Circling the Wagons
We all know this has been a strange holiday season but for us it got even more strange. We have known for nine months now that we are not in any way immune to COVID or the virus finding us on our hilltop. That wishful thinking evaporated in March when our nearest neighbor (a man we did not know) died suddenly of heart failure a week after his mother’s family funeral. He tested positive for COVID and the bubble of invincibility burst. We started taking it all very seriously without any time lag for reality to set in. We also had several New York City friends test positive in March, going symptomatic and suffering through all of the advertised symptoms over several weeks. In one case, the husband got it and the wife (who is several years older and therefore, technically, quite vulnerable) did not. He managed through without any criticality or need for hospitalization. The other friends had the opposite occur and they both got it and suffered through the illness together alone and in their own home. They too did not go critical or need hospitalization. We are smart enough to understand statistics and never for a moment took those outcomes of good fortune as any sort of sign that the virus was not Uber dangerous. There were enough horror stories out there to be convincing that both for ourselves and for others with which we might be in contact, there was an abundance of danger and need for extreme care. We always took social distancing seriously.
That said, after the initial lockdown of six weeks or so, everything seemed to back off a bit. Traffic returned more or less to normal and everyone was moving around, most with masks, but plenty without masks or arguing about the issue at every opportunity. It all seemed stupid and very much a function of our dysfunctional political environment. After lots of silly bravado being announced and acted out, enough people began getting visibly infected and some dying, bringing a stronger sense of reality and seriousness to the medical theory that was not sufficiently convincing to that portion of the population getting contrary cues and information from their idiotic leadership. About the worst thing that could have happened, did, when Trump got COVID and despite being hospitalized and getting every advanced and scarce therapeutics, shrugged it all off and played to his base in a way that only a desperate and unsubtle reality TV director could orchestrate, complete with the life-endangering ride around the block and the Evita-like prance up the stairs for the Mussolini balcony scene.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch on the hilltop, we were struggling with the non-COVID medical problems of brother-in-law Jeff. Strangely enough, the symptoms that plagued him the most were most-notably and strikingly COVID-like with fluid in the lungs and an inability to get sufficient oxygen. This required two hospital stays totaling over ten days, constant therapeutic oxygen and occasionally morphine. It caused us to choose to stay put on several occasions rather than traveling to see family and friends. We found ourselves repeatedly rationalizing the wisdom of laying low for a while longer as the circumstances and COVID surges, first of late summer, then of early fall and finally of winter, raged. We watched as the drama of overburdened ICU’S shifted from New York to Louisiana to Arizona and California to the Midwest and now back again to the West Coast. California has vacillated in and out of the hot zone with L.A. being the epicenter but both Northern and Southern California being nearly as bad.
While we continued to take masking and social distancing seriously and avoided all gatherings larger than the recommended 8-10 people, we didn’t remain hermits. We, like most people, tried to make rational and carefully considered trade-offs that kept us somewhat less isolated, but still safe. For 2020 as a whole we had nine nights in hotels since COVID arrived, with eight of those on one trip to Oregon where we ate only outdoors and rode in separate cars with our friends in theirs. We got tested every few weeks and all seemed well. Then as always happens, everything was OK right up until it wasn’t.
For Christmas, we, not unlike most people, adjusted our plans and chose to forego gatherings in other than virtual space. We were not perfect, but we were more prudent and careful than many. The one place that constantly concerned us was the presence of workmen at the house (luckily, mostly outdoors). We asked that they all wear masks, and most did….in part. The working men had more trouble with masking than not. I would say they masked 50% of the time (much higher when inside). I sense that this laxity is perhaps 60% due to difficulty doing the work while masked, 20% due to a sense that they were stronger than the virus, and the last 20% I have to attribute to general incredulity that this was a serious and real threat. For Christmas we planned to have my sister Kathy and her husband of 47 years, Bennett and brother-in-law Jeff and his wife of twenty-six years, Lisa. We planned a distant, but indoor meal on Christmas Day.
Then, on Christmas morning, Bennett got the news that he was COVID positive. He had been interacting with a workman doing driveway work at his house and that man had contracted the virus somewhere. Needless to say, we cancelled Christmas dinner, especially when we learned that the day before, Jeff and Lisa had visited with Kathy and Bennett to drop off a gift. Jeff can ill-afford a bout with COVID (not like any of us is not potentially vulnerable in our own ways, but he’s the one still on occasional oxygen). So, we played the alternative game of Meals-on-Wheels and drove Christmas dinner around and left it and gifts on the porches of the two couples. We also got several parts of the meal from Jeff and Lisa so I guess we are all hoping that surface transmission has been completely debunked by now. We were due to have massages the day after Christmas. For reasons of conflict, I asked to push that until Sunday. That morning, our masseur called to say he could not come because he was exposed to someone who tested positive the day after Christmas. Had we gotten the massages on Saturday as planned…who knows.
The good news is that Bennett remains asymptomatic and Jeff feels fine, so we have reason to be hopeful that all will be well. Then Kim heard from her sister, Sharon that one of her friends had gone into the hospital and died of COVID in a week. We have three workmen coming tomorrow and one of them has COPD and another is father of our masseur (which is how we met him), but said he has not seen his son since his potential exposure. I can assure you we will be discussing masking and social distancing first thing in the morning before work begins. It is time to circle the wagons and take this thing as seriously as we can. Life is too short and COVID is too random to do anything else.