Compassionate Accessorizing

In early June I did the unthinkably daring (and possibly foolhardy) thing of driving from Nashville to the Hudson Valley to spend time with my family in New York—yes, as a cancer patient in the dangerous time of COVID.

The drive that used to be so routine became a germ-avoiding odyssey. I was so very careful getting here. I packed all my own food and drink for the trip. I wore a mask and gloves at rest-stops and gas stations and sanitized, sanitized, sanitized. I didn't buy even so much as a cup of coffee on the road, and slept in my tent on the ground in a lonesome, wooded campsite in Northern Virginia so as not to rest my head on a potentially germ-ridden bed in a hotel. (I'll do the same on the way home.)

And I've been rewarded with wonderful stays on our family farm tucked away in a remote corner of the Catskill Mountains, and at my sister's beautiful home near the Hudson River. I've taken long walks in the woods and gone biking along rail trails. There's been lots and lots of good food, good rest, gorgeous vistas, mountains and streams and rivers, and lots of time soaking up the groovy Hudson Valley-Catskill Mountains summertime vibe. I even made a quick trip across the border to see a friend in Massachusetts. And I've felt very safe the whole time.

The trip has been all about the mask and the hand sanitizer. And social distance. 

I've been masking up, sanitizing, and social distancing with some dedication ever since all pandemic hell broke loose back in March, but I think I do it now with even greater vigilance while moving about the country. Riding on the rail trail --- masked. Walking in the nature preserve --- masked. Going to the grocery or to get take-out --- masked. Like so many folks, I have a hand sanitizer pump bottle and some wipes in my car, and I carry one or two little bottles in my purse or pocket at all times.

The good thing is that nearly all of the people I've seen in most of the places I've been while here in the Northeast have been masked. Once I saw an unmasked woman enter a grocery store, and a staff person courteously reminded her she needed to wear a mask. The woman gasped, not at the fact that she had to wear a mask, but at the fact that she had forgotten hers in her car. She apologized, ran out to get her mask, came back a few moments later, and went about her business. 

But I know that's not the case everywhere. COVID infection and mortality rates are spiking again, especially in the South, including in my red state of Tennessee. The Florida and Texas numbers are especially shocking. And in these places, apparently, mask wearing is some kind of political statement. If you do it, suddenly you're a "nasty liberal" instead of a person with plain old common sense. 

When I lived in Japan in the early 1990s, I saw people wearing masks every single day on the trains, in schools and work places, on the streets, in the parks, and in the stores. I'd arrived during cold and flu season in late December, and the point of wearing the mask wasn't just to keep oneself from getting sick, but to prevent transmission of illnesses to others. As the flu season passed, fewer wore masks, but if someone had the sniffles, a cough, or a cold, and they happened to be out in public, they usually had a mask on. It was normal. It was sensible. It was considerate of other people. It was a healthy practice.

Many Americans, it seems, are not inclined to that sort of common sense or consideration. Nor do they care about public health. Instead, they'd rather have public meltdowns and temper tantrums when asked to wear masks.

The other day a friend texted me from Nashville to say that she had been at a Panera when an unmasked man came in and started haranguing the masked customers and workers, shouting about how wrong it was to wear a mask and screaming at everyone to stop wearing them. 

I've read reports and seen videos of other people doing these things, declaring they had "breathing problems" or that it was their individual right not to wear a mask and that local ordinances or store policies requiring it were violating their rights as Americans. And while I always try to exercise compassion in the face of stupidity, my supply for this kind of nonsense is really running low. I'm at the end of my patience, frankly. (So much for cancer making me a more compassionate and generous person!) 

I know, though, that, like toddlers, these adult public tantrummers are responding to the COVID crisis from a place of fear (primarily) and denial. They, like toddlers, cannot control the world around them, which triggers a fear response, which pisses them off into a downward spiral. They lose any ability to be compassionate or considerate.

People, COVID-19 is not a conspiracy of the "liberal media." It's a real disease, and it is pandemic. People are dying. YOUR life is at risk. And so is mine. Currently, we don't have a good treatment, a cure, or a vaccine. I have confidence that we will. But we don't have it right now.

Wearing of masks, social distancing, and good hand hygiene stop the spread of this disease. There's empirical, scientific evidence to support those claims. We need to do all those things until we 1) can treat it effectively, and/or 2) have a vaccine against it, and/or 3) can cure it, control it, or eradicate it completely. 

My nieces and I were talking the other day about how we can find all sorts of "cute masks" on Etsy, and how some companies are starting to make masks designed to be "more breathable" for workouts as "athletic attire" (though we declared these overpriced and recalled fondly the early DIY mask days of the pandemic). The point is, according to my very wise twenty-something nieces, those who malign masks and refuse to wear them are (besides jeopardizing everyone's health) missing out on a very good opportunity to accessorize. 

So sanitize those hands, social distance, and for goodness sake...mask up, y'all. Accessorize, accessorize, accessorize. And try, at least a tiny bit, to enjoy it.

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.