COVID: Press Your Luck
Weather: Snow! So much snow! So much fun when it first falls, so miserable the days (and weeks) after.
On the headset: Wind of Change podcast.
I started to feel bad around lunchtime on Thursday. By Friday afternoon, the body aches had intensified. A non-specific sense of blah had captured every corner of my body. The feeling waxed and waned through the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, I looked to Lori and said “I need to isolate. I’m not feeling too well.” I spent the rest of the day in bed.
Monday morning. I told myself I would take a sick day. I failed to heed my own recommendation. As I gathered my notes for the morning, my concentration kept eye on the body aches. “Is this it? Is this what it feels like? Will my being here put peoples’ lives at risk?” I slipped downstairs for a COVID swab. Then a call to my attending. Then my manager. “I feel off. No fever, no cough, no shortness of breath, no diarrhea, no change in taste. But ‘off.’ Body aches. Mild headache. Sore throat. Worn down. If this were any other time, I’d chalk it up to the winter crud that we all get annually. But this is not a normal time.” It was decided that the risks didn’t outweigh the benefit. I called Employee Health and went home to isolate.
Waiting on the results of a COVID test measures fairly high on the anxiety index. In between checking my phone for a results notification every 3 minutes, I could reflect on the past week, the possible sources of my crap status. There was the snow storm on Wednesday; not just the storm, but the rolling in the snow. The walk through Prospect Park at 10pm on a school night. The snow angels and spiked hot cider. Then there was the walk through Dyker Heights on Saturday. The hours outside in the sub-freezing cold. The gluehwein (mit schuss).
Then there were the exposures. Two of our patients. They didn’t know each other, but they shared a cancer diagnosis. And a room. They also shared a COVID result: positive. Within 48 hours, they would also share a decease date. Then one of our interns tested positive. Then the resident. All within five days. We didn’t know these people would test positive. They were fine until they were no longer there. That’s when we would worry; for them but selfishly, more for our own well-being.
I had shared a prolonged conversation with one of the patients. I was masked with an N95. He wasn’t. He rarely was. I stood arm’s length from him, my phone stretched out to him with a Polish interpreter connecting us. He coughed once. I stepped away. We joked about Poland. I looked across the room to the son. His mask was below his chin, as it always was.
That exposure ran like a broken record through my thoughts. Every detail. The length of the call. The sound of the cough. The anger. The resentment. It takes a certain amount of selfish disrespect to not wear a surgical mask on a cancer ward in the middle of a pandemic. The entitlement. It’s everywhere. We fight so hard for these people. We sacrifice. We give and we give and we give and we ask for very little in return and even that is thrown back at us. The reactions my fellow citizens have had to this pandemic have made me question my faith in this country.
My phone dinged. Negative. It was my second negative result in five days. The anxieties melted away. Mostly. Employee Health cleared me to return to work with the reminder that there have been a rash of false negatives. If symptoms worsened, I was to return to quarantine. The symptoms never worsened, but they did persist ever so slightly. The anxiety surrounding the possibility of a false negative also persisted.
It’s all part of the psychological burden healthcare workers have had to carry for the past year. Anxiety hangs over every interaction. Everyone we see, everyone we meet, is a threat to our safety. We get close, but never too close. We expect our friends to treat us the same way. After all, we’re the likely source. To counter that, we wear masks and goggles and gowns and gloves. Ten hours per day in an N95 mask. Ten hours of the mask digging into the bridge of the nose, pressing the lower jaw into a grind, stealing away deep breaths, and hiding smiles, whispers, and water breaks. We’ve all internalized it, compartmentalized it, turned it into normal. We’ve done so without even recognizing it or confronting it. We know that we have no direction to move but forward and looking within is hardly a step in the right direction.
It would be much easier if people would just wear a damn mask.