March 29, 2020
In the first week of March, Stephanie and i caught a stomach bug, I got it first, then she did.
It was unpleasant but nothing to worry about — certainly not compared to the coronavirus, which we were starting to hear a lot about. Of course, we’d been hearing about it since January, being news-watchers. But we weren’t alarmed. Like most Americans, we thought it might sort of … dissipate over the ocean or something, like hurricanes do.
By February we were starting to pay attention, and would say things to each other like, “You don’t suppose it could come here, do you?”
Eventually, we knew it was coming. But in early March, we thought staying home with our stomach virus was just sensible. No one needed our bug on top of what was circulating.
We stayed home for two days, started to improve, then relapsed and convalesced some more. Then the work week ended and we decided to continue resting even over the weekend. It was kind of a bad bug, one we’d underestimated.
That Sunday evening we learned we may have been exposed to corona by someone who had been in upstate New York. Then we learned that corona can (though it rarely does) present as a stomach virus, rather than the respiratory version that’s mostly talked about. Finally, we found out our next door neighbor was sick. His illness was respiratory, and it definitely sounded like corona.
For all these reasons, Stephanie and I thought we should get tested. But no one would give us a test. I called around. My primary care doctor told me to call the ER, the ER told me to call the health department, and the health department told me to call my doctor. No tests anywhere. I’m asthmatic and over 40 and wondered if it would be wise to go back to my regular routine.
That was Monday. I cancelled commitments, even jury duty, that were scheduled for the early part of of the week. I felt fine but hesitated to go all the way back out into the world. I thought I better wait. One day, two, three. I stayed glued to the news and it changed every hour.
Meanwhile our neighbor recovered from whatever he had. Stephanie went to a 3-day staff training in New York, washed her clothes and herself as soon as she got home each night, and began to quarantine in earnest as soon as it was over.
We both spent the next two weeks worrying that she had caught corona during those three days in the city. We became neurotically, compulsively clean.
And it slowly dawned on me that I was where I was going to be for a while. Maybe for a long time.
Now, like everyone else, I struggle to adjust to this bizarre new lifestyle. The hardest part is missing people. Probably the second hardest part is worrying. Worrying has started to become a full-time job. It isn’t even just corona itself, it’s everything corona has caused or complicated.
For instance three people close to me, all living in different states, had to have surgery in early March. I worried about them, and about people I care about who live alone, and about people who were sick or struggling in some way that got worse for them after corona came.
I worry on a broad scale (what will happen when this virus goes into the poorest areas of the poorest nations? How will this not destroy our economy?) And I worry on a narrow one: will my car battery die since I’m hardly driving anymore? Where will I buy seedlings for my garden this year?
I miss driving every day. I miss going to restaurants, shopping, going to the gym (I just joined in February!), taking the train into Manhattan … just, the whole, live world. Because I didn’t realize I was entering a long quarantine in March, I didn’t do and buy things I now wish I had.
But I keep being surprised by the compensations. With only the rare plane overhead and almost no traffic, I hear birds all day. The air seems cleaner and I’m sure it actually is. I see birds and squirrels everywhere (how much have we, in our cars, with our crazed energy, been sucking up all the available space? Or are they doing what they always do, except we don’t notice them because we’re never still, never off the phone, so consumed with ourselves that we barely register the changing seasons?)
It’s only been, what? Three weeks, going on four. But now when I exercise, when I cook, when I walk my dogs, when I write, I am focused. I’m not thinking about the next thing on my list or when I can finally stop for the day. I realized this week that I’ve never experienced this much unscheduled time in my entire adult life.
Maybe we've needed a lockdown. I mean, obviously, we didn’t need a catastrophe. But what else could have stopped us in our tracks? Didn’t we sort of need to stop?
For every one of the people chafing at this interruption, are there others waking up to themselves, their families, the inside of their houses, their neighborhoods— the squirrels and the chipmunks? Or is it just me?
The inside of my head is quieter. I know the worst is probably still to come. I see the charts and I hear the predictions and my insides constrict with dread and fear: what if there aren’t enough ventilators? How can we protect our health care workers? What will life look like a month from now? A year?
But I keep trying to find a little light. Last night we ordered in food for the first time. Inside the delivery box was written “Think of someone you love.”
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