Requiem For Our Matriarch, Killed By Covid-19
A celebration of life inside a painful, cautionary tale of death by the coronavirus
Some months back, I had this passing idea for a piece on coronavirus. Here are the three lines I finished:
I am treated like I might be infected.
My fellow condo owners steer clear.
They know I’m a nurse.
I didn’t return to the topic because, in truth, I am far removed from healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients on the front lines, enduring the chaos that stems from those intimate encounters with sick and dying patients.
My clinic sits inside a hospital, and we prepared for the worst by setting up field tents, attending ventilator training, planning out triaging and the entrance and egress routes for the COVID-19 casualties.
We stopped seeing patients in the clinic and pivoted to telehealth as a safer option for us and our patients. I kept coming in to serve people, all the while remaining fearful of what was coming our way.
The wave of coronavirus patients never came, but the insidious manifestation for me since we reopened for visits is that I study every person that comes near me, looking beyond the masked face for some overt sign of infection.
