10 - Stories from a Pandemic: Mourning
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What does Emily Silverman say about the lingering impact of the pandemic?
You're listening to the Nocturnous, Stories from a Pandemic. I'm Emily Silverman. How does a pandemic end? With a vaccine or other treatments. Does it go out with a bang? Does it fizzle out? Or is there some nightmare scenario where it keeps coming back, relentlessly decimating our society's most vulnerable? What we know for sure is that the story is far from over. If anything, it's only going deeper and awakening us to older wounds. Like racism, ageism, dysfunction, exhaustion. But something magical happens in these moments of breakage. There's space to imagine a different future. In the words of Leonard Cohen, there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. Here is episode ten. Morning.
Today's Sunday. Um the day before Memorial Day, so it's that weekend when the rest of the country is partly opening up. It's really hot in Los Angeles today, so you probably hear my AC starting to blast. So I'm on my way to work. It's four forty-two, it's eighty-two degrees out. Today's disturbing news of the day. A hundred thousand deaths today. Um today's Sunday New York Times had no pictures. Had a thousand names of people, their ages. And what they were known for. And what went missing in the world because they're no longer here. And yes, a lot of people look at those numbers and say, Oh, there were elderly, they were infirm, they had health problems. But what you're also missing out on is the relationships, the wisdom, the knowledge, the the love, the
experience, the stories, the context that um these people put around our lives is gone. And it's not just their families that are affected, it's all of society. And to say that somehow that's okay. is to ask people to erase part of their humanity. And I think that's the danger we're facing right now, is that this episode is dangerous. It's morally dangerous. And that leads to a lot of questions. Like, well what matters in life? If we're so ready to just let a virus rip through And take the most vulnerable in our society, then What really matters?
This is the medical laboratory scientist at a blood center in the Midwest, just giving an update. So we got through the first wave, more or less, which is good from a covet perspective, of course. Uh from a blood supply perspective it's maybe a little more complicated. Collections are down I think something like sixty percent, but During lockdown, when they were only doing emergency surgeries, supply and demand seemed to be pretty matched up. But now that everything is open with elective procedures and transplants and all that happening. We have so little inventory on our shelves. I think right now we have five O megs and no opazas, just none. For a center that supplies double digits of hospitals in the region, including a trauma center.
my organization has maybe a day of blood supply, assuming normal use, like No giant bleeds anywhere. It's really concerning. especially factoring in all of the protests and police brutality and injuries that are happening with that. Meanwhile, we've lost a number of our chronic transfusion patients to COVID. feels a little bit ridiculous to grieve for you know, people I've never met. their names on a board that we, you know, keep a list of units that we have in stock for them. I test their blood sometimes, but I've never met them, but they're still my patients. And then having to erase so many names off the board in such a short time it Hurts. have the rest of my patients stay safe and that the protesters out there can also stay safe and
I wish this was a little more hopeful.
I'm one of the pulmonary and critical care physicians at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. As I sit now we are at the end of week ten of the COVID pandemic. We received our first patient on March tenth. I personally cared for my first COVID-posit patient on March fourteenth. And we are still in the lockdown phase. We are still in that suspended state where we are not in the before or the after.
How does the daily death toll and missing stories affect our sense of loss?
We're in the in-between. And in this intermediate state I think we're all trying to process what we've just seen and what we've just been through in whatever way we can.
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