Covid diary: a jumble of hilarious (and not) dreams

I read somewhere online that Covid is making us all have strange dreams because of the strange situation we find ourselves in.

I have seen a change in the types of dreams I have - quite predictably there were dreams where I could not ventilate the patient, or discovered that I had the virus. But there has also been a strong theme of food dreams. Maybe people (including me) are cooking and baking more, because it is something that we can control?

I had a dream where I was the celebrity chef on a TV show and I was demonstrating to everyone how to make a lasagna. Never mind in real life I have never made a lasagna, but in the dream I could do it perfectly. First I cooked down the onions slowly, added black beans (it was a vegetarian lasagna), tomatoes and red wine and put the lot to simmer. Then I made the white sauce which was a simple flour-butter roux followed by lots of stirring in milk. Then I layered the lot and baked it till the smell was amazing. When I woke up I knew exactly what I had to do that day - make a lasagna! Stirring the silky white sauce was as luxuriant as in the dream, it was the only therapy that I needed that day, and the bubbling of cheese in the oven...

I had another dream where I was making Cacio e pepe. A strange Italian theme, perhaps, because I don't usually make Italian food. In the dream, I tossed the perfectly cooked spaghetti (I think a reference to the Windup bird chronicle that I am reading) into the cheese, coating it with a little pasta water to thicken it to a lovely sauce. Every strand of spaghetti was coated with this glorious shiny cheesy peppery sauce. I woke up with my stomach grumbling and ran downstairs to make it for breakfast. Sadly in real life my cheese stuck together into a stubborn play-dough like clump at the bottom of the bowl. I put the lot on a pan to try and melt the cheese, but alas the clump just got stuck to the pan. In the end I ate a plain-ish bowl of spaghetti for breakfast!


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Onto more serious dreams now.

I had two dreams very close together featuring my friend S who I very rarely talk to. In the first dream, he called me to ask what was happening with his father since he could not get anyone to help him. His father is elderly and living in the middle of the Italian epicentre for Covid-19, so I suppose the anxiety that underlies this dream is quite real, though he never said anything of the sort to me in real life.

He said that he had called several hospitals and none would send an ambulance to fetch his father. I thought it was odd (even in the dream) that from a family of doctors he would be asking for my opinion, but I said it was OK for him to turn the video on. Once I could see his father, he looked grey, withered and unconscious. S shouted at his father to wake up, and there was no stirring. I looked very closely at his chest, but it did not seem to be moving. S said that his father had been talking about his mother calling him to heaven (but in real life both his parents are alive and well!) I had this surreal ice-in-veins feeling that he was already dead. I didn't know how to say this to him as he began to cry on the video link. At that moment, I realised how many of my friends I have never seen show any vulnerability, as if they were perfect humans with perfect lives and any small hiccup is just that, a small hiccup. Then I woke up.

A few nights later, I dreamt of being inside a beautiful garden. It was like something out of a TV show, separate areas showcasing gorgeous well manicured flowers with a neatly raked pebbly path leading between the areas. The path seemed to lead way off into the distance with many side branches. I think I was a bird, because I was floating above the garden and though I could see the crunchy stones, I could not feel them underfoot. Then I heard a sound and realised that someone else was in the garden. S was lost in one of these branches of the garden. I went over to him and realised that he was lost. Not just lost in the garden, but lost in life. Maybe it was because he had become an orphan in my previous dream?

He seemed oblivious to the surroundings. There was no sound in the garden at all except for the crunching of his shoes on the pebbly pathway. He moved closer to see some of the flowers up close, then moved onto the next one. He seemed to be moving at an imperceptible pace, and I started to feel extremely impatient.

Why is he stuck there like some useless fool? I felt angry at him for no apparent reason in the dream.

I willed for him to get out into the rest of the garden - there is so much to see! What other flowers are waiting for him? But he was not aware of my presence and I had no voice.

Then I saw that he was holding a small notebook, one of those that fit into the palm. He was writing something in it, and I got closer to see. I looked over his shoulder, so close to him but he still didn't know that I was there. His handwriting in the notebook is nothing like his real handwriting. In real life his writing is blunt, angulated and messy, like that of a mad science professor. In the dream it was gentle, rounded and loopy, much like a Victorian lady (maybe like Jane Austen's handwriting?)

I could see that he was writing a list of descriptors for the flowers. There were many words on the page, all of them adjectives. The three that I remembered just before I woke up were
Small
Yellow
Round

Then I left the garden and came back into the real world. 

Covid diary, a couple of weeks in

This has been a very strange time for the world. Sometimes when you pause, it's almost like nothing is really happening - is Covid really happening? When I am in the garden or stirring a pot of soup, I can almost forget. But then when it quietens down, the calamity that has befallen the world is so incredibly striking. So many people have become unwell and so many unfortunate people have died.

We have done incredibly well in Australia to stave off the crisis. With each passing day, we hear news of lesser numbers of new infections. I feel this quiet pride in being Australian - even there are plenty of idiots who are still doing the wrong thing, I believe the majority of Australians have listened to the government and done the right thing.

The hospital has become an eerily quiet place too. With most non-urgent elective surgeries cancelled, the wards are quieter than usual. The surge in numbers of doctors and nurses with the altered rostering means that we actually have time to pay attention to our patients, sometimes a luxury that we do not have with skeleton staffing. It has highlighted to us how over stretched we usually are, and how incredibly hard the staff work every day (even outside the Covid crisis). We looked after about a dozen Covid patients in the ICU, most of them requiring either a short stay for observation and not requiring intubation, or intubated for several days and then successfully recovered. A couple of patients died, and it was a strange feeling to read about them in the newspaper afterwards. People die in the ICU every day, sometimes I think, why don't we hear about those deaths?

I have been fortunate to have so much social support from people around me. Friends I haven't heard from for ages have texted to wish me well. I got some nice emails from music friends too, encouraging me to remember a time when we created music with joy and carefreeness. I have also been doing fun music projects with friends around the world, each of us recording tracks to be put together. I feel grateful for these little tokens of connection - we are not alone, and we will get to the other side of this. Life still goes on, it hasn't been put on hold - our human connections are still there despite all the difficulties that have arisen in these times.

In my kitchen: April 2020

How much has the world changed since the last IMK? My heart goes out to everyone, and definitely I am glad for the diversion for reviewing what I ate...

On the garden front, there has been some excellent vegetable growing in my dad's garden. When I left for "the war", I took a lot of photos of his garden, and looking back on them really sustains my soul now..

There are amazing bitter melons, both the "Chinese" kind and the "Indian" kind - a little shorter and more spiky (pictured).

There is also an incredible chilli plant from which I picked this bakers dozen of little chillis.

Lots of gorgeous cherry tomatoes for salads. The summer has been long this year and great for tomatoes.

These are some vegetables I picked one day - the loofahs on the left are called silk melons in Chinese, so soft and luscious. Also a couple of okra, shishito peppers, snake beans and in the back the purple weed vegetable that grows everywhere.

Flour is now a huge commodity as seemingly the entire world has taken up baking! I check every time I go to the supermarket and alas, I have not found flour at any of my locals.

So I have decided to ration my supplies and bake once a week. I've sliced the slices smaller so I can still have my 2 pieces of toast in the morning. How I look forward to the days when we can buy flour at will and bake any time!

Just before the madness of Covid started we had a vegan dinner at home with my beloved friend B. We had this crazy idea to have a vegan soup club - wouldn't it be nice to quit our jobs (we are both ICU doctors) and start a soup cafe to serve a different vegan soup everyday. We decided the soups would be

1. Pumpkin
2. Lentil
3. Tomato & red capsicum
4. Potato & leek
5. Minestrone
6. Pea
7. Vegan ramen

We discussed which one should be no. 7 so much that I decided to make it.

This actually turned out really well! I steeped a bunch of shiitake mushrooms in vegetable stock then made a base of onion/garlic/ginger with miso, blended it with some of the mushrooms for the base. Then the rest was just preparing the vegetables, crisping the tofu and plating up.

1

This was the other surprise find - miso glazed eggplant is so easy to make! Just a quick melting miso with mirin and sugar in a small saucepan, brushing it over the eggplant and grilling it. Such incredible flavours!


Onto the Food and Music series..

My friend Emily was visiting from Toronto and we had planned to spend 2 weeks together eating and playing music. Our plans were pretty much destroyed by Covid-19 and she ended up re-booking an earlier flight home.

Still, we squeezed in some playing with my usual quartet. The violist unfortunately couldn't make it so I switched to viola.

We ate these massive delicious prawns with chilli garlic and coriander as part of our extraordinary Aussie seafood feast (also featuring salt & pepper calamari and fresh deep ocean perch for mains). This feast was accompanied by the Faure piano quartet no. 1 - one of the two best piano quartets ever, both of them in C minor, Schubert's Death and the Maiden and a little light Beethoven Op 18 No.1 to finish as dessert.
  

Another day we had a gathering where we ate some Barry (son of Barney) the sourdough belonging to the cellist, with guacamole; goat tagine with couscous and salad. This feast was accompanied by Beethoven's Op 18 No. 4, probably the piece for our quartet, the other best piano quartet in the universe the Brahm's piano quartet in C minor and Aus Meinem Leben by Smetana, just an incredible work.

PS. If you are reading this and wonder what music is perfect to accompany the anguish that the world is feeling over Covid-19, please give the Smetana a listen

Before I departed for the covid-19 war, we had our very last gathering. We were sad that our little string quartet would not be gathering for some time. Our last hurrah featured a simple but delicious dinner of fish with veggies and potatoes

Our hearts were heavy but we take solace in our friendship, music making and merry meals. So much joy came from the last musical menu, Bach's Goldberg variations for string trio (is there another more perfect piece in the universe?), Dohnanyi's Serenade Op. 10, Dvorak's Piano trio Dumky and finally a couple of movements of the Mendelssohn Piano trio no. 2 in C minor.

I am trying to make sense of this world that we live in, and I am writing some of my covid thoughts down too. I know this too will pass and we will come out the other side (when there is flour and string quartets again!) I'm sending this to Sherry who hosts the monthly IMK event - thanks Sherry!