click to enlarge My mom was a registered nurse for nearly 50 years. She retired two years before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. One of her first jobs was working as a nurse's aide at a rest home in rural Alabama where she remembers wiping brown streams of chewing tobacco-tinged drool from the faces of old women who were too weak or disoriented to clean their own faces. My mom told me many touching, cringeworthy and funny stories throughout her career. As the COVID-19 pandemic grinds on, there is one patient from my mom's long career whom I think of quite often, an anonymous person that I know of as the "Unknown Patient."