COVID-19 is big, and it's new, and it's scary, and it's going to kill a lot of people. And here in healthcare, that's our specialty.
They tell us that healthcare workers and first responders are "the frontline", and while I appreciate that, we didn't arrive here when Governor Wolf shut down the liquor stores. We got here at different times; some of us years ago, some of us relatively recently, some of us before others were even born. Lots of us tasted the line for what it was after getting smacked to the ground by our first twelve hours in fluorescent scrubs or black leather boots. You start this job hoping to make a difference, but some days--or weeks, or months--it feels like a race to see if the burnout or the sciatica will put you down first.
Then, on the tail end of a mild winter, along comes a strange new disease, and people start dying. Stores shut down, Tom Hanks is quarantined, Italy is a horror show, and it's starting to look like the world might end.
Take a stroll through your local ER or ICU (although I would pick a different month) and you'll see the world end every day--maybe every hour on a Friday night. Pick your way past the crash cart with drawers ripped asunder, duck under the jungle of lead wires and IV tubing, and watch your feet on the visceral cocktail staining the floor by the stretcher, and you'll see the end of the world. It's not The World, mind you. The MI or the stroke or the car wreck or the gunshot wound may not even make KYW, much less CNN, but I promise you that somebody's world has come apart. You'll hear it in their mother's screams, their brother's anger, or maybe just the steady beep of a now useless monitor when you realize that the compressions you've pounded into their chest for the last twenty minutes may have been the only kind act they'd seen in a very long time.
We're used to the end of the world. Frankly, we're used to all of this shit. A new, highly contagious disease, ravaging the community, transmitting through uncertain means? Perhaps you've heard of HIV. An inept government response with unrealistic goals and uncertain means? Sounds like how we've been dealing with narcotic addiction for the last fifteen years. An untenable economic strain in which people's needs and market conditions pass like two ships in the night? That's America on any other Tuesday, let alone under COVID. Anxiety about bringing home something horrible to the people I love? Bites, scratches, and sticks aren't picky. Fear for my safety and that of my coworkers? There are restraints in the supply closet for a reason, and they aren't gathering dust.
I don't mean to downplay the coronavirus. This has been bad. This will get much worse. The global loss of life that April 2020 is about to see belongs in the pages of Boccaccio, not on Facebook Live. But every one of us had a moment when the idealism shattered and the reality of working in healthcare hit us, immersed us and filled us, like falling through ice into frigid black waters with a wide open mouth. Every nurse, doctor, PCA, technician, technologist, respiratory therapist, radiographer, EMT, paramedic, and firefighter you've ever met once realized that the challenges we'd chosen to confront were implacable, and uncaring, and would never end even if we spent the next forty years fighting the good fight. And every one of us squared with that moment, said "fuck it," and took up the fight anyway.
This is new territory for all of us, and the stakes are colossal. But we didn't get this far without thriving on that, in a strange, paradoxical, beautiful, vital way. Listening to coverage of this pandemic seems to imply that equipment shortages, unseen dangers, considerable personal risk, and extreme emotional strain are new enemies, when in fact they feel more like old friends.
Listening to: "Ten Thousand Mornings" by Peter Mulvey
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