She told a story about her father. She’s a oncologist and her husband is an infectious disease specialist. Her father is also a doctor, and he has still been out and about treating patients at 80 years of age. His age, combined with his profession make him extremely high risk for COVID-19, in case that’s not clear. The other day, she called her father, just to see how they were doing. He said he was fine. Her mother agreed, saying that he had kind of a dry cough for a couple of days, but no fever. She was worried about him working so hard because he kept dozing off every time he sat down and got relaxed and he had never done much of that before.
The daughter practically screamed at him over the phone — “You’re a DOCTOR, you’re high-risk, you have a cough, and you’re falling asleep because you’re not getting enough oxygen into your system! PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND GO TO THE ER RIGHT NOW!”
Mom, apparently having better sense than he, took her at her word and practically dragged him to the car and toted him to the Emergency Room at the same hospital where he practiced. She let him out at the front door to check in while she went to park.
As soon as he told them what he was there for, the ER staff checked his blood oxygen level and found it to be in the vicinity of 95% which is NOT good, and goes a long way toward explaining his sleepiness. They immediately quarantined him, locked him down and started aggressive measures to get a handle on him.
Thus the podcast from the daughter explaining how she got online to solicit people who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate blood plasma to see if it will check his progression early and also continue research into the treatment. That’s going well, which was the focus of the story — she got so many responses that she’s implemented a kind of plasma bank to match patients and volunteers. Again, good for her.
But that’s not the story. It’s this:
She hasn’t seen him since they put him into isolation. Basically no one has. She says even docs and nurses won’t get in the room with him unless they have some hands-on thing they need to do — they do all their queries and conversations by phone and machines. She knew that's what would happen — she knew the protocols. She’s an oncologist, as I said, and she’s been present for probably hundreds of deaths. Good ones, bad ones — in her line of work, many that were a sad relief to both the patient and the family, and she was there for all of them, usually the one pronouncing the death.
But thinking about this as she grappled with the high-probability bad outcome for her father, it suddenly struck her.
For the first time EVER, she realized, we Americans are going to have tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths essentially all at once in which the patient dies utterly alone, in a glass or plastic room.
No family. No docs. No — nobody. Even counting throw-away people, accidents, and misfortune, death is usually accompanied by someone being present in some hands-on way. There are always the outliers who die alone, of course. But, along with the CNN/FoxNews panic-graph-friendly numbers associated with COVID-19, this one is going to spike into territory unknown before.
In fact, she said she and her mother realized something else — that when her mother pulled up into the ER bay and dropped him off and watched him stride through the doors, annoyed at being there at all, it was likely, in a very literal sense, that this was the last time any of them would ever see him. Period. But she won’t know until he recovers. Or dies.
So, this doctor who was on the podcast to talk about blood-plasma treatments wrapped it up with this advice: Take 10 minutes or 20 minutes in that parking lot. You’ve already been exposed anyway, you live with him. Take that 10 or 20 minutes and be there together, say all the things you really need to say to each other, for each other. Because these minutes may be the last you’ll have together. Ever.
This plague, whether it’s going to be worse than we ever thought and kills a million, or peters out into obscurity after “only” killing 80,000 or so, brings this immediate and harsh reality check for us that's not new at all: The universe is going about it’s business without the slightest regard for what we want or what’s “fair”, and we are not promised anything.
I may drop dead before I finish banging out this line, or you before you finish reading it. We are all of us in that place -- always have been really -- but it’s suddenly cast into sharp relief and shadows by this … thing.
The plain fact is, whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re all in that parking lot with no guarantee we’ll ever see him, or her, or them again. Maybe this story crystallizes whether you took some vanishingly small snippet of time that may be the last taste forever of a whole lifetime to say everything you needed to say before they walked though that door, hung up the phone, drove out of the driveway — before they casually said goodbye.
Interesting, yes?
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”
― Seneca
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