Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 47

I wake up in the middle of the night and have to pee. I get up, stumble my way into the bathroom and bump into my partner. I literally bump into them.

I’ve got earplugs in so I can’t hear what they are saying. All I can hear is the sound of my own voice, screaming. I have been properly shocked.

I pull out my earplugs. They are holding me. I have stopped screaming now and am breathing deeply.

I tell them I didn’t know they had gotten out of bed. They say, check the bed for your partner before getting up to pee. Good lesson.

It takes me ages to fall back to sleep, my flight, flight and freeze response fully activated.

Over my morning cup of coffee I mindfully check the headlines. I’m learning not to actually read anything at this time of day, just the headlines. I can save articles for later if I really want to read them.

It looks like Boris is back. Apparently he’s also had a baby. Last night he addressed the nation for the first time, saying we’re past the peak and on the downward slope, as if we were on a skiing expedition.

He wants to get the economy back up and running. Get kids back in school. Ensure workplaces are safe.

There’s a vaccine coming through a new partnership between Oxford University and AstraZeneca, but no one can say when it will be ready.

I spend the morning writing. Meanwhile the sky is doing amazing things. First it’s bright blue, then dark grey. Now it’s raining, now there are hail stones, pinging off the windowpanes. Then it’s back to bright blue.

I call my sister. She’s been working in the COVID ICU at her hospital. She fills me in on how it’s going.

They’ve now turned the medical cardiac floors of the hospital into COVID units. The ICU nurses can get sent to any one of them on any given day. The problem is, they all look exactly the same.

She keeps getting confused about which floor she’s on. She could have sworn that just yesterday she’d restocked that cabinet with everything she needs, but today there’s nothing left. Oh wait, different floor.

She fears her colleagues may think she’s going crazy.

She hasn’t lost any patients to COVID, yet. She’s got one she’s pretty sure isn’t going to make it. He’s had to be intubated and is on dialysis. He’s got multiple organ failure. She tells me no one with COVID-19 recovers from multiple organ failure.

The patient’s wife keeps calling the hospital to speak with my sister but my sister’s never available because she’s in with the patient. To take a call means coming out of the room and taking off all your PPE only to have to do the reverse to go back in. It’s a long and laborious process and means putting the patient’s life at risk if they need immediate care.

When they finally do speak the patient’s wife does not understand this, no matter how much my sister tries to explain it to her. She doesn’t trust my sister or the hospital to take care of her husband. Next it’s calls from the patient’s six adult children, one after the other.

A big part of my sister’s job is establishing and maintaining rapport with patients’ families. She’s used to standing with them at the patient’s bedside, taking them through the caring process one step at a time, showing them how it all works, and comforting them if things get worse.

She can’t do that now. It’s all over the phone.

Also, this patient is Black. A Black man in his 50’s, no previous health conditions.

She doesn’t know how to convince the family that she’s doing the best she can for their loved one. I tell my sister that it’s not personal. To be Black in America during this crisis is to be re-traumatized.

All the times the system has failed you, your loved ones and your community come to bear on this moment. To ask them to trust you is to ask them to forget about all of that. It’s not like flicking a switch.

She tells me about a cancer patient she recently lost in the regular ICU. A 41-year-old man. Usually when someone is dying the entire family is allowed to sit with them. The nurses sometimes put out food and drink for them, otherwise they forget to eat.

This patient only had his wife by his side. She had to carry the weight of his death all alone, holding her own process as well with no support. The little support that my sister can give is from behind a face shield, N95 mask, and gown.

My sister sat with her for a while in the hospital waiting room, feeding her a banana and a granola bar.

Then she had to tell her that when she got home, and before she could embrace her children, she would have to take off all her clothes, take a shower, put her clothes in the washing machine and wash her hands.

There’s also been drama with my sister’s face mask. Apparently, it’s hard to find an N95 in her size so she had to get fitted for a different kind.

The first one she tried kept breaking while she was with patients, not good.

The second one she tried made her sick. Literally, she started experiencing shortness of breath and coughing. They thought she might have coronavirus, so she had to get tested and stop working until the results came back, negative.

Then they realized it was the mask. Something in it was causing an allergic reaction.

Problem was, because all staff are assigned their specific kind of PPE you can’t simply request something different when you go to pick it up at the beginning of your shift. So she had to get her manager involved.

Luckily, her manager had a secret stash of the original kind of N95 mask she needed, the one they didn’t have enough of in the official PPE stock. She managed to get enough masks to tide her over until they could officially change her assigned gear.

She has to wear the same PPE all day. At the end of the day it gets handed in, washed and reused at least 4-5 more times. But at least she doesn’t have to wear a PAPR (powered air-purifying respirator) which is what you have to wear if you fail your fit testing for all existing masks. It’s basically like wearing a space suit.

After talking to my sister I have one more Zoom call with a friend of mine in Manchester before its time for a nap. For the last few days I’ve not been feeling well. Head-achy, nauseous and exhausted.

I get up from my nap feeling as if I could go on sleeping for the rest of my life. It’s as if gravity is working extra hard on me. I feel the heaviness deep in my bones.

I drink a full glass of water, take a shower and then it’s time to get on Zoom. I’m leading another tonglen practice.

This time it’s about simply bearing witness. When you’re as tired as I feel there is nothing more to do. Sitting with the reality of suffering, in the open space of awareness, doesn’t require a lot of energy. It does require trusting that awareness is enough.

So I do a lot of resting back in awareness and being with my own suffering, my sister’s suffering and the suffering of the world. In that being with, there is also relief.

While I’ve been teaching my partner’s been cooking up the most delicious Mexican ever which I proceed to inhale within five minutes of the class ending. Then it’s time for our walk. A “roamin’ in the gloamin’” as the Scottish say.

We do our usual lap around Hackney Downs. It’s really quiet after the rain and the grass, flowers and blossoms are bejeweled with droplets of water. The sun is setting, bathing the park in a golden, purply light.

We get home with just enough time to watch the first episode of the Amazon sci-fi drama Tales from the Loop before getting on Zoom for our weekly Family Cocktail Hour. This is the first week I haven’t sent out a reminder but everyone’s come on anyhow, except my Dad.

I text him and he FaceTimes me asking where he can find the link, the same link I’ve emailed him every week for a month now. We all laugh at him.

He’s sticking his tongue against the inside of the corner of his mouth to keep from smiling, something he’s done since we were kids when he doesn’t want us to know he’s amused by our antics.

He finally joins the call. We talk about the same thing we talk about every week, coronavirus. Then it’s time for me to go to bed so I say goodnight and leave the call.

As I’m falling asleep I remember a scene from the show we watched earlier. A little girl returns from school to find her house has mysteriously disappeared, her mother along with it.

Later she meets her adult self who tells her that she will never find the answer to her mother’s disappearance, that some mysteries are never solved. But somehow you know that this little girl is going to figure it out, no matter what.