It happened in the blink of an eye. Like in the movies. One day, we heard about some people in China getting infected with some new virus from–rumor had it–a live bat sold at a market that someone possibly made into bat soup. It was there. Then everywhere. Then here.
Wuhan, China. The epicenter of the virus. A city that I, like many Americans, had never heard of until this sudden onset of illness that immediately sounded the alarms of potential pandemic amongst those in the know. I wasn’t in the know. I continued my daily routine and tried to take comfort in the vast distance between my Silicon Valley California home and the horror that was unfolding in China.
Then came Italy. And the rest of Europe. And the first cases in America. The moment I saw the headline about a nursing home outside of Seattle my heart sank. I tried not to obsess with the latest news article and statistics on this virus, but it was clear that a nursing home would not fare well with an infection that was slaughtering the frail and most vulnerable. Then, the first cases popped up in my own backyard. The first official cases. It seems the virus may have been here already for weeks. We don’t know yet. A patient was transferred to a hospital 10 minutes from my apartment. A few days later, that patient died.
Our offices closed their doors. All of the tech offices across Silicon Valley (well, most of them.) Offices full one day–full of meetings and water cooler chatter and open office chit chat, dark and silent the next. Slack and Zoom made the transition to work from home smooth logistically, but the social and mental impact of this sudden shift was jarring to all of us. We are moving forward as if the world is the same as it was, yet, suddenly in the middle of a global pandemic. We carry on because life goes on, as I imagine it did in the times of all the pandemics of the past. With our highly connected world we have the luxury of social distancing without full on social isolation, but also the continuous spread of real and false news which fuels necessary awareness as well as anxieties and misinformation. We wonder–can we go outside to get our mail? Can we take a walk around the block? Can we visit the local cafe? Plan a vacation for this summer? Will we be able to visit loved ones in assisted living facilities? How much toilet paper do we need to prepare for the apocalypse? And, most importantly, can we convince our stubborn and aging parents to take this risk seriously?
It is not as if some bomb dropped on our heads. We are not at war. Yet in other parts of the world, in the hospitals where doctors are forced to decide who to save based on their predicted outcome, it sure looks like it. Those amongst us who believe in statistics and trust statisticians fear that we are not doing enough to mitigate overwhelming our own fragile health system. That we are days behind Italy. That so many here will soon suffer. We secretly hope that our friends on Facebook posting that this is all a hoax are right, though our friends who work in healthcare and respond to their posts to inform them of how wrong they are remind us that this is all real. All too real.
We wonder if the cold we have is actually this infection. How would we know? There are no tests available unless you’ve been traveling to another country or have clearly been near someone who has tested positive. A week ago I felt a slight chill and my lungs, lungs weak since a bout of pneumonia years ago, started to tingle, then burn into a throbbing soreness. But, a week later, with no fever and cough, only sore lungs that make it slightly hard to breathe, I assume I have one of the thousands of other illnesses one can get this time of year–not Coronavirus. I still scan hundreds of articles to try to find a case similar to mine in case this might be a mild form of what I’m reading about, though I’m not sure how that would help anything at all other than in increasing my anxiety. I’m already home, already trying to not go out much, and trying to do my part.
But it’s difficult to suddenly shift into a safe set of processes in life even when one moves to isolate themselves and yet maintain an otherwise normal cadence of life. For those with children who are able to work from home, we face unplanned challenges with childcare.
My son, 19 months old, is watched daily by my 76-year-old father in law who prefers to continue his routine of taking the train from his town to ours. I am very concerned due to his age that he is putting himself at great risk doing this. But he prefers this method of transportation and I’ve yet to determine if I ought to ask him not to come at all–for we still need someone to watch our child while we work. Others face similar situations as many workers now have their children home with schools closed for weeks to try to slow the spread of this (hopefully) little plague of 2020. What do we do? There are no rules written for how any of this plays out. We can only do our best and support each other through the unknown to come.
I haven’t yet written about any of this as it has all been quite overwhelming. But I think I’ll try to write a bit more as I read earlier some recommendation that we ought to journal through this time which likely will be remembered in the history books (we can only hope not.) So I’ll write here as I do, with no particular purpose other than to share what it’s like to be alive through all of this. How one’s world, chaotic as it felt before, can be so rapidly upended that all prior chaos, from just a week earlier, mind you, feels quite quaint.
And my 19 month old with a fountain of energy to match his fountain of hair, who now says “thank you” whenever handing you an item and who yells at our Echo to play “Janis Joplin” and “Bad Guy” all day long, has no idea what is going on in the world. And for now, he doesn’t have to. Thank god that this virus is not harming children. I am terrified for our elders and the vulnerable amongst us, but I am so relieved that children are not severely impacted. The thought of living through a pandemic wiping out our youth, especially as a mother of a young child, makes me want to hide in a dark cave with my family and never come out. So, I feel grateful that of all the plagues to be unleashed into the world this time around, my son should be ok. But many others won’t be. And I think of my mother who refuses to change her behavior to try to mitigate her chance of infection or infecting others, whose doctor told her (shockingly) that this is no worse than the common flu. And all the people I know who are forced to make decisions on whether to come together to mourn the dying or to avoid further spreading of the disease. I think of all the stories coming out of Italy and the rest of the world where people are dying not because they have to die but because there aren’t enough hospital beds and ventilators and I see the charts that show we are slipping day by day closer to this exact scenario and I worry. I feel, for once in my life, my anxiety levels match the actual rational amount of anxiety for the situation at hand.
And yet, anxiety helps no one.
I told my husband, as I was trying to spin up positives for the horror unfolding int he world, that there is something beautiful about all of this–not the people dying part, of course–but how pandemics reveal that no matter how much we have or don’t have, whatever our political affiliation or ethnicity or nationality, we’re all equally vulnerable because we’re all equally human. At that moment, he let out an accidental sneeze to punctuate the statement with the most perfect unplanned comic timing possible. Even though it hurt a bit to laugh, my lungs as sore as they are, I couldn’t help but break into a deep bellied chuckle for a good minute in tandem with my husband who found his sneeze equally hilarious.
And that’s life. Nothing makes any sense and yet it all does. Sometimes it takes a disaster to pull ourselves out of the dirt so we can again see the sky. But now we’re still in the dirt, deep in it. As an atheist I’m not one for prayer, but since it’s officially our national day of prayer I’ll throw one prayer out that maybe this will all blow over and soon we’ll be making “too soon” jokes after the fact. But I have little faith my prayer or anyone’s prayers will do much of anything. Our government officials are, not surprisingly, failing us. I don’t want to get into politics here. Not in this post. But it is terrifying how this crisis is being handled. And I sit here, as if watching a horror film, waiting as the next weeks unfold, with my lungs burning and throbbing with something, and my mind racing through what might be coming a week from now, seeing how much has changed from a just a week ago.
life with interest 