Revival

I haven’t written in almost 3 years. I got lost in the routine of small children and was flooded by so much anger over Trump’s presidency that it was hard to find the emotional reserve to put words down in any constructive way.

And then, COVID-19. I look at the tag line of this blog and almost vomit. To be worried about making organic baby food...if only I had such woes now.

Marriage, death of a parent, betrayal by a parent, birth of a child, birth of a second child, political chaos... these are supposed to be the defining moments of my life, formative to my character and the shape of my personal narrative. I was woefully unprepared for a catastrophic health crisis to be the focal point of my adult life. 

There is an abundance of information, misinformation, tweets and Facebook group threads. I devour everything to seek out some hope that maybe we are learning our lesson. That the next state will heed what China told Italy, what Italy told the US, what Washington told New York, what we are telling everyone else. But the human mind wants so badly to not believe the worst, to try to deny the inevitable because it is too much to bear.

I am delivering babies. I am consoling patients, woefully unprepared to be surgeon and therapist. My partners and I are scrubbing our bodies and putting our clothes in plastic bags, showering and gargling before we touch our families. My colleagues are wearing masks around their babies and sleeping in garages or laundry rooms. We are calling our siblings to ask if they will raise our children in the event that we die.

Some figures report up to 15% of those ill with COVID-19 are hospital workers right now. Reports from China tell the tale of some 40,000 healthcare workers with not a single COVID positive case amongst them. They wore full hazmat suits their entire shift, some of them wearing adult diapers to save their PPE and so they would not risk any contamination with donning and doffing their gear after a bathroom break.

And meanwhile here in the US, my phone blows up with fellow OBGYNs across the country who are shamed for wearing a mask during patient care and vaginal deliveries. I am sourcing masks from my family who find coveted n95s in hardware stores and believe it or not from my father’s friends in Asia. Physicians are being fired for speaking up about lack of gear. We will risk our lives, we know what the cost would be if we were not at the bedside, but we are not martyrs. We cannot strike like the sanitary workers in Pittsburg for our lack of protection. We cannot quit our jobs and take a leave of absence. We have families and we are humans who deserve all the armor we can afford while walking into this war.

I write this as catharsis for me and as a commentary on our nation’s lack of a coordinated effort to manage this chaos. We are not the fifty United States of America. We are islands. We are fifty school children running like scattered ping pong balls fearing a school shooter with no teacher, no principal to tell us how to survive the massacre. We need a DOH and CDC who can objectively process scientific data and make reasonable recommendations that are befitting of the supposed richest country in the world. On March 11, the US had just over a thousand cases and that perhaps was our tipping point. We could have shut the country down then but no one wanted schools closed, no one wanted the stock market to fall, college kids wanted their Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. I applaud the NBA and organized sports for shutting down. But everything we did was too late. No one told anyone what that would mean for us as a country with cases bouncing from one state to the next.We are currently on a worse trajectory than any other industrialized nation and the worst of this disease is yet to come.