There will come a point, I imagine, when the writing stops being about Colin and just about what life keeps throwing at us. Case in point: this pandemic. More than once I’ve caught myself thinking that, thank God he died before this hit us, and then wondering what’s going on in my head that I’m thanking God that he didn’t hang on a little longer.
But, as much as a nightmare 2019 was, the idea of trying to juggle a child with a breathing disability and a cancer diagnosis through this nightmare seems beyond daunting. The little bit we hear from the hospice – and also from some of the medical blogs/Twitter accounts Christina follows – sound nightmarish, with new restrictions at times keeping parents away from their children in hospitals and hospices. When you think that a parent’s presence might be the only thing keeping a small child compliant with the health care regimen, you have to wonder how that’s going.
And it’s not as if the virus is leaving us entirely unscathed. I mean, compared to people who have gotten sick or ended up in the hospital, we’re great. That said, we’re almost done with our two-week quarantine after a kid in Emma’s class turned up with the virus. On Friday, the kids will return to school and then we’ll see how long they get to keep going until there’s the next change in school policy. I suspect we only have days.
Now, to be clear, Emma is the only one of us on quarantine. The rest of us are supposed to keep our distance from her and limit the amount of contact we have with others. Given that Emma is the most likely of all of us to forget her mask inside the house, this is a near possibility. We’re trying our best but, the fact of the matter is that, whatever Emma has, we have to.
I still don’t know if the kids truly understand the nature of this thing. Having watched their brother die, they are aware of illness and death. But then you see how hard it is to get them to follow hygiene guidelines and you can tell it hasn’t quite sunk in. Last weekend, Noah and I took a walk to gather pine cones for a decoration for Colin’s grave. I didn’t make a big deal about keeping distant from people, because I figured we were just walking in the woods. But, as luck would have it, we ran into a rather large clump of people on the path to the woods, including Noah’s friend Henry. We were hardly in a throng of people, but there were enough. And when Henry asked if we were going shopping, Noah fairly loudly responded “No, we’re in quarantine!” which I’m sure delighted all the people who were within 5 meters of us.
So, who knows?
The kids have no symptoms. Christina can’t decide if she has a sore throat or not. I’ve noticed for about a month now that I can be slightly out of breath at times. No one’s talking about putting me on a ventilator or anything: I’m simply not getting air in like I’m used to. Who knows what it means? The symptoms predate Emma’s classmate getting sick, so it’s already suspicious. I’ve been to my doctor – who is astoundingly chilled out about the virus – twice now. His first diagnosis is that I’m recovering from some other viral infection. His second was that I need to lose weight.
I don’t entirely disagree with him on that fact, but that’s overlooking the roller coaster my weight levels have been on. Let’s say I was at around 101-102 kilograms before everything went to hell. That was overweight, I won’t dispute it. Then I pretty much stopped eating and dropped to 88. I won’t deny that was nice: I got into jeans I hadn’t worn since George W Bush was president! But it wasn’t healthy weight. Then my appetite returned and the lockdown started and I barely left the house and one day I was at 104. However, I had no breathing problems. Those didn’t start until months later, when I’d worked my weight back down to 99-100. But my doctor doesn’t want to talk about that. He only wants to talk about how I was around 94 in January and I’m around 99 now.
So yes, the coronavirus is new, but the difficulty in figuring out how to deal with it leads on a road to the nightmare that was Colin’s death. Even now, in those – mercifully fewer moments – when I’m catching my breath after climbing the stairs, I find myself wondering if this is how Colin might have felt at one point, when his lungs were fighting off the infections? And then, to take the trauma one level further, I wonder if this might have been how my Dad felt as the emphysema began to worsen.
I guess there’s only one answer: Who knows?
It is amazing to me that there are more similarities than differences relative to how the virus and the quarantines are being handled in Berlin vs Bandera. This is surprising and even comical given the gigantic differences between the two communities. So….thanks so much for sharing your experiences. Here…I find myself making sure my nose and taste buds are working each morning as I drink my morning coffee. Then…when I feel out of breath for any reason, I hold my breath for ten seconds to see if I can because I read somewhere that if you can do it, you probably don’t have Co-Vid….The games we play to “entertain” ourselves during a “Pandemic for the Ages.” Stay safe!