Because one of the things you don't have today is a Vent Tech because he's in bed number three.

How am I holding up? Well, I haven't hugged my kids or kissed my husband in four weeks. I get up three hours after I go to bed, and each shift starts with a meeting where we go through all the things we don't have and what our plans are to deal with that. And those meetings last a really long time because we don't have anything.

And I'm trying to be clinical and objective where I need to be, and sympathetic and compassionate when I can be, but then, all of a sudden, I have to decide who gets a ventilator and who doesn't. I mean, do you give it to the old guy in bed number 13? Because he probably needs it more and because old people have the same right and desire to live as young people do. And even though you don't want to admit it to yourself, you're thinking: "he looks just like my father."

Or do you give it to the woman in her 40s in bed number seven, who just got remarried and has a better shot of surviving without it? But then, also, what if she doesn't? Just imagine that for a second! And then you stop. And you think: what an insane question for a doctor to have to ask herself, in the middle of a hospital, in the middle of a city, in America.

But then: surprise! You don't have to make that decision after all because another ventilator makes itself available, and you try not to think too hard about why that might be, and you say, "Great! Tell the vent tech to hook that up when he's back from whatever extended dinner  break he's taking, and I'm going home."

And you try to sleep for three more hours, and then you get up, and you do it all again -- only, when you get to work, you find out that both your patients are alive, but neither of them has been ventilated. And when you ask why that is, they say because one of the things you don't have today is a Vent Tech. And when you ask why that is, they say because he's in bed number three ... and also it just hit me like a piano smashing down on me that the Clippers aren't coming back this year.