Corona-tion

I had the moment a few days ago. Christina was reading a Twitter feed from a health care worker – she has a ton of them that she follows – about how a home health care team, one very much like the one we had for Colin a year ago, had seen several of its employees infected with the coronavirus, meaning that they can’t leave their homes and they certainly can’t come into contact with their patients. How are they going to run their service? What are the patients going to do without nurses?

And suddenly, before I’d really thought about what I was saying, out came “I’m so glad we’re not doing this with Colin.”

Christina didn’t take it badly. If anything, I’m beating myself up for having said it. Because I’d rather have him alive and if we were trying to take care of a child in need of breathing assistance in the middle of a health care panic and with no available nurses, we’d have found some way to do it.

But I’m still glad we’re not. Because if he were here and if he were sick (I’d take the first, not the second), we’d be living in fear and with no sleep and just out of our minds. By this point, maybe we’d be more comfortable with the machines and maybe it wouldn’t be as big of a deal and maybe we’d have a routine so it wasn’t all that much of a nightmare. But I doubt it. It would have taken last year’s nightmare and upped the volume to a level I can’t even imagine.

So, I don’t know what I feel.

It’s an odd thing. Four years ago tomorrow, we got his first cancer diagnosis. A year ago at this time we were trying to figure out how we were going to get him home and had not yet gotten the second cancer diagnosis. Half a year ago, we knew he was going to die any day now. And now, here we are, wondering who is going to survive this mess. I don’t lose too much sleep about my personal health. But we know enough people who are at risk that it gives us pause.

And, as we go through it, there’s a little reminder of him in every step. Along with checking my temperature almost daily – using the thermometer that accompanied him with every step of the illness – we have the monitor for blood oxygenation, which will give you a clue if you have some kind of breathing problem like pneumonia. We wouldn’t have this around the house if we hadn’t gone through what we did in the last year.

We don’t have much hand sanitizer. Christina threw a huge bottle of it away in the autumn because neither of us could stand to look at it or deal with the memories. Oh, if only we’d known. We still have a small bottle somewhere.

We also have one of his old breathing machines, the one that’s going to be donated to Ghana. Seeing as no one is going anywhere these days, it’s going to take longer than planned to get the machine to Ghana. And I’m fine with that. I’ve begun to treat it like a totem. Like, if one of us gets sick, at least we have a breathing machine. Which is ridiculous. Christina is the only one who halfway knows how to use it, and I doubt she could reset it to work for anyone currently in the household it. And that’s before you ponder whether we even have the tubes or face masks you would need to make it work. But it’s there.

Otherwise, I’m working from home. Today was the last day of school for a while. I imagine it’s only a matter of time before we’re under full lockdown. I wonder, if there’s a lockdown, how are we going to do? One of the main reasons I’ve enjoyed going to work the last few months is that it gets me out of the house and away from the memories of him, for a period of time. We’re about to be locked up in here with all the memories, for better or for worse. And the main thing I wonder: If there is a lockdown, am I allowed to go to my son’s grave?