While foreign tubes are being inserted, with language barriers in place, you’d try to explain why rolling onto your belly in the hospital bed is needed to perhaps help getting a breath be less excruciating.
If you sat at my desk you’d try and calm a family member, over the phone only, since visitors aren’t allowed.
If you stood outside the glass fishbowl, like me, watching lifesaving procedures being performed in unprecedented ways, to keep staff contamination at bay, you’d feel your heart break while staff worked feverishly to sedate the anxious patient, just prior to passing down a endotracheal breathing tube. If you could read the patient’s frantic thoughts at that moment just prior to sweet sleep, you would be certain he wondered worriedly, “what if I never wake up?”
Because people aren’t waking up.
Y’all, I can’t understand all this. It’s not like anything we’ve ever known, and I’m sure you’re getting that Sci-Fi movie vibe too. As if we’re walking through a dream we can’t wake from, we all feel that surreal mood. It’s hard for everyone, and we all feel the sting, but we have to remember to feel more than just how this is affecting us personally. We gotta try to imagine how it’s impacting the world at large, how we’re all hurting in one way or another. Because, you see, it’s our ability to empathize with another that binds us, and if we can stand together (even as we’re physically apart), we will stand stronger when the dust settles. Eventually it will.
