The reason I ended up in assisted living in January 2020 is that nobody around me thought I should go back to living on my own. The primary care doctors, physical therapists, neurologists, visiting nurses, social workers, psychiatrists -- they all recommended I relocate somewhere where medical help would be close at hand.
As for me, I was confused about what was going on with my body, and was content for the first time in my adult life to just defer to everyone else. Listening to them meant I also started consolidating my IRAs, finalizing my will, signing a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) form, and beginning the process of assigning power-of-attorney to my kids.
I also left a list of my passwords in a safe place.
Meanwhile, almost as soon as I moved into my new assisted living apartment, a much bigger problem than what happened in my little life was starting to take shape. It had a name -- "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2," as it was called by the World Health Organization, or SARS-CoV-2.
It was first detected in China and the authorities there were frantically trying to confine it by walling off the city of Wuhan. Here in the U.S., President Trump banned travelers from China from entering our borders. As outbreaks of the disease surfaced elsewhere, officials everywhere started to impose similar restrictions.
Cruise ships reported some cases and soon they were trapped at sea; their inhabitants prevented from going home or anywhere off-ship. No one would accept them so their dream vacations had overnight devolved into prison terms of unknown duration.
In Europe, the travel bans came down fast and furious. My oldest daughter Laila and her family barely got out of France before the deadline hit; two other friends took the very last flight out of Italy.
But if prevention was the goal it was already too late. New reports confirmed that the virus was indeed here in the states, up near Seattle, and public health officials indicated that it was far more mobile and contagious than any previous virus had been over the previous century.
As this was sinking in, I was trying to adapt to the new routines at my apartment complex, making friends and rebuilding my sense of confidence after a year dominated by serious illnesses that caused me to end my formal career.
The first indication that Covid was going to have an impact on me was when printed notices started appearing under my door. The escalating tone of urgency was difficult to miss:
* All staff will wear masks and gloves going forward.
* The dining room is being closed closed indefinitely.
* No further visitors are to be allowed.
* All residents are to be confined to your rooms.
* Your meals will be left at your door.
* Alert staff immediately if you show any of the following symptoms...
Call me a hypochondriac but just reading those messages started to make me feel rather ill. Plus being confined to my room quickly turned into a form of pure torture. I could feel my spirits beginning to wilt.
The meal deliveries simply didn't work for me; the food left at the door was cold by the time I tried it. After taking one or two bites, I threw it away, telling myself I wasn't hungry anyway.
I felt listless sitting there watching the TV, and started to shiver. I wrapped myself in blankets and turned up the heat to no avail.
The head of the maintenance team, R, took note of my situation and alerted the building management that I seemed to be starting to decline. A nurse came but said I was fine. R then decided to take over cleaning my room each week herself rather than assigning other staff members to do it. As such, she was my only visitor during that stretch, and I looked forward eagerly to our conversations every Friday morning.
Unlike most of the residents and staff, she knew exactly who I was, and she remembered my Patty Hearst stories from Rolling Stone well. The rest of the staff were understandably focused on the many sicker, more fragile residents, but she realized my problem was that I was basically shriveling up from loneliness. Since I couldn't see my neighbors, play beanbags, or share meals with them any longer, she gave me news about how they all were doing, similarly locked away in their individual chambers.
She told me that my friend S from Kenya was of the few allowed to leave his room -- to visit his younger brother with dementia, because he was his brother's caretaker.
Meanwhile, my family members were all coping with their own issues -- suddenly having to work remotely, keep kids home from school, quarantine after possible exposures to Covid.
We got a major scare when my son Aidan, a brand new EMT at that time, was exposed on one of his first days on the job when he was called on to transport a Covid patient. His employer told him he had to quarantine at home for two weeks without pay or benefits, because he was a new employee.
I called or texted him every few hours but he assured me he would be fine. At the same time all of my own medical appointments were suddenly getting cancelled. I had been slated to have eye surgery for cataract removal but that was put on hold. I needed dental work urgently but that was cancelled. My primary doctor had been seeing me once each week but now those appointments stopped as well. She did warn me at my last checkup that Covid was no joke and she expected the public health situation to become very serious very soon.
One of my new friends, M, needed a brain operation at Stanford and I agreed to go with him because I knew my way around campus, but then he called me to say that that surgery had been rescheduled for months into the future.
Like everyone else, I was isolated, scared and lonely. Then, one afternoon, a young staffer knocked on my door. I opened it to see her holding her fingers to her lips.
"C'mon out and go up the fourth floor game room!"
Not knowing what to expect, I went and to my surprise, three of my fellow residents were playing cards at a table. They were the women who had been recently widowed who I sometimes ate meals with before the lockdown.
The staffer smiled nervously. "I decided to get you all together because I can see you've each been doing badly on your own. You need to see each other. Don't tell anyone I did this."
The four of us compared notes about the pandemic. "I don't see what the big deal is," said one of them, who was in her early 80s. "We're all going to die of something anyway, so why not from this?"
She threw her hands up in the air and grinned.
"They say it could be a painful way to go," said another.
"That's why they have morphine!" rejoined the first.
I just nodded along in confusion; basically I didn't know what to think. After an hour or so of cards and chatter, we were all worn out and retired to our rooms.
Later that evening Laila called me to say she wanted me out of that facility altogether. I was to pack my bags and go down to the lobby of the building and wait for her husband to fetch me the very next morning.
(To be continued)
***
The news:
* What to Save? Climate Change Forces Brutal Choices at National Parks. -- For decades, the core mission of the Park Service was absolute conservation. Now ecologists are being forced to do triage, deciding what to safeguard — and what to let slip away. (NYT)
* Few mature forests remain in the U.S. after decades of intensive logging. The remaining trees could soon be gone as the U.S. Forest Service moves ahead with a plan that would allow about 2,000 acres to be cut down in what's known as the "Flat Country" project. The Biden administration is pursuing an aggressive environmental agenda but it has said little about old-growth forests. [HuffPost]
* The New York attorney general said it has expanded its probe into the Trump Organization, investigating it in a criminal capacity alongside the Manhattan district attorney. The New York attorney general's office is said to be investigating whether Trump took tens of millions in tax deductions he wasn't entitled to. The Manhattan district attorney has been conducting an investigation into Trump and his employees to determine if the company committed financial crimes. [HuffPost]
* Biden is increasingly at odds with other Democrats over Israel (WP)
* Gaza War Deepens a Long-Running Humanitarian Crisis -- The Palestinian enclave was already in a dire state. The war with Israel has made it worse, damaging the health and sewage systems, closing schools and displacing tens of thousands. (NYT)
* An Israeli airstrike hit a street outside the Al-Rimal health clinic in central Gaza City Monday evening, shattering windows, shredding doors and wrecking Gaza’s only coronavirus test laboratory. (Reuters)
* In Show of Unity, Palestinians Strike Across West Bank, Gaza and Israel -- Hundreds of thousands stopped working for the day to protest their shared treatment by Israel. Many Palestinians described it as a rare showing of common cause. (NYT)
* Beyond Airports, TSA Also Manages Pipeline Security. That Could Be A Problem (NPR)
* Restrictions reimposed as virus resurges in much of Asia (AP)
* EU Set to Open Borders to Vaccinated Tourists (WSJ)
* Parisians tuck into coffee and croissants again as cafes re-open (Reuters)
* The poorest American families are in danger of missing out on monthly checks under a new program from the Biden administration unless a massive outreach effort is made to those not in the IRS system. More than a third of children in poverty in the U.S. live in households that don't file taxes. [HuffPost]
* Police hold 11 staff of popular Belarus media outlet (Reuters)
* Was Christopher Columbus really from Genoa, in Italy? Or was he Spanish? Or, as some other theories have it, was he Portuguese or Croatian or even Polish? A definitive answer to the question of where the famous explorer came from could be just five months away as international scientists on Wednesday launched an effort to read the DNA from his remains and identify his geographic origin. (AP)
* Free fares? Big cities explore options to make commuting by bus and train more attractive. (WP)
* The Mercury News looked at the most popular baby names in the California. At the top of the list: Olivia for girls and Noah for boys. (SJMN)
* "The Onion" Calls On Israel To Bomb Our Offices In Case Any Hamas Agents Hiding Out There (The Onion)
***
"There's a Storm a'Coming"
You'd better run
There's a storm coming
Goodbye to the sun
There's a storm comin'
You'd better
You'd better run
Out in the night
There's a heart that's breaking
I think it's mine
There's a storm comin'
You'd better
You'd better run
Is merry gotta molecules
Every little thing you do
So sad, in the end
Oh in the end
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