Five Years Later
Five years ago, right around this time, the world began to fold in on itself like origami. I’ve seen a lot of people posting their memories about it, so I thought I’d add mine.
At the end of February and start of March 2020, my husband and I drove down to Disneyland for a long weekend to enjoy the Food and Wine Festival. And enjoy it we did! But on the drive home, I had a cough that was getting steadily worse. And in the first few days after coming home, my husband had a high fever.
The kids got through that first week of March at school, and my husband and I even went to see a show in San Francisco (The Last Ship, with Sting, who had one arm in a sling) on March 5. We still weren’t really hearing anything about COVID at that point. But then the next week, there were rumblings… The kids were slated to have spring break in mid-March, and then it was decided the schools would close for an extra week. (Ha!) That extra week turned into… Well, you know.
It was difficult because my oldest was in eighth grade and had been looking forward to the dance they throw, and the trip to Great America, and the promotion ceremony, but it all got cancelled. The schools did their best by having an online promotion slideshow, but that’s not nearly the same thing. My fourth grader had his week-long class camping trip cancelled, too. I had been slated to chaperone that trip.
Meanwhile, though my husband recovered relatively quickly from whatever he brought home from Disneyland, my cough worsened. None of my doctors wanted to see me, though; they didn’t want me to come in for any testing or anything. I have a history of asthma, but I hadn’t had any kind of breathing issues in over a decade. Still, I was suddenly back on inhalers and regular at-home nebulizer treatments. I had to sleep at night lying forward over my pillow like a person in a river hunched over a log and trying to stay afloat. It was the only way I could breathe. This went on until around July, when it finally began to slowly, slowly improve. I found the more sunshine I could get (vitamin D?) the better I did. So, was it COVID? I’ll never know for certain since I wasn’t tested, but it seems pretty likely. And to this day I continue to deal with issues that started at that time.
Of course, by that summer, we had a few options for getting out of the house, too. Restaurants where we live moved their tables outdoors and towns closed streets to cars to allow for that outdoor space. We were able to go to Six Flags by making a reservation since they were letting in so few people per day. Little things like that.
Meanwhile, I had other health concerns—I have focal nodular hyperplasia in my liver, and I’d been having pain related to that. I’d gone for scans just a few days before the Disney trip, and I was supposed to have a bunch of follow-up visits that got cancelled for obvious reasons. Over time, we were able to eventually get stuff done, and I’m fine for the time being, but between the respiratory and the liver issues, it was a really tough time for me physically.
And… everyone was home. All the time. Which meant I was juggling not only my own needs but those of everyone else in the house. Trying to keep kids on some kind of schedule. I created a curriculum for them in which we did PE, and some French, and some brain teasers… I didn’t even try with any math, though. But we had a geode kit, so that counted for science. We watched the Mo Willems YouTube each day for a while, too.
We’re lucky my husband has a job he can do remotely. Before the pandemic, he worked from home on Fridays. Even now, he works from home two days a week and goes into the office three days. Not everyone was that fortunate.
And I ended up on a committee for determining how and when to re-open our schools safely. The kids finished the 2019-2020 year via remote learning, and they spent most of 2020-21 the same way (though that year was at least better planned thanks to a summer where I’m sure the school district scrambled to find ways to do things). Roughly a year after everything shut down, we were able to create a hybrid learning schedule where kids were on site some days and learning from home on others. People who didn’t want their kids to go in person had the option to keep them completely remote, too. There was no perfect solution, and none that would make everyone happy, but I’m satisfied we did the best we could under the circumstances.
I would “officially” get COVID in August 2022 (as would my husband and middle child but somehow not the other two kids), and the Paxlovid made all the difference for my speedy recovery. (Being vaccinated probably also helped.) But I’m still dealing with long-term effects, as is middle child, who now has a host of doctors and medications. It may be that COVID simply unmasked underlying conditions, but whatever the case, the result has been not a lot of fun. And yet we all know it could have been much worse. And that it was much worse for so, so many.
We hoped that the pandemic might have positive long-term effects, too. That people’s priorities would shift, that remote work might become increasingly the norm, and for a shining moment that seemed possible. But humans are creatures of habit, and more than that, the culture has demands that must be met to keep capitalism going. If a worldwide crisis doesn’t change how we think and behave, what will?