COVID-19, Chapter 2

The sign on the door of the hospital gift shop boldly dictates who will be admitted: “No Shoes, No Service,” it says.

“But I’m wearing shoes.” The man’s voice screeches obstinately, the soles of his cutaway tennis shoes flap, and his bare feet slap hard on the linoleum floor as he fumbles the get-well card he’s holding and it goes flying.

I, an underpaid clerk, sigh in disgust. I haven’t encountered a customer like this in some time. His hair is slicked back, his shirt is untucked, his face is partly hidden behind a blue surgical mask.

I suit up. Hand sanitizer, gown. Hand sanitizer, mask and goggles. Hand sanitizer, adjust the goggles that have steamed up from the mask. Hand sanitizer, gloves.

Through the door of the ICU, I see my patient, staring off towards the windows, and his hand grasps at the air. I lean forcefully to drag open the suctioned sliding door. I enter the room and introduce myself. “I’m Doctor Tamarelli with psychiatry! Your doctors asked us to check in with you!”

Slow. Sluggish. Feet dragging. Legs heavy.

The run was not the effortless morning wake-up I had envisioned when I sat on front steps tying the shoes. The gazelle I had envisioned, gently bouncing over the trails, had turned into more of a hippo waddling along.

Then, around fifteen minutes into the run, I remembered a friend’s wisdom. “Don’t fight the current. Find it and flow with it.”

When my neighbors and colleagues and I had to leave our jobs, when we had to stay home, when our favorite activities were canceled, when we became afraid to greet our neighbors, when we became afraid to walk through our neighborhood, when our favorite restaurants closed, when we could only see and hear our friends, our coworkers, our grown children at a technological remove— when all this happened, a few things that we all knew came into sharp focus.  

His voice was serious and stern. “You can’t visit, mom,” my son said. “I’m a vector.” In fact, he’s a doctor working at a big-city hospital, and while not on the immediate front lines in terms of direct contact with COVID-19 patients, he is very involved in the logistics related to the ventilators in the ICUs. Walking the common halls and entering the secure isolation areas daily puts him at risk not only for contracting the virus himself but also for transmitting it unknowingly. He could be asymptomatic but test positive for the virus. He absolutely would not consider putting his seventy-year-old parents in danger.

So… no visiting. Not him, not his wife, not his two teenaged children.