Whew!
The clinic admitted a new patient for the first time in two months.
With the coronavirus orders and restrictions and everything,
first day of admissions is being done rather differently
than it was ten weeks ago when I showed up.

This young (30-ish) woman is a New York native, and as
we are not in New York and she is from out of state,
she must be isolated for fourteen days in the admit wing.
She can go from her little admit room
to the nurses' station on the same floor, and will do tomorrow.
But she can't join us in the dining room for meals.
And when she has therapy / psychiatry /social worker / clinical appointments,
she has to have the sessions remotely, using ZOOM.
I hope the two weeks are not unbearable for her,
it is so different than it was for me.

I am one of the volunteers who helped to welcome her today.
I've never done this before.
Normally on the first day, one of the patients will volunteer
to take the new patient on a tour of the clinic campus --
always it is a patient who is supposed to do this.
Actually, on my first day,
the volunteers were all signed up for patient-sponsor duties,
but the one who was supposed to give me the tour
went all space-cadet and never showed up ...
so an embarrassed member of the admissions staff
gave me a hasty tour, then handed me over to the dining room for lunch!

I've never forgotten that.
So I volunteered, fool that I am, to provide the tour,
so that the new patient today would have
what I missed.

Oh dear. I had a script to work with -- well, okay, an OUTLINE.
This had to be done remotely, as well.
The new patient is in her little admit room,
and she stayed there the whole time using ZOOM on her computer or smartphone or something.
The nurses' station loaned me a tablet,
since I have no smartphone or cellphone myself.
So there I was, marching around inside the residence building
carrying this tablet connected to a ZOOM session,
showing her the inside of the residence areas through the webcam
or whatever you call it,
and keeping a walking commentary running,
answering questions, and so on.
I was all out of breath when it was over,
and it ran maybe half-an-hour or forty minutes.

The poor kid! I hope I didn't embarrass myself TOO much
but she was very polite and good-natured about the whole thing.