the home front
Pandemic Nation
One of my best friends is an anesthesiology resident who's been told he and his co-residents will do ICU work when the time comes. My mom's an NP, my wife's a PA, my brother's a PA. I am not someone who has been reacting to COVID-19 emotionally, although I have taken it and the precautions recommended seriously. The situation is a perfect demonstration of the way scale breaks the individual. Denial felt plausible for far too long because reality is very small and almost always anecdotal right until reality is a million neighbors projected to die before their time.
Last night, I video-chatted with a group of guys I've been close with since before I was married, some since high school, including my doctor buddy. As I was ending the chat in prayer (yes, prayer!), my wife received an email confirming that a family she helped treat—and suspected of having the virus—was confirmed for COVID-19. She saw this family last Sunday, and came home to me, our children, and my mother that afternoon. My mother is high risk if she gets this virus, and she's had confirmed patients in her clinic as well. Frontline medical staff "are becoming especially vulnerable" in general, which will be my friend in less than a week.
I'm spouting all these details because everyone is living through some battery of specific tensions. Our own list goes on in ways I don't really feel the need to elucidate because I'm not trying to preach to anyone (in this newsletter, at least) who's skeptical or wants to shrug away the obvious disaster. Why bother? What I keep thinking about instead is how much I wish I could help. My friend will almost certainly choose between someone getting to live and die in the ICU, possibly daily, before this is all over. And I wish I could be there with him. I wish I could assist technically or at least ethically, could reassure him in the moment, could tell him that (should even the most modest forecasts come to pass) he cannot hold the impossible choices against himself. He needs none of this from me, of course. He'll probably, almost certainly, be fine.
This all paints a dire picture, much more dire than I feel day to day. My tone is so somber! But I suppose it's because fear slipped its chain for a little bit last night. I love my friend, my wife, my mother. I'm not even a little worried for my personal health, but I remember asthma attacks as a kid, that awful and uncanny feeling of automation disrupted. Breathe in, breathe out—no thought required. There's still no thought required when the breathing stalls. You cannot think lungs functional. They are you, until (eventually, no matter what) they help kill you.
Other people's lungs are currently killing them. It isn't weakness or sentimentality to emphasize this or to let the truth sink deeper than statistical head-nodding. That people are always dying doesn't change the reality of how this surge will cause more people to die. We have got to commit to holding multiple narratives in concert and not in opposition. Society cannot go 18 months on lockdown, and also we have to give hospitals a chance. You will probably be fine, and also this is very, very bad.
Reading: too many tweets, tbh; Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (much, much too slowly); Ecstasy and Terror by Daniel Mendelsohn (just finished); Dog of the South by Charles Portis; Midwest Futures by Phil Christman; From the Beast to the Blonde by Marina Warner (also too slowly!); Selected Poems of John Donne.
As a quick note, the above emoting is not meant to minimize the ways we can all help: blood donations, programs for feeding kids outside of school, food pantries generally, mutual aid networks in our neighborhoods (for the elderly, especially!). Honestly, though, a lot of these work-arounds would be easier to boost if they were regular features of my life. Starting a thousand volunteer and donation projects from scratch while dealing with all the personal fallout from the virus and our economic collapse isn't ideal. And soon we probably won't be able to leave the house! Honestly, if congress doesn't authorize relief to the right people, and on a faster timeline, they'll have blood on their hands as thick as tar. If nothing else, maybe this time such incrimination will stick.
May God have mercy on us, and on the vulnerable most especially.