Happy 1st Birthday, Covid!
-or- But Why The Damn Mink Gotta Die?
Where were you when you first heard about the pandemic?
I was in a morning meeting, slurping down stale coffee, refusing to eat one of the deformed and wet jalapeno bagels my director had brought to celebrate New Year’s Day of 2020. She delivered one of her best ‘look how much I sacrifice for you’ monologues which was followed by a pleading, “Please, enjoy!” With eyes watering and throats quivering, several staff managed to swallow a bite or two. In no time she erupted in laughter seasoned with gleeful wildness. Over the years I had become convinced that my director secretly schemed torturous social experiences that only overanalyzing, codependent shrinks would struggle to navigate. And I was fascinated by every single weird and bizarre scenario she delivered.
Some people say that a person must be insane to become a therapist. Other people say that a therapist becomes insane after years working in the counseling field. My director frequently argued that both were equally true. Most clinicians (like myself) reject the notion that, as my director would say, “Only a crazy person wants to get into the head of a crazy person, because it will make you crazy.” But these debates no longer matter now. There is no talking in death and despair.
Sometimes it’s easy for a therapist to accidentally switch from being objective to subjective. Why? Because therapy is about living, and living is personal. For example, when the South China Morning Post published an article last March citing Chinese government data that traced Covid-19 back to 11/17/2019, everything got real damn personal for me. My hospital struggled with Covid-19 during November of 2019, but like every other hospital we had no idea what was actually happening. Then came the morning meeting on 1/1/2020 where we were informed of the emerging pandemic in China while gagging on nasty bagels. Someone pin the meeting asked, “Is that what we have here?” My director was adamant that President Trump would have informed the private medical sector and the public if the pandemic were in America.
“No, no,” she said. “They would tell us because Americans don’t leave Americans to die.” She sobbed in March while reading the South China Morning Post article. We all sobbed.
So, without further ado, I present a birthday toast.
It has been a remarkable year for SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19, MIS-C, MIS-A, and if I have forgotten any other aliases or manifestations then I apologize. A remarkable year, yes? If the grim reaper and David Copperfield had a love-child, it would be this virus. A Scorpio born under a Cancer moon. Not only have you murdered well over a million people spanning the entire planet, but you have convinced a good chunk of Americans that you are aren’t even real. How did you accomplish this magnificent feat? Hot damn, I ain’t ever seen anything like your overachieving ass. For example, remember that sweet Texan dude, Tony Green? Wow — you were sure grinding hard on that guy. Remember back in June when Tony was calling you a hoax and talking all that smack about you being fake? Then he had that little get-together of just 6 people that you decided to crash? So you hitched a ride to his party using your asymptomatic invisibility cape?
In less than one month you infected 14 of Tony’s family members, killed some of them, hospitalized others, caused Tony to have a stroke, and you ensured that he live emotionally maimed the rest of his life. Talk about using a day planner effectively. You even closed out your 1st birthday with a surprising twist of demented horror. You forced the entire country of Denmark to murder millions of mink. Conceptually speaking, that’s more like a subplot in the next Nightmare on Elm Street movie than a reality. Cheers.
