I'm scared. I feel safe in my house and I feel like my family is safe. We have developed systems here that I think are the best we can do to keep ourselves safe in our house. It has been more than three weeks since we have really had to go out into public at all. I haven't been anywhere beyond my neighborhood (other than a recreation drive in the car) since we started shelter-in-place, and the only place my husband has been is the drive-up window at the pharmacy to pick up our son's and his mom's medicine. Anything and everything else we need we have delivered.
But we can't be here forever. We won't be here forever. Eventually, we will have to go back out into the world. And there will not be a vaccine to protect us. Our systems won't protect us out there. We will have to develop protocols to come back into our house. My husband can dress fairly casually to work. I will be in a suit most days. How does one sanitize a suit?
I made two face masks this weekend. It was hard. The fabric is thick, which is a good thing, and I'm terrible at pleats. (Plus, the tension on my thread got screwed up on the second one, which slowed me down, but I fixed it.) I need to make more, though. I need to make at least enough to last each member of my family for a week. That's a lot of masks -- 21 masks. It's going to take a long time to make those masks. And, yes, I know that two-ply cotton masks (even if they are made from high-thread-count Laura Ashley sheets) are not tremendously effective at stopping the virus, but they're better than just relying on our nose hairs to do the filtering before the air gets to our lungs.
I have a very public-facing job. I am literally in court nearly every week, sometimes multiple times a week. And those courtrooms are filled with people. Sure, the Court is going to video court soon and my office is going to telephonic meetings of creditors. But, again, that can't last forever. Can it last until there is a vaccine?
Will there ever be a vaccine?
I input my information into the COVID-19 Survival Calculator. Here are my results (which were somewhat amusingly entitled "anonymous 49.6 year old female"):
The 52.9% infection risk scared the shit out of me. Basically, I, who have been sheltering in place with all the precautions I can think of -- we wash the dog's feet after every walk, FFS! -- have a 53% chance of getting this disease. But the mortality risk and survival probability were heartening. From what I have read of first hand accounts like this one, though, having this disease is awful, even if you're not hospitalized.
I had the flu in March of 2017 and there were a couple of days when I really could not move without great effort and I had fleeting thoughts of "so this is how this bug could kill someone." And compared to what I have read about COVID-19, that really bad case of the flu I had for merely a week was a walk in the park. I don't want to get this disease. I don't want my husband or my child or my parents or my in-laws or my brother's family or my friends or my work colleagues or even those other lawyers that I may not like very much to get this disease.
Nevertheless, I'm bending my mind to the idea, attempting to accept the idea, coming to terms with the idea that one of us will probably get it. Maybe more than one of us. And the best I can hope for is . . . we suffer a miserable two to four week illness at home, not requiring hospitalization, and that we do not spread it further?
So, I've been having a hard time. I've been depressed. I've felt a little hopeless . . . a lot hopeless.
I cried when I walked the dog this morning. Not single-tear-down-the-cheek crying . . . audibly sobbing, that was me, as I walked the dog. Not loudly, but audibly. Like, if there'd been someone on the other side of the street walking their dog, they'd have heard me and looked in my direction. Mournful.
I guess I am in mourning. But for what? For my old life, my pre-novel-coronavirus life? The halcyon days when I could scratch my eyes, pick my nose, and do facepalms with impunity? Maybe I'm prematurely mourning the loss of the safety I feel in my home now, the loss that will come in a month . . . or maybe two . . . when we have to go back into out there.
I even told the people at work on our MS Teams chat (which is now and, I think, shall ever be, an omnipresent distraction on my desktop) that I was not doing very well this morning. It's not like me to own stuff like that very often. I'm as stiff-upper-lipped as a girl from East Texas can be, I suppose. I push a lot of stuff down. Probably not healthy, but I do it. But I couldn't keep it down this morning. I couldn't keep it down as I walked the dog and tried to image going back out into the world where, to me, the novel coronavirus is everywhere. I couldn't keep it down when I logged onto work and it was all just too much.
Almost immediately, one of my lovely colleagues sent me a private message commiserating and trying to buck me up. Another two with whom I regularly text, took it to private texts and urged me to take care of my mental health. All three of them were just what I needed. I felt better. We are all suffering. We have our ebbs and flows. Today, I ebbed and these three wonderful ladies flowed toward me. One day, it will be my turn to flow toward them. We all, every one of us, need each other now in ways we never have. Now, is the time to lean in, but not in the way Sheryl Sandberg meant several years ago. Now, is the time to lean into and on each other. I think it's the only way we get through this.