I was talking to a patient the other day while we passed in the hallway. I had a mask on, she didn’t. She was in the office that morning to get her routine fasting labs. I asked her if she was going stir crazy at home in quarantine yet. Her chest puffed out a little, her face lifted, a smile curled at the edge of her mouth, “I’m essential.” There was a pride in her response that I had never considered. It stayed with me. Her job was in manufacturing and she was proud to be needed.
I have had a job where I am needed for so long, that I don’t even think of it as a positive. In fact, being needed can be a burden and I have to be diligent in ensuring that people do not take advantage of me, use and abuse me, take more from me than I have to give. I have to draw lines in the sand that can not be crossed so that I can continue to do my job without facing burnout. I have learned to preserve my down time so that I can be refreshed to continue taking care of patients when I’m needed.
I watch my healthcare brothers and sisters on the front lines and I know how it feels. There’s too much need. Too much death. Too much expectation. In order to preserve the limited PPE, the limited healthcare workers, the limited ICU beds, leaders in healthcare and government have asked people to limit the spread of COVID 19 by isolating, sheltering in place, and following guidelines to stay healthy like social distancing, washing hands, wearing masks when in public, and avoiding excessive exposures (like going to get a haircut or shopping).
I have seen the protestors. At first I wanted to shout at them, call them stupid, stand in their faces and wish the wrath of the disease on their lives. Yeah, I got pretty pissed off. I know what the consequences of their actions are and I just wish they understood.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34).
After the anger, I thought about the essential worker. Her faced brightened, her demeanor changed, when I asked her how quarantine was going. She wasn’t in quarantine, she was working. She was needed.
The people with their rebel flags, Trump hats, wrapped in the American flag, taking to the streets after sitting at home watching the bills pile up with no end in sight, nobody ever called them essential. They are the sea of nonessential, unneeded that are watching the rest of us get all the accolades. Their white skin, with all the privilege that it brings, wasn’t working for them right now. They are the unseen. The ones with too big a mortgage bill, too big a car payment, secretly living from paycheck to paycheck, trying to look like they’ve achieved the American dream, but falling short by just one paycheck.
Once I tried to understand the motivation behind the protests for reopening a country that has virtually no COVID 19 testing, no cure, no vaccine, no reliable count of the dead or infected; that’s when my anger subsided. These protestors just want to be needed. They just want to be counted. They just want to be heard. They just want to work (and get a haircut or a greasy burger in a booth with a rip in the seat at the local diner). They are not evil, they are desperate. They are so desperate that their motivations and desires will put them and others in harms way and it’s a chance they are willing to take. Many were not wearing masks or practicing social distancing. The virus will spread. There will be death. There will be sadness and worsening desperation. The essential worker will be harmed like a sick kind of payback for being needed in the first place. They will burden a system that is already showing cracks from the strain.
They know not what they do, but I pray that a sliver of reality will get through. We are all essential. It is essential that we all do what we can to protect the other. It is essential that we understand that our behaviors do not just effect us, but create a ripple. The ripple can be like a breeze of cool air, refreshing and healing or it can carry the invisible virus of death and despair. People will be harmed. People will die and we know it to be true. Some might say it’s the price we pay for freedom. I say no haircut or burger is worth that kind of payment. That’s too big of a price to pay to be needed.
Am I the only one that is disturbed when the shiny-overly-smiling-faced purveyor of my chicken sandwich at the Chick Fil A drive thru responds to a simple “thank you for my chicken sandwich,” with “my pleasure”?
I have been at home for the past 4 days with my family. I go back to work tomorrow. I am actually looking forward to the routine of a work day, although even the work day is not routine. I have little to no one on my schedule. I will be on the phone or computer “seeing” patients, mostly reassuring them, encouraging them to provide medical care for themselves at home. The last 4 days have been disorienting. It reminds me of being on maternity leave. Both of my children were born around flu season. I was petrified to take them out in public during those first few weeks after birth. I basically sequestered myself and the babies at home. It didn’t take long to become unaware of time of day or day of the week.
The coronavirus is named because under an electron microscope, the group of viruses appear to wear a crown. I can’t help but compare that to the crown of thorns that adorned the head of Jesus Christ while he hung on a cross. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this illustration, I just keep thinking about it.
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to bring Deconstructing Doctor out of semi-retirement. As I write this, the kids are obliviously occupied on their iPads, pretty sure my husband is, too. That Rumba that he bought for Christmas that I did not want is happily purring through the house. In retrospect, I love the Rumba, although this one is actually an off brand. Something generic, something copied. It is truly a worthwhile gadget. Maybe it deserves its own blog post sometime.
I have recently taken to the habit of drinking a glass of red wine from a clear glass shaped like a skull. Not everyday, mind you. It started after Halloween. I decided to make a Halloween feast for my family. Hot dogs carved like fingers, cake that looks like cat litter, with little tootsie roll cat poo half buried below the surface, green colored punch, smoking and smoldering, poured into clear glasses shaped like skulls. My dad thought the Halloween feast was a lot of fun, the kids still talk about the cat litter cake, and I really liked those clear skull glasses. I’m the only one. So I put the other 5 glasses away until next year and kept one out, one that I can drink red wine from when I felt inclined.
It was a typical Monday morning, I got the kids up and ready for school, dropped them off before the bell, and headed off to work. Halloween was still fresh in our minds, the candy piled high on the kitchen table, costumes laying clumped in piles in the kids’ rooms, skeleton decorations still hanging on the front porch.
There are times when silence is necessary. Quiet reflection, stillness, exhalation. I found myself in a state of mind consistent with floating on the stillness of the ocean, buoyed by the salinity, the sun peaking in and out behind the clouds, shadows flickering behind my closed eyelids. It is absolutely blissful, however, not as conducive to angsty curse-filled blog accounts of the unfairness of a doctor mom’s life. I reached steady state. How does one rail against such peace and calm? One doesn’t. One just floats.
My 10th great grandfather and his family boarded a ship in Mannheim, Germany in 1663 bound for America. They came to Germany by way of Amsterdam and before that France, seeking refuge from religious persecution. Each new home offered only temporary asylum. During this time, and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the Catholics were persecuting the French Huguenots, murdering and torturing them, causing them to flee to the corners of the world.
I only know one person that committed suicide. He was a patient of mine. There were plenty of patients over the years that had tried, but all of them were unsuccessful. Except for him. Over the years, whenever suicide becomes big news, my mind often goes back to him. I search all of my recollections of meeting him in the office, talking about his job, his family, his military experience, and I never once suspected that he would take his own life. Never. Once. He never seemed depressed, never admitted to being depressed, never expressed any feelings of desperation, isolation, loneliness, sadness, or rejection. He was pleasant, likable, even a bit jovial.
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