The Line has Been Drawn
/“This illness that Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.” That quote from the post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven burns as I read it. I think about my before’s and my now’s. I don’t know what the after will look like yet.
Before, PPE was an inconvenience. A mask was something I, as a med student, used without much consideration for how precious it truly was; the gowns were things I thought hospitals had plenty of as they lay around for anyone to use for any situation they thought necessary. I now have to reuse my PPE, even when it causes a rash on my face and rubs the skin on my nose raw. An N-95 used to be worn only for so many hours, then discarded and replaced with a new one. Now, I use it for days on end because the hospitals were woefully unprepared, and those masks are running out. I see a staff member drop a brand-new mask on the ground and cringe while judging her recklessness. She throws it away.
Before, I saw the paramount importance of individual freedoms, of each person being responsible for their own actions, of the government playing as small a role in our day to day lives as possible. I now watch with disbelief as people flock to protesting sites complaining about public places being shut down in a massive effort to buy our collapsing health care systems time to adjust to our terrifying new reality. Before, I would have seen the protestors as freedom fighters. Now, the thought lingers: could the National Guard make these idiots go home? How do we makethese ignorant people understand what is going on?
Before, I would run to the store on a whim, make popcorn ‘just because’, eat two apples a day if I wanted to, throw away left-overs because I wasn’t sure how long they’d actually been in the fridge or because I didn’t really like it the first time around. Now, it’s been over two months since I’ve seen a fresh vegetable aside from the onions we’re rationing. Now, I’m saving the 4 apples I have left for special occasions that have been measured out and decided upon. Now, I refuse to go to the store - as I’m around COVID patients in the health care field and I don’t want to expose someone at the store if I’m that dreaded silent carrier.
Just months ago, I was part of a disaster preparedness lecture with discussions on triage and proper use of precious resources. I did not see this pandemic coming, thinking the simple thought exercise belonged in the scope of third world countries, in lands of little resources, in places of bushmeat and poverty. Surely the great first world would never have to handle such tragedies. Surely, we, with all the amazing medical advances, would never be brought to our knees by a true back-woods virus? Now, I am appalled by my naiveté.
SARS-COV2, the virus causing this pandemic, likely came from bushmeat in the hands of a starving father desperate for a family meal. Virus hunter Nathan Wolf discusses in his TED talk that these desperate places are where many historical novel viruses originated including HIV, Ebola, and many coronaviruses. Now, the starving have reached out and brought us all to our knees. To our global horror, a problem we throw our spare change at has caused hospital systems in the entire world to shudder on the edge of collapse. Before, I saw the severely underserved as a problem those with higher authority tackled. Now, I see fellow humans that desperately need the help of an entire planet - for we ignore them at our collective peril.
A line has been drawn in my life; I may not know what the world will look like after this pandemic passes, yet I do know my naiveté is being burned away.
