Love & angst in the time of cholera......
Mar. 20th, 2020 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osodecanelaBoth my sisters are infected with Covid-19.
One tested Tuesday, the other yesterday. Amen, for the moment both of them are only mildly ill. It also means mom, who is elderly, frail & recuperating from two surgeries to replace her hip, & has been coughing, is likely infected as well. I spoke with all of them in the last 12 hours and their outlook is surprisingly positive.
I didn’t sleep well last night. I was restless throughout the night. I last remember looking at the clock at a quarter past three. Joan’s call woke me at half past seven.
I’m relieved to hear how good she sounds. In retrospect, I’m sure Typhoid Mary sounded pretty good as well. She was only on briefly to reassure me she’s doing OK and to have me call mom. Joan needed to get going to get calls into her three children to inform, as well as reassure them.
Mom was very upbeat, much more so than I’d expected. She’d had a conference call with my other sister & with mom’s internist. Mom’s local doc is in the thick of this epidemic and was really effective in calming her down. Note, that there’s a large family in mom’s area that’s been on the national news, the matriarch & 3 of her adult children having succumbed to Covid-19, after a big family dinner a couple of weeks earlier. Another 3 of that family is in the hospital where her internist practices. The upshot of the call is her doc suspects mom is almost certainly infected & likely at least a week or more into this, with no real decompensation so far. Given her already compromised lungs, she’s got an oxygen saturation monitor at home and O2 wise, she’s doing fine. He stopped the anti-inflammatory med she was taking, since there has been some reports that it might decrease her ability to fight the virus. He made it clear to her, even in her age cohort, most people survive this virus. They’re not the people who make the news.
I’m much calmer this morning than last night. My dreams thru the night were rough, no surprise I guess given my personal history. I’m not just a gay man of a certain age, I lived in San Francisco at the dawn of the HIV crisis, a young physician doing my medical training at the time. I watched man after man, my age and older, sicken and die, some very quickly, some slowly, the walking dead among us. It was a wrenching time emotionally. I saw them in the hospital, I saw them in the clinic, I saw them in my social circle, I saw them as strangers walking down the street.
One man still haunts my memories; he’d come in with pneumonia, ending up on a respirator within a day or two. In a rare moment of consciousness while intubated, he motioned for a pad on his bed stand. With a shaky hand he wrote, “snow me, let me go & donate my eyes when it’s over.” I cried myself to sleep that night. He was still in his 20s.
I need to get on with my day. I’ve got plenty to get done here in the house, and I have to take my husband into town. The mechanic just called & my husband’s car is ready.
One tested Tuesday, the other yesterday. Amen, for the moment both of them are only mildly ill. It also means mom, who is elderly, frail & recuperating from two surgeries to replace her hip, & has been coughing, is likely infected as well. I spoke with all of them in the last 12 hours and their outlook is surprisingly positive.
I didn’t sleep well last night. I was restless throughout the night. I last remember looking at the clock at a quarter past three. Joan’s call woke me at half past seven.
I’m relieved to hear how good she sounds. In retrospect, I’m sure Typhoid Mary sounded pretty good as well. She was only on briefly to reassure me she’s doing OK and to have me call mom. Joan needed to get going to get calls into her three children to inform, as well as reassure them.
Mom was very upbeat, much more so than I’d expected. She’d had a conference call with my other sister & with mom’s internist. Mom’s local doc is in the thick of this epidemic and was really effective in calming her down. Note, that there’s a large family in mom’s area that’s been on the national news, the matriarch & 3 of her adult children having succumbed to Covid-19, after a big family dinner a couple of weeks earlier. Another 3 of that family is in the hospital where her internist practices. The upshot of the call is her doc suspects mom is almost certainly infected & likely at least a week or more into this, with no real decompensation so far. Given her already compromised lungs, she’s got an oxygen saturation monitor at home and O2 wise, she’s doing fine. He stopped the anti-inflammatory med she was taking, since there has been some reports that it might decrease her ability to fight the virus. He made it clear to her, even in her age cohort, most people survive this virus. They’re not the people who make the news.
I’m much calmer this morning than last night. My dreams thru the night were rough, no surprise I guess given my personal history. I’m not just a gay man of a certain age, I lived in San Francisco at the dawn of the HIV crisis, a young physician doing my medical training at the time. I watched man after man, my age and older, sicken and die, some very quickly, some slowly, the walking dead among us. It was a wrenching time emotionally. I saw them in the hospital, I saw them in the clinic, I saw them in my social circle, I saw them as strangers walking down the street.
One man still haunts my memories; he’d come in with pneumonia, ending up on a respirator within a day or two. In a rare moment of consciousness while intubated, he motioned for a pad on his bed stand. With a shaky hand he wrote, “snow me, let me go & donate my eyes when it’s over.” I cried myself to sleep that night. He was still in his 20s.
I need to get on with my day. I’ve got plenty to get done here in the house, and I have to take my husband into town. The mechanic just called & my husband’s car is ready.
Patience and Hope
Date: 2020-03-20 08:09 pm (UTC)My mother is 93, and I may be having a similar conversation as the epidemic continues. It is good to be reminded that many people DO recover from this virus, and that there is room for hope, along with all the other emotions that come up at this time.
Best wishes to all your family for a speedy recovery.
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Date: 2020-03-20 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-24 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-03-29 06:26 pm (UTC)