Buzzed

In the past week on my social media accounts, I have added my voice to the shrill, to the complaining and impatient, to the fearful. We're all sounding the same notes. Yes, I'm a little afraid. I'm anxious. Like all y'all, I've been a bit cooped up in the days of COVID-19 and spring rains. We're also fretful about the well-being of the good folks we know who work in healthcare. All the very good advice out there on how to deal with isolation, summon equanimity, to live in the reality of pandemic times is, after all just, advice.

Yoga practice. Check. Going for walks. Check. Washing hands and staying home (except for solitary walks and the very occasional grocery forage), yes and yes. I'm catching up on reading, on those little projects around the house, etc., etc.

As a cancer patient, I've had some experience with social distance, keeping a low profile after infusion chemo, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that I kind of love it, at least without the infusion chemo part. It looks good on me. But I know it's awful for others who have lost work, who have had to adjust to working at home, who have to suddenly become school teachers to their kids AND figure out their economic lives. I know I'm fortunate to be able to work from home and not to have to worry about the educational well-being of little ones.

I'm not bored. Even scaled down and closed inside the four walls of my bungalow, my life manages to be over full and pretty content.

But there's a buzz I can't tune out. It's that conversation we're being forced to have, the one about who gets access to which resources. Who gets tested and who doesn't? Who gets treatment, and who doesn't? You've read and heard how the elderly, the "infirm", those with cancer or other serious illnesses find themselves among the unchosen, in respiratory failure and left to die so that those with more "prospects," the younger, the more "fit," get access to one of the too-few machines that could save a person's life. That buzz is so loud. It's a conversation too about the failure of policy, of the current administration's inability to understand and apply basic science in shaping a national response to our current circumstances. There's a recklessness in how the people in charge communicate, and an insidious divisiveness that spells out doom. I hear it even inside the brick and plaster walls of my cozy little house. It gets louder and louder and louder.

My health is good AND I have metastatic disease. I can say those things together because my last scans showed that I have no active cancer in my body, and I have no other acute illness at the moment. But my health is also fragile. Because my body is busy trying to keep the cancer suppressed with the help of daily oral chemo, and because I've undergone more aggressive treatment with chemo and radiation, I know my immune system is maybe not in tip-top shape. So, yes, I'm being super careful, and as I said before, mostly staying home.

NED. Clean scans. And I just had a birthday, my third since a Stage IV cancer diagnosis had me believing I might not last the year. My oncology team and I have worked hard to get me here. My health insurance has shelled out an awful lot of dough to keep me alive. While I love irony in a good book and appreciate satire in a late night monologue, I don't want to be the main character in a narrative that has me dying from the opportunistic infection of a little virus after pushing back a metastatic disease. I'm doing my part to stay safe. I just hope everyone else is too. Because that is all I've got.

My Very Own Three-Card Monte

I grew up about a hundred miles north of NYC, in a mostly rural area dotted with small towns. When I was a kid, my family would make regular trips into "the city" for various things, mostly entertainments like Broadway shows, baseball games, and museums. Later, when I was a ne’er-do-well teenager,  I spent time in the city hanging out with friends — going to clubs, shopping the thrift stores, rummaging used book and record shops, copping a little weed (or something stronger), or just wandering around the streets to check out the action. Always, always, always in the 70s and 80s there were con men (and a few women) running street games of Three-Card Monte. They'd set up their quick-folding tables where the flow of pedestrian traffic brought plenty of suckers their way.

The players’ banter and jibes and the quickness of the easy game captivated passersby. It was a little thrilling, all the hustle. We didn't have street cons like that where I came from. The crowd would look on, always convinced we could track the money card (or the shell covering the pea) with our eyes. Sometimes we could. Sometimes we couldn't. The point was to make us BELIEVE we could win this oh-so-simple game, to get us to lay our money down based on that confidence. Of course it wouldn't have mattered what we'd tracked with our eyes, because sleight-of-hand always made sure the operator (who could disappear into the crowd as fast as his table clicked closed) was the real winner. My friends and I played only vicariously, not eager to part with our hard-earned restaurant tip money, but we watched lots of other folks lose their dough, and often their cool.

Now, I feel a little like I'm living in a Three-Card-Monte kind of world, in reverse. I don't want to find this particular money card, or this pea under the shell, not if it's coronavirus.

Here are the corona-con's distractions: Some people might be naturally immune. Some people might have acquired immunity already by having had a case, even a mild one, of COVID-19. Some people have symptoms. Some people have none.

But we can't tell who has immunity, who has a mild case, or who might be a carrier just by looking at them. With all the cards moving so fast, we can't track the money card; we can't guess what's under which shell. Testing is still not ubiquitous, and until it is, we won't have good counts on the number of cases and who has what, where or when.

We're told the elderly and the immunocompromised (hello...I'm sitting right here!) are most at risk. It's accepted. It's medical science. The numbers so far don't lie. Here's the creepy thing: we're lots more okay with the notion that the old and sick are more likely to die than we would be if children and infants were particularly vulnerable and we suspected that their parents could be the carriers. The calls for lockdowns would be taken much more seriously if children and babies were in jeopardy, and fewer people would be calling this latest pandemic a hoax. Thank goodness it appears that children aren't as much at risk, and thank goodness schools are closing so we don't have to test that theory. Too bad so many people are really in need of lessons on public health and herd immunity.

But really it's quite simple. Chances are you know and love someone old, someone sick, someone with cancer. Chances are you love someone, period. I really, really hope someone loves you. Chances are you have friends, or, at least, a pet fish who needs you alive and well. And chances are you could be a coronavirus carrier. You might get COVID-19. You might not. But you could give it to someone else who really doesn't need it. Or you could get it and be too sick to take care of your pet fish.

Let's not suddenly fall in love with Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest. Be your best compassionate, human, thinking self, and do the right thing.

I'm not asking you to panic. I'm just asking you not to fall for the short con. You think you're tracking the money card, but the house always wins.

Love your neighbor (or immunocompromised Auntie). From a distance. Keep calm. Wash your hands. Stay home if you can. When you do go to the store, leave some bread, milk, and toilet paper for the rest of us. Thanks!

P.S. On top of trying not to catch the coronavirus, I have scans this week, so ya know, no stress. My rad onc's office called and said to go ahead and get my CT and MRI as scheduled, but that if I wanted to get my results by phone instead of coming into the clinic, the doctor would be glad to call me. That's the prudent thing to do of course. I adore my rad onc and hate to give up a chance to say hello in person. Still, in the interest of public health, it's probably best to circulate outside the home as little as possible. Here's hoping her phone call brings good news.