World Turned Upside Down: Let's Get Serious

This is the first, and I hope the last, blog photo you will ever see that I take of myself in a hospital bathroom.

I snapped it several weeks ago to send to Husband and our kids, with the accompanying text "Needless to say, I'm a mess and may deplete the hospital's mask supply."

I had just sent a loved one off to a complicated surgery, and that can lead to tears on the inside of glasses lens. I was worried about the surgery; I was worried about that surgery taking place in the middle of a pandemic; I was worried I wasn't up to the task of being the advocate for this loved one.

Spoiler alert: The loved one came through surgery magnificently, and is now being pampered in recovery.

It turns out that if you are going to require extended hospitalization during a pandemic, this was the exact right moment to schedule that surgery. Just one week earlier the no-visitors policy had been lifted at the giant Big City medical complex but only for one advocate/visitor per patient, and masks were required. The miles of corridors I walked toward the ICU and recovery room were mostly empty, so social distancing was easy.

As a person with at least four entries into the let's-kill-Grandma lottery (pulmonary embolisms/clotting disorder, age, weight, blood type) I have been scrupulous in my social distancing and mask wearing and seeing those choices endorsed by the medical folks were a great comfort. I never felt as if I had to check myself for symptoms of a deadly virus.

But at the end of the week's hospitalization we stopped at Target for extra home-care bandages.

People, it was horrendous. The store was crowded, social distancing was virtually non-existent, and masks were worn by perhaps one in ten shoppers. I scurried to the pharmacy and grabbed one other purchase then checked out.

How could I feel so safe in a place designed for sick people, and so threatened in a place designed for people who are well?

The answer, of course, comes down to a single fact. In one of these locations (the hospital) staff and visitors are doing their best to keep everyone safe and healthy, and in the other (the store) people apparently don't care about this. In one everyone was paying attention to CDC recommendations and science, and in the other...well, not so much.

Yesterday, in the face of our state's ever-rising infection numbers, our governor mandated that everyone should be masked in public places. Not in our homes, not in our cars, but any time we're likely to be in contact with the aerosol exhalations of someone we don't live with. This is the very lowest bar we have to step over in slowing the pandemic--we're not being asked to once again close ourselves in our homes for months on end (although I continue to think "I need a tattoo" is a terrible reason for going out).

It is a way to tell people around us "I care for you, and I don't want you to get sick and die, so I will wear a mask to protect you from me." 

And still, my Facebook feed is packed with people who are literally frothing at the mouth with their uncontrolled rage at being asked to wear a mask. For a variety of reasons they have decided to disbelieve the most up-to-date science. 

I do not understand this. 

Because it's uncomfortable? So is a ventilator. Because it doesn't keep you from Covid? No, but it keeps us from sharing our sneeze-slobber, and sneeze-slobber is the surest way to pass the virus along. Because you aren't feeling sick? Allow me to introduce you to the folks who have covid but no symptoms, because as many as half of the people who are potential Typhoid Covid Marys have no symptoms at all. Don't have a mask? If you live in my zip code and don't have a mask, let me know. I will give you one. Because it is a symbol of government tyranny and YOU ARE FREEEE??? I...have no words, but if I did, the words would include the descriptors "inexplicable" and possibly "uncaring."

And now I will get into the toe-stepping-on portion of today's lecture. My fellow Christians, the ones who are pro-life but refuse to wear masks? You do see the irony, right? That your asymptomatic Covid could kill actual post-birth human beings? You understand that you are telling me, with my increased chances of dying from this disease, that in spite of your holy hugs and declarations of devotion you don't care enough to wear a mask to decrease the chances I will die a horrible, painful, death by suffocation? 

I was already a mask wearer, but during that week at the hospital I wore masks all the time. I cried in them (and man, are they uncomfortable when they're all snotty inside), I laughed in them, I slept in them, I talked to my dear one non-stop through them. Because if there was a single thing I could do to prolong someone else's life or my own, I wanted to do it. I was frantically worried about my loved one, but I did not have the additional worry that someone was sneezing pandemic death my way, or the way of any of the patients.

Think about that. And wear a mask.