Reflections

55

A week ago last Thursday (the 12th of March) I was sitting in my manager’s office at the end of the day chatting about some random things before I left for two and a half weeks of vacation time. He was half paying attention to the influx of emails he was receiving, and reading me some of them as they arrived when one made me sit straight up in the chair and ask him to read it out loud again. “Anyone returning to Canada from out of the country, including from the USA, should self-isolate for 14 days”.

I muttered an expletive and said something along the lines of “Kirk is coming home from Chicago tomorrow and that’s going to mean that we both now have to isolate for 14 days since we can hardly avoid each other in the house.”

The upside of that knowledge was that I had a little less than 24 hours to get a few essential items into the house so that we wouldn’t be out of anything we needed over the next couple of weeks. I sent Kirk and text and asked if he needed anything picked up from the office, and then I went back to my desk and picked up my work laptop, which I had fully intended to leave at work. I would still ignore it until April 1st though, as well as let my Blackberry go dead. I suck at taking time off, but I really need it this time.

The next morning I stopped in at the grocery store, the produce shop, the wine store, and the drug store and bought a few things that were either perishable and we were out of, or that I knew we might run out of in the next few weeks.

I stopped at the drugs store and shook my head at the complete absence of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, isopropyl alcohol, and disinfecting wipes and grabbed a bottle of bleach. I guess people hadn’t figured out that a $3 bottle of bleach has a pretty spectacular cleaning power and goes a long way.

On the way to the airport I popped into my office to grab a book I wanted to read, and also to grab the bottle of hand sanitizer that lives at my desk. I wondered if it would even be there. It was. The office was a ghost town, though that’s not a surprise on a Friday afternoon anyway, many of us work a compressed work week (more hours in fewer days to get every other Friday off).

On the way out the elevator opened and my manager walked out, whe spoke for a moment or two and then he said “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

I responded with “Maybe…” and he gave me a look that said “I hope you’re wrong“

I’m not wrong. I had a hunch this was going to go sideways quickly when that recommendation had come down the afternoon before.

So I was smart and grabbed my work laptop, but I wish I’d thought about a few other things. There are a few books and some papers I wish I’d picked up, and the manual I am working on updating; I have all sorts of pen notations in there on things I want to change after the workshop I put on two summers ago. I know I’m not going to be putting it on again this summer as planned, but it was a project I had started to work on and I’d like to keep on it.

I also wish I’d rescued my office plants. I’m plant-sitting for someone on mat-leave, and I have my own to care for. When I left the office on the 12th I’d asked my next door cubicle neighbour to water them, he has his own collection. Now no one is in the office and my plants are going to die, and presumably his too.

It’s a silly thing to bother me, but it does.

I also wish I’d taken my office chair home. I am realizing how good it really is; it wasn’t a cheap chair and I m realizing that the cost really does have value. My chair at home sucks for my back. Working on the couch sucks for my back.

I am a journal writer, when I am in the mood, and I am very much in the mood these days. I also use fountain pens and my ink bottles are sitting at my desk at work. I, weirdly, also wish I had grabbed those.

I also realized that my driver’s licence is up in a few weeks, and I have an appointment booked to renew it for the 31st of this month. I’m not sure how that will play out. I don’t really want to go out, anywhere, for a long time.

I’m supposed to pick up a Swedish ham at Oyama’s on April 13th, for Easter dinner (and lots of yummy leftovers). That’s not going to happen.

None of them matter in the least. They just irritate me, but they don’t really change my resolve any. Though I admit to considering sneaking into the office on the weekend after I am through the 14 day isolation and when I know there won’t be anyone in the building, except for the security guy.

I know those are all such ridiculously first-world things.

Not everything that runs through our minds when a crisis hits is logical, though.

Like toilet paper.

I still can’t figure that one out.

I’m trying to understand the reasons that people are ignoring the call to stay home and stop gathering and closely interacting with others.

Kirk was just ouside and came in shaking his head.

Across the street from us is a new seven-unit complex that took forever to build and disrupted our lives for three years. Now there are people living there and at least one of them is apparently very stupid.

Kirk said that he overheard a woman on the upper deck of unit-2 talking to someone and saying something along the lines of “I just want to get this virus and get it over with so I can go about my life….I’m still going to Italy….”

See, that’s the wrong attitude. And no, depending on when you planned ot go to Italy…I bet you’re not….

So why are people ignoring the call to isolate?

1. Is it ignorance? Are these people who simply didn’t pay attention to biology or math lessons in school? We all took high school math and science up to some level. Are these the same people that just managed to get by or failed completely? They didn’t retain any basic information on disease transmission and exponential growth curves?

2. Or are they just so self-absorbed that they think they are somehow going to be spared any effects- direct or indirect – of a worldwide pandemic? They are feeling onconvenienced because they can’t go to their favourite bar, their favourite restaurant? They can’t go get their streaks or colour touched up or their nails done? Are these the same people who don’t want to recycle because it’s bothersome?

3. Or are they just completely unaware? Are they people who don’t read/watch.listen to the news? I don’t know how that is possible these days, but I guess there are some.

4. Do they have feelings of superiority? Do they think that because they are healthy that it won’t affect them? If so, that leads back up to number 1 above…

5. Or is it fear? Are they afraid to admit that this is a real problem that we are facing because if they admit it they will somehow lose control of the tenuous control they feel they have on their own lives? If they concede that they are wrong and this really is something to be concerned about, are they afraid that they will come bit unglued when they are forced to acknowledge reality?

I remember 911, or at least some aspects of it, so vividly. I remember waking up to the radio-alarm and hearing the announcer saying something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. I remember thinking that a small plane had somehow lost control and crahsed into the side of the building. Then, in my waking foginess I realized she was crying. I remember turning on the TV and the day vanished in a blur of not being able to turn away from what was unfolding on the screen in front of me. Tears poured down my face as I tried to comprehend what was happening in the world. It was tuesday. I didn’t go to the lab for a day or two, I don’t think anyone did. On the weekend I had to go to work at the hair salon; I worked reception on Saturdays at the saoln I’d worked at on and off since 1987, and through two and a half university degrees. I remember Derek bringin in a small tv and setting it up in the corner of the reception area, with a set of rabbit ears to improve reception. And I remember Denise coming up to the front at one point…she walked over to the TV and turned it off. She looked at me ans said “I’m so tired of listening to that, it’s depressing and I have a party tonight…” She then stood in front of me and proceeded to tell me about what she was goingt o wear and how she was going to do her hair..and so on. I remember just staring at her in disbelief.

So, in this case, maybe self-absorption is high on the list of why people are ignoring it. That, coupled with fear and superiority.

We always seem to think that things that happen in other parts of the world will have no impact on us. We see it through the TV screen…and we equate it to the fiction that we binge on?

Kirk and I were fairly active in the weeks before this really hit home. I was at an all-staff at a hotel for a few days, then on a trip up north with two people up from the US, from Washington, and just outside of Seattle, the hotbed of the Western US outbreak. I flew twice on that trip, and was in a car with the Americans for two days. We went to an international wine festival the weekend before I went on that trip, and we also went to a movie the same week. There was a tribute performance to Simon & Garfunkle at the UBC Chan centre. The Kirk went to Chicago.

So we are ticking the days off from a number of potantial interactions that could have resulted in infection. But we are down to the last week now. The median incubation period is five days, with 97/5% of those infected showing symptoms within 11.5 days. The period for self-isolation is 14 days, with evidence from some sources suggesting that it could really be up to 24 days.

Our 14 days will be up next saturday, but I highly doubt we will go back to anything resempling a normal life for a much longer timeline.

And I am perfectly ok with that.

I’m generally a reflective person, though it’s hard to be anything but reflective these days. Well, not for everyone if the throngs of visitors to the local parks and tourist sites are any measure of evidence.

Is it awful that I am glad Mom and Dad are no longer with us so that they don’t have to be terrified of this bug?

That I don’t have to be terrified for them?

Mom was a germaphobe and probably would have locked herself up weeks ago. But Dad was in a care home with Alzheimers disease so wouldn’t really have processed it, but he would have been an easy target for the virus.

I would probably be beside myself with worry over them right now, if they were still among the living.

Protect those you love by calling them, instead of visiting. Easter is coming, don’t try to keep things normal and have a big family dinner with everyone over. Take a year off and improve the odds that you will have a big family gathering next year.

Stay safe, and keep your distance everyone.

(82/365)