23 Apr Alexa, play Under Pressure
Alexa, play Under Pressure
“Don’t you dare leave us to go and run off to New York City. If something happens to you, what will WE do?”
That’s what I wanted to yell to my physician husband, yet knew too well that hysterical self-interest was NOT the way to persuade him. Of course, his desire to serve the vulnerable and passion for the epic were major attractions when we were dating, but now married and facing the world’s current situation, I was finding that wiring extremely frustrating. So, instead of dramatic demands, I forced myself to calmly try and buy time. “Every minute the news is changing, why don’t we wait and see? Tomorrow we’ll figure out the best way to help the hospitals after we have more information.”
That situation actually took place over eighteen years ago, the evening of September 11, 2001. We’d been married for less than three years and were living in Chicago while he finished his training as a newborn-baby intensive care specialist and I was a graduate student seven months pregnant with our first child. A fan of the epic myself, normally I would have wanted to jump in the car and go with him, but a fairly advanced first pregnancy was stopping me and new adult concerns were dawning. He, we, didn’t yet have a will, or disability insurance, or life insurance, much less any significant savings in case of emergency. I desperately did not want him to run off, potentially putting himself in harm’s way, when the world we were about to bring this baby into had just shifted so violently and completely that very day. Understanding how emotional and vulnerable I was feeling, he agreed to sleep on it.
Of course, now we all tragically know that neither he, nor any other additional physicians were needed in New York in 2001. Their emergency rooms were not overrun, the World Trade Center victims either escaped or they perished and the few injured were easily cared for by the healthcare providers already in the city.
I now have twenty-one years of marriage experience with that man and that first baby is an eighteen-year old high school senior, the “big” sister to her three teenage brothers, two of whom are now taller than the rest of us! The young doctor in sub-specialty training has now been literally “saving babies” for two decades. He certainly is an epic hero in my opinion, not to mention the opinions of all the families he has served. Now in his fifties, he’s still saving babies but also managing the leadership role of overseeing fifty physicians and advanced practice nurses that care for thousands of families a year in six area hospitals.
This “Thursdays are for Thinking,” I’ve been asked to write about what life is like right now for a health-caregiver and their family. I can only speak for our family and some of the other physicians’ circumstances with which I’m familiar. I share not as an expert, but as a wife and a mother.
Basically, we’ve been experiencing an emotional smorgasbord: deep concern, hyper-news-cycle-focus, shock, fear, pride, loneliness, frustration, resentment, humility, repentance, gratitude and…hope. Emotions I recognize we are all processing on different schedules and rhythms as we attempt to size up the enormous impact COVID-19 is having and will continue to have in all of our lives for the foreseeable future.
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January 2020: Honey, why don’t we take the kids on a cruise for Spring Break?
I was an international-news-source fan way before 2020, but having booked our first family cruise, I became particularly attentive in late January to the international reporting concerning the coronavirus situation developing in Wuhan, China.
In January and February, via the news, I first observed Chinese citizens being forcibly home-quarantined in a manner I’d never before witnessed. Weeks later footage now broadcast frantic people involuntarily extracted from their homes and, the last straw emotionally for me, was video of an elderly Chinese woman wailing from her balcony that her husband could not breathe and there was no one to help them.
My heart was breaking for those panicked people, but this trauma still seemed to be a world away. I remember even laughing at myself, of course the first cruise our family has ever booked wouldn’t actually be affected by what’s happening in Asia. I was being too influenced by old stories of sickness spreading quickly on cruise ships. I told myself to calm down, what were the odds?
Then in early March I read a chilling British news article. A British physician had received an unimaginable email from a physician friend working in Northern Italy. The conditions he described: patient numbers exponentially increasing, medical resources running out, physicians having to make life-and-death medical resource decisions unheard of in modern healthcare systems, doctors from specialties unrelated to COVID-19 being pressed into caring for the dying and, most compelling of all, the first desperate exhortation I was to hear for as-yet-untouched countries to do anything and everything possible to avoid the same horrors.
For the first time I felt fear and dread, not yet for myself or children, not yet even for my husband’s health, but for any and all earnest, dedicated healthcare workers facing a potential tsunami of death and helplessness unthinkable in our current healthcare paradigm.
Of course, we ultimately cancelled the cruise. The possibility of our family quarantined in two cruise ship cabins, especially with our three active teenage boys, was utmost insanity. The next inspired alternative we landed on was to drive to New Orleans for a few days over Spring Break. The kids had never been and there is so much culture and history…thankfully, we ultimately vetoed that plan too. We seemed to have a consistent knack for almost exposing our family to potential COVID-19 hotspots.
In the meantime, I had the gall to be upset that Austin community leaders were still pushing to host SXSW. The initial arguments to go forth with it made no sense and frustrated me incredibly, all the while I was now planning to take our family to a post-international Mardi Gras city about to explode with the virus. COVID-19 humility lesson #1: acknowledged.
The next step of lockdown meant even more focus on the news, trying to understand what is happening elsewhere and how to prepare for what was ahead here: schools closing indefinitely, businesses closing in spite of profound economic consequences, not to mention toilet paper hoarding. Healthcare-wise the news screamed about ventilators needed, healthcare equipment shortages, COVID-19 victims dying alone, caregivers crumbling under traumatizing pressures, the need for mass graves and the realization that younger, healthy people are not consistently immune, caregivers began dying in increasing numbers due to the heavy viral loads they voluntarily faced daily.
Our New Personal Normal: My husband’s profession, the calling to which I and the kids are all so proud, is now a potentially lethal threat not only to him but to our entire immediate family. Of course this is also the new normal for all the physicians, nurse practitioners, respiratory therapists and nurses (and their families) with whom he works as well. Optional medical procedures can be postponed, but babies determined to be born cannot be put off. He is now on the phone for additional hours every day planning how to handle mothers and babies in this strange new pandemic-ravaged world. Physician stress and burnout was incredibly high before this crisis and now it’s on steroids. While operating as the invaluable frontline warriors against the disease, they are also the most exposed to it. They are truly heroes, but also human and as we all know from any epic movie, a hero’s loved ones are always their Achilles heel.
These critically necessary healthcare heroes have families (and often extended family) directly dependent on incomes now docked or even interrupted due to new comprehensive healthcare industry economic woes. They may have immuno-compromised children and elderly parents from whom they must proactively isolate while also developing an in-case isolation plan from their currently healthy household. At the same time, as community healthcare leaders, they must also inspire courage in understandably frightened co-workers. All the while developing and teaching new protocols and procedures involving the PPE (personal protective equipment) that was thankfully already stocked here in Central Texas…at least until he told me it had to be redistributed to other crisis-areas. Wait, what?
Humility Lesson #2: The news coverage of the devastation and panic experienced by victims and caregivers in other states that had led me to heart-breaking sympathy and fervent prayer, morphed into a completely different and embarrassing personal response at news of “our” supplies being diverted. I wanted to yell at the TV, “Don’t you take my man’s PPE!”
How quickly my compassion evaporated. I’m ashamed to say the axiom, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part” even came to mind. Until this point I had observed but not felt drawn into the daily televised COVID-19 blame games, but knee-jerk self-interest had me suddenly looking down my nose and resenting the virus epicenters’ “lack of planning” now affecting my community’s preparedness and my husband’s protection.
Thankfully, I didn’t stay in that heart attitude for long. Although I hope my attitude was understandable, it didn’t “feel” right. It certainly wasn’t brave and clearly fell short of the love Jesus desires for us to act on for our neighbors, whether they’re in Austin or Manhattan. My love for “my caregiver” is certainly not more important than the love felt for any other person’s caregiver. I want mine to be protected when necessary, but New York and other hotspots needed life and death help STAT. Rather than dwelling on selfishness, this was an opportunity to serve heroes and patients in their hour of need, an opportunity to choose generosity over fear. Now that is something truly epic!
In the weeks since I started writing this article the country has been told our “Pearl Harbor” was approaching, that “the worst week of many Americans’ lives was imminent”, the number of projected fatalities would be a staggering 100 to 200,000. National, and thus individual, economic fallout only mounts, day by day. Truly terrible, too-easily-despair inducing news.
Yet, as I am finishing this article, glimmers of hope are beginning to shine. New York, the world’s epicenter of the virus, is cautiously thought to have peaked its curve, the latest fatality models have decreasing numbers, proving that social distancing is successfully flattening the dreaded curve.
A flatter curve buys preparation time and slows down the virus’ advance in the areas of the country, like Austin, yet to crest their own peak and eventual decline in cases. A flatter curve means it is increasingly unlikely that my baby-ICU trained husband will be pressed into emergent service in an adult-ICU caring for COVID-19 patients. A demand that has already been pressed upon some of his colleagues in New York City. Social distancing isn’t some abstraction to me but feels like a fight for my husband, our family and our community. His friend in NY described his first day in the adult ICU as “terrifying” with hundreds of patients on breathing machines…multiple deaths a day in that one unit…two patients per room, but thankfully only one per breathing machine…some staff too terrified to come to work…others working until they could scarcely stand and having to be forced to go home.
Whenever he has worked from home, I overheard these developments and observed the countless hours of communication and planning necessary to prepare for the battle yet to fully arrive in Austin. I know that he has not cared for an adult, or even an older child in years, but I also know if the call came, he would go…that’s how God wired him. Concern about how what he does and who he is will continue indefinitely during this uncertain time where death is tracked in the tens-of-thousands on millions of televisions around the country. I am thankful for what he does when it pays the bills and I admire who he is when he’s “saving babies” but when I think of the dramatically disproportionate death toll amongst healthcare workers fighting to save lives, I am desperate for our community to stay vigilant and informed regarding the many lives still on the line.
As I spin with a thousand thoughts and exponentially more feelings and our “expected peak” lurks in the sensed but not seen future, I am taken back to September 11, 2001 in our little apartment in Chicago. Although the world had tilted and everyone was readjusting, I am reminded of the Lord’s faithfulness. His light…His provision…His comfort in another dark moment in our little family’s brief history. Then, like now, I was afraid of how my husband’s tendency to run at the crisis would threaten our nest, our chicks, our home, our future.
But then as now, I must choose to dwell on the Father’s character dousing the flames of my feelings and His power to bring peace beyond explanation.
As we combat this virus together, some of us by seemingly little things like washing our hands, wearing masks and social distancing (something now forever burned into our collective consciousness!), some of us facing the daunting challenge of livelihoods diminished or threatened, we must remember that He who did not spare even His own son for the cure of our deeper infection with sin, is able to calm and quiet not only the mind and heart of this wife of a healthcare worker, but all those of the countless caregivers, single and married, who battle the virus, those patients who have suffered in isolation and especially those who have lost loved ones. We will stand firmly in the refuge and strength of the Father who gave all for us that He might be our very present help in all our times of trouble!