Last time I posted about the coronavirus, I wondered out loud if maybe it was over. I knew better, of course — even from deep inside my vaccinated bubble, I could hear the Delta variant hoofbeats fast approaching — but for a few months there it felt like life was almost normal. I wanted it to be normal so I happily stuck my head in the sand and pretended. It was glorious.
But now— [brushes sand out of hair]— the numbers are rising. Kids are getting sick. Masks are back.
I read the news reports. I discuss vaccine science. I talk with exhausted medical professionals and scared parents and public health nurses. And just the other day I placed an order for another box of medical masks and I wanted to cry.
It didn’t have to be this way.
***
I don’t know what to do with my anger.
I’m frustrated about the resurgence, and that we need to wear masks again, and that our daily activities are, once again, in jeopardy, but mostly? Mostly I’m angry at the unvaccinated people who are so stubbornly committed to their “freedoms” that they are willing to sacrifice the well-being of those around them.
Yes, I realize we’re supposed to be respectful and open-minded, tiptoeing oh-so gingerly so as not to destroy relationships with those who think “differently,” but any more these days I just can’t even. It’s gone too far. I’m done with civility. (Not really, but that’s how I feel.)
When I hear about unvaccinated people who end up in the hospital and then express dismay at the intensity of their illness and frustration with their inferior medical care, I want to scream, And the surprise in that is what? Did you think this was a JOKE? You do realize there is a pandemic going on, right? Hospitals are short staffed and the employees overworked precisely BECAUSE people like you haven’t had the decency to take basic precautions. Of COURSE your care wasn’t great! Did you honestly think it would be otherwise?
The way they act — stunned, almost, or affronted — I get the distinct impression that they’ve been living in an alternate universe and have suddenly bumped up against reality. How could they possibly have missed the memo? I wonder. Could it be that they aren’t savvy with their news sources?
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
And as for the antivaxxers who play victim — Poor me! they blare on their Facebook statuses, I’m being bullied for my choices! — do not even get me started.
Of course no one should ever be cruel to another person — I stand behind that — but when personal choices inflict pain on others, it’s only natural to get angry. I mean, isn’t vaccination refusal a gross breach of the basic social contract, that implicit agreement that requires all of us to work together for the common good?
Break the contract, people are gonna get pissed, and then do something about it (I hope).
***
Which leads me to my next point: when, oh when, are the unvaccinated gonna have to start taking responsibility for their actions?
One of my local public health friends who is fed up with the unvaccinated bullshit says we should just stop treating the covid-positive unvaccinated people. That’s never going to happen, of course — it’d be unethical, and besides, medical professionals have taken an oath — but I get her point: half of us are bending over backward to stop the spread while the other half is just waltzing around, thumbing their noses at our efforts and wrecking havoc, and then we all come limping along behind them, meekly mopping up their mess.
When is enough enough?
In a recent NPR report (if you’ve got an extra seven minutes, give it a listen), a medical ethicist argued that it’s time to start making the unvaccinated people liable for any harms. He explains that he’s not being vindictive or punitive. Just, people who live a high-risk lifestyle have higher insurance premiums, and if a drunk driver kills someone, there are consequences; likewise, unvaccinated people who are similarly endangering the health of others need to be held accountable.
Some places, like Puerto Rico, are being aggressively proactive. There, in order to be treated at the health clinics, patients have to produce either their vaccination record or a negative Covid test, and in order for unvaccinated employees to continue working, they have to provide proof of religious exemption and produce a negative covid test each Monday, and they have to pay the 80 dollars for each test out of pocket.
I can’t wait for us to catch up.
***
The other night, I dreamed I was in a fancy hotel. Through the big glass window, I watched as a huge tsunami wave crashed against the hotel, swallowing all the screaming people on the beach. At first the hotel held up; we were safe! But then people started finding their way in: dirty people, poor people, angry people. Our fancy hotel turned soppy-wet and rapidly fell apart. We were no longer safe.
***
I have close friends and family who are unvaccinated. I love these people, deeply, and yet I am angry at them. The disconnect is disorienting.
If anger is a secondary emotion, then what’s my primary emotion?
Helplessness, I think. A loss of control. Despair and sadness. Fear.
GRIEF.
I wonder if my anger at unvaccinated people is, perhaps, a scapegoat for a greater, generalized sense of powerlessness? Afghanistan, conspiracy theories, the climate crisis, Haiti, my pulled hamstring, impending old age: there are so many things I can’t control.
But Covid, now. Covid, we could have controlled, should have controlled. That was in our power. And yet we failed and so here we are, being swept up in yet another tidal wave of destruction.
Cue the rage.
But listen: loving someone doesn’t mean you can’t be angry at them. In fact, I believe it’s actually a sign of respect to get angry at those we love because it means we care enough to be invested. And it’s a gift for us to know when we make others angry! My mother used to say it was important for me and my brothers to know that our behavior had an impact on other people — her. (And boy, did she ever let us know it!)
Confession: despite what I just said, I’m not directly confronting my friends and family, partly because I’m not sure it’d be constructive and partly — maybe mostly — because I’m chicken.
So what do I do? I write. Putting my feelings into words helps me think. My brain is so chaotic (last night my husband compared it to a filing cabinet knocked over in a windstorm) that it takes considerable time, and many many pages of words, to process my jumbled thoughts.
And that’s it, folks. This is all I’ve got. I don’t have the answers, obviously, and maybe there is no answer.
A couple months after I pulled my hamstring, I’d done everything I knew to help myself heal — complete rest mixed with stretches mixed with incremental moderate exercise — but it still wasn’t getting better. Or it wasn’t getting better fast enough to suit me.
And thenmy knee flared up. At times, it was so painful that I had trouble sleeping, and for about a week I had to take the stairs like a toddler: one step at a time. I bought a knee brace and started wearing it during the day, both to provide support and slow me down.
It was miserable.
When I began worrying about irreparable damage — ground-down cartilage, shattered knee caps, crutches — I knew it was time for an expert to weigh in. I googled physical therapists, picked one, and went.
Right away, they put my fears about my knee to rest. My injury was the hamstring, that was it. They barely even looked at my knee. Fix the hamstring, they said, and everything else would be fine. The peace of mind I got from that, right there, was absolutely worth the 150-dollar initial consult fee.
To start, they did all the normal stuff like watching me walk and then testing my range of motion, and then they pressed on certain points on my legs — but not directly on the sore spots — to find the places where the fascia, sandwiched between muscle, had locked into, or fused with, the damaged muscle.
Here’s how I understand it. Think of a piece of raw chicken and how the skin slips back and forth over the meat. That’s how the fascia is supposed to move, but when there’s been an injury, the fascia sticks to the muscle and then the muscles don’t slide properly.
So what this particular physical therapy practice does (and it’s their specialty, apparently) is fascia work. At each session, they zeroed in on a couple stuck spots and then did deep tissue massage — five minutes or so per spot — which inflames the area, causing the blood to rush in, along with all sorts of other good, fight-the-stuck-fascia “things” which then loosens everything up and promotes healing. (Since the inflammation is good, anti-inflammatory meds during treatment are a no-no.)
The spots they chose to work on depended on where I was feeling pain, but often were in some other part of my body altogether. Like, when my hip started bothering me, they worked on my inner calf muscle and my lower back. When my foot acted up, they worked on the top of my foot between my toes. The therapist would first use a percussion tool to numb the area and then dig in with her elbow or knuckles. At first it would feel painful — or “nervy,” rather — but by the end it would feel about fifty percent less bad, or at least that was the goal. After that, they’d wrap the worked-on area in towels and a heating pad and leave me to bake for about 10 minutes. Once the timer dinged, we’d review the stretching exercises from the previous therapy session and learn new ones, and off I’d go.
Gradually, I began running again. First, only a mile every other day, then two miles, and then finally back up to 3-4 miles four times a week. And I was religious about my twice-daily stretches. The whole routine took a ton of time — mornings I did the complete running and stretching work-up, it took almost a full two hours! — but I was determined to wring as much healing out of the appointments as I could. My leg never stopped hurting — it continued to feel heavy and clunky when running — but I could tell it was much improved, and I wasn’t having any knee problems at all.
And then, because I felt so much better, I canceled this week’s appointment and played Ultimate, the first time since the injury. For two hours I played — gingerly, slowly, carefully — and it felt wonderful, but even so, it aggravated my hamstring enough that I’ve had to lay off the running. [hangs head] I’ve doubled down on the stretching exercises, and now — because at a hundred dollars a pop, I feel like we should be able to do much of the therapy at home — each evening my husband works on my leg: I locate trigger points and set a timer, and he reads a book while mindlessly elbowing me in the leg. He even gives me a heat treatment afterward! (Maybe we should open our own PT business?)
Seriously, though. How long does it take for a hamstring injury to heal? And do they ever completely heal? This whole process has been so long and drawn out, it’s beginning to make me wonder….
