Tony Scott - Along Came COVID - Love and Loss in the 2020 Pandemic

Brenda was sitting in a chair holding her face in her hands.

“Yes. Sadly, we can’t fix the problem. She has run out of the kind of white blood cells she needs to fight the infection and her lungs are failing her.”

“Is this because of the pregnancy?” he asked.

“Well, it’s because of the virus. Pregnancy makes things worse.”

Frank was frustrated. “How did this happen? Where did she get this?”

“We don’t know,” Ann answered.

“How can we find out?”

Peggy let Ann continue, admiring the job he was doing. “She got it between two and eleven days ago, I expect the shorter because of how fast she has gotten sick. She must have come in close contact with someone who had it. We think it can be transmitted from someone before they know they are infected.”

“For her sake, it’s not important for us to know,” Peggy said.

Brenda stood and looked at the group. “Are you sure she will die today?”

Ann sounded bold. “Yes. Her pulse ox is down to sixty-five percent. It might be in the next hour.”

Frank’s mouth popped open. “The next hour?”

“Yes,” Peggy said. In the next few minutes .

“She started a little cough yesterday,” Brenda observed. “How can she die today?”

As Brenda wheezed out the words, Ann looked down at a text message, and told Peggy with eye contact.

“Brenda,” Peggy softly spoke to her, “She’s gone.”

“My little girl is gone,” she spoke, one word at a time between sobs. “My grand-baby is gone, too!”

“Yes,” Ann said, whispering because she had lost her voice. “I’m sorry.”

“You can sit here as long as you like,” Peggy offered.

Brenda looked up, “No. I want to go. You guys need the ventilator.”

“What?” Peggy gasped.

“I know you need the ventilator. I heard that last night on the news.” She was sobbing and moving toward the door.

“Not only couldn’t the family see their daughter, they couldn’t hold her hand as she died, and they can’t visit her now. That’s cruel.” Ann said.

“Yes.”

Peggy walked with Ann to the ICU where Faith was sitting on the bench outside the door, her face in her hands. As they approached, she looked up, sweat, PPE marks, freckles, and all. “I don’t know if I can stand this,” she said.

“I don’t want to suggest that any of this is easy or that this isn’t the scourge of the century,” she said, “but I know you better than to think you will succumb to this. Of all the people in this medical center, not only do you have the compassion, but you have the personal strength it takes to weather a storm like this. But I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes you want to wake up from a bad dream, which doesn’t happen.”

“That’s what this is, Peggy. A bad dream. Every time something bad happens to one of our patients, I can’t help but go into a tailspin worrying about Josh and Cori.”

“Cori?”

“My baby.”

“Cori.”

“I just wish I knew that this is going to turn out OK, Peggy. Do you think it will?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“You are strong. Josh is strong. Cori has everything going for her. We are seeing the worst of the worst. We aren’t seeing all the ones who don’t know they’re sick or who are only mildly ill. We see the ones that need serious intervention. We get a slanted view.”

“I’ve never seen someone die before,” Faith confessed. “It wasn’t ugly looking, but it was ugly feeling.”

“Yes.”

She stood from the bench. “I need to get some of this work done. Thanks for talking.” She disappeared into a bathroom.

The way she walked away exuded strength and determination hiding grief and the injury. Peggy admired her stamina, her honesty, and her fortitude. She was going to become a bastion of the profession.

“Can you believe how fast she died?” Faith asked, sitting next to Josh at the charting station and leaning on his shoulder. “It was less than twenty-four hours from when she had symptoms to when we couldn’t oxygenate her. That’s amazing. What else does that so fast?”

Josh had no answer. “I don’t know. Bacterial sepsis doesn’t. Maybe some poisonings and chemical weapons. Botulism?”

“I can’t believe this. That means any one of us could be working today and in a casket tomorrow.”

“I try not to think of that, like I don’t think about the dump truck on I-40 with no brakes.”

“I suppose,” she said. “It’s just that this hammers it home. Then others come in, get a couple days of oxygen, and go home. And there are some who don’t even know they have it?”

“That’s what everybody is saying,” Josh said. “especially children. I guess there are lots of children who get this and don’t know. I read that it is also true of scores of other viruses kids pass around. Except nobody dies from those.”

“Every time I think I understand medicine it throws me an intellectual curve ball.”

“Which is why everybody is arguing about facts about this virus,” he said. “You can get it from surfaces, you can’t get it from surfaces. Sunlight kills it, sunlight doesn’t kill it. Masks work, masks don’t work. Hydroxychloroquine works, hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. Remdesivir with be a game changer, remdesivir doesn’t work. I’ll bet the experts will be pontificating and changing their minds for a year. And who’s to say that the virus we have in New Mexico will behave the same way as the virus in Miami, Anchorage, or Los Angeles? Or Jakarta!”

“I have thought of that,” Faith said. “I wonder if we will look back on this and laugh at the way we muddled through it, the way Peggy talks about AIDS and hepatitis C.”

“I think we will. But in a decade, we will know so much about this that we will wonder why we couldn’t do a better job. It’s not that we don’t want to, we just don’t know what to do. What are we doing that will turn out to be a good thing? And what are we doing that we later learn harms the patients.”

“It’s scary.”

Josh took a deep breath. “There is something even scarier.”

Her eyes flashed open and snapped to his face, “What?”

“What if this is a biologic weapon? What if this is man-made? What if someone figured out how to hook a virulent coronavirus to some molecule that allows for fast human-to-human propagation? Or worse, figured out how to make an innocuous virus that transmits well into one that is virulent and lethal.”

“Jeez, Josh! Shut up! Don’t think about that and don’t say it.”

He tried to make her change-the-subject face. “What if Cori has red hair?”

“Wait, what? Did you just change the subject?”

“I’m emulating you.”

“I don’t do that.”

He laughed. “No. Not at all. Never. It’s like my brain trips over a curb every time you do it. Anyway, what if she has red hair?”

“Where would that have come from?”

“My sister, my mom when she was young, my uncle, Haley.” None of those were true.

“We’re not related to Haley.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You’re related to Ricky. Ricky doesn’t have red hair. I thought black hair was dominant.”

“It is supposed to be. But what if the baby isn’t yours.”

“The blond joke again?” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m assuming the baby is mine. I don’t know how it could be otherwise.”

“Time will tell. But I keep thinking about it. I saw a curly-headed girl with light blue eyes in an ad on TV and wondered if I was looking at Cori.”

Faith sneered. “You know what I look like, right? I doubt both the red hair and the blue eyes. Because of you, curly hair’s not impossible.”