7 - Stories from a Pandemic Part II: Remembering a Pandemic
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When did the pandemic first feel real to the storytellers?
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You're listening to the Nocturnous Stories from a Pandemic. I'm Emily Silverman. The middle part of this pandemic has been a blur. The initial shock has given way to a relentlessness as COVID has gone from a looming threat to the water we swim in. Евентулий еврей суccumbс to entropy. Even once in a generation pandemics. We keep hearing that the end is nigh, but where exactly are we going and are we there yet? In this episode, we invite you to remember back to the beginning of a pandemic that we experienced both individually and collectively. When did the pandemic become real for you? This is our seventh episode. Remembering a pandemic.
The beginning of the pandemic brought I felt it. I felt it in my soul, I felt it in my bones. It was this feeling of impending doom. This is the same feeling when HIV AIDS hit. I administered a lot and lost a lot of people then. And when these cases were just a footnote. It was like no they're connected. It's all connected. I watched these scenes of increasing panic about this respiratory infection that was spreading in Wuhan, China. And I remember thinking at I think it was New Year's Eve, like, holy shit, this is bad. In February, I took a work trip to Ghana and on the way back, sitting in the waiting room with Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport, watching the the T. TV monitors, there were these video clips of uh of how they were building a a massive hospital in a parking lot outside of Wuhan because they couldn't keep up with the increasing number of cases that they were seeing.
And again I remember thinking, Holy shit, this is bad. I remember one of my patients who Was an іmigrant from China. whose daughter had started stockpiling. equipment like rubber gloves and hand sanitizer because she was watching the Chinese news and so she was much better informed early on than most of my other patients. And I remember about a month later when we were calling all of our patients to make sure that they had everything that they needed, being really impressed that they'd been paying attention and preparing appropriately. I remember myself reading about what was happening in Italy and being terrified, especially when I saw some data shortly thereafter about how much deadlier it was in older patients than it was in younger patients and thinking.
Is everyone just gonna be wiped out? What I recall from the beginning of the pandemic is the Twitter feed out of Italy. I recall that watching my husband, who's an intensivist, read those posts and looking at them myself and realizing that this wasn't going to be contained and it was coming and it was going to be devastating. I think I was in denial. Uh my older son, who was living in New York at the time, was saying this this is something to watch out for.
How did early news from Wuhan shape clinicians’ early reactions?
This is this could be a real problem. And he sent us hand sanitizer. And I did not uh I I I'm a person of great uh denial capabilities when it comes to catastrophe. And uh so I I did not think much of it uh until uh it's really arrived here in San Francisco. I remember the date vividly, actually. My family and my husband's family had all gotten together at True Foods Kitchen in Bethesda, Maryland. There were 12 of us total, and it was just a wonderful gathering. Being in a crowded restaurant didn't feel weird or abnormal at all. Like it was completely still normal to be in that kind of an environment. And of course, at the end of the time together. We all hugged and said, See you soon. And I think we knew on some level that we might not be able to get together in that way for a little while.
But I don't think any of us knew what was coming. In the beginning I didn't take the pandemic that seriously. I heard it was a coronavirus that was coming out of China and I thought we see all kinds of coronaviruses show up in our unit all the time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
When did the pandemic first feel real to the storytellers?
0:00–4:08
2
How did early news from Wuhan shape clinicians’ early reactions?
4:08–7:48
3
What personal experiences highlighted the sudden shift from denial to urgency?
7:48–11:13
4
How did hospitals prepare for a surge that no one anticipated?
11:13–15:58
5
What were the emotional and practical challenges of caring for COVID patients on the front lines?
15:58–19:33
6
How did families and caregivers adapt to protect loved ones during the early lockdown?
19:33–22:34
7
What does the episode say about collective trauma and the difficulty of telling a unified story?
22:34–26:13
8
Why is it important to remember the pandemic’s impact on healthcare and society now?
26:13–29:16