results.
I was doing Covid tests, mostly for nursing homes and rehabs and similar facilities. I would know thinvs about my patients, never having seen them, that no stranger should know. Often I knew more about their situation than they or even their doctor ever would. You see, while all positives had to be called out to a person by phone (usually a charge nurse, never the actual patient), we customarily did not report on the precise values of the PCR markers. We did not report viral load information unless asked.
When I would see, for example, a person who was 80-100 years old, who had a high viral load and lived in a nursing home I knew for a fact was not adequately taking care of people with covid or doing enough to slow transmission? That person was dead. They might not know it yet. Their doctors might not either. Nor family, or friends. But I, a complete stranger, did. They had almost no chance of living. I had just delivered a notice of death in advance. For them, even for their nurses, what I had said was one of the most impkrtant things they would ever heard, and among the last. For me, it was Tuesday and I had another fifteen to thirty names waiting to be called, with the next run of results coming in soon and two errors to track down and biohazard crates to seal and take upstairs to wait to be taken by the shipling company, and just wanted to move along.
It is a strange, sterile sort of intimacy. I prefer surgeries, dissections even. Things which are not so cold and remote.