On Coping and Numbness
Do you have to google to know how many people have died so far as a result of COVID-19? I did when starting this post. Is that an indictment of me, of how we’re treating this disease, or some combination of these factors and more? Officially, according to the CDC — which won’t receive this information going forward unless filtered by the White House’s novel propaganda machine — the number is 135,991. Google spits out a number rounded to the nearest thousand (showing as 138K, because no one can agree on anything, and 2,000 is less than 2% of our death toll). Does google just add a K at the end of a three-digit number to make us feel better? Do we count the people who state health departments have hidden in fatality rates clearly linked to COVID but lacking an official diagnosis? Do we count the numbers of individuals who died without health insurance and never received treatment? What a national disgrace.
When talking about grotesque numbers such as these, subconsciously, it’s natural to try and distance yourself or downplay it. How can you live knowing that something preventable through government and individual actions proved too much for the self-professed greatest country in the world? How do you function as if the world isn’t falling apart? How do you reconcile that there are people out there that just think about 135,991 as an impersonal number and want their sports back?
The number of deaths for any given historical event should never be just a number. Each of the 135,991 or 138,000 or whatever the real number is (again, that this is a question is just so sad) impacted countless others through their lives, has connections existing in the world, and should be more than a number. The news that 773 people died from this today should be regarded as an avoidable tragedy and generate the highest level of outrage.
Instead, we’re talking about canned f-ing beans.
That 773 people dying from mostly preventable causes does not the top of our news cycle at all times, and that anything is allowed to distract from that, is a failure on so many levels; at the same time, because we’ve already felt so much death, it’s hard not to feel numb.
The numbness goes away when the impersonal becomes personal. For me, since I knew in late February that COVID-19 could truly wreak havoc on the United States, my focus in my personal life was preparing for potential lockdowns to slow spread and for convincing as many people as I knew that the virus should be taken seriously. Flattening the curve was important for me both because I feared that a pandemic could destroy lives, but also because there are people who need hospitals under normal conditions.
One of those people is my mom, who has been living with lung cancer for over two years. I tend not to talk about it on the internet, as despite the doomscrolling and the horrors I’d only know about by being Extremely Online, I do still think about it as a separate world from reality. My mom has been through what I like to refer to as Complete Hell — she had a stroke-like incident which was the result of a brain tumor, and the lung cancer was discovered after a full-body scan around the same time.
In what is something of a miracle, the cancers independently developed and thus the situation was not immediately terminal. She had the brain tumor successfully removed shortly thereafter (that her brain surgery happened the same day my sister hemorrhaged while pregnant with her second child is another story — thankfully, she and my niece are still here — our family is both insanely lucky and been through some ish) with some long-term effects but general health.
However, she’s lived with lung cancer since then which has been a battle. She’s been in an ICU since Monday, where they’re treating her for complications from her ongoing chemotherapy cycle and general nerve pain from living for 26+ months with a tumor. Due to COVID-19, visitors are limited to my dad. I can FaceTime with her if she’s feeling up to it, but otherwise, I’m forced to stay away. So are so many others who would want to be there for her. This scene is likely reminiscent of many other people going through illnesses, COVID or not, right now.
My mom is still fighting, and she has doctors in the best medical system in the country working with her, and so she has a chance to still make it through this cycle. I’m very thankful for that, and everyone who is sick should have similar options. Health care should be a human right, and honestly go screw yourself if you think otherwise. At the same time, the angst and the distance I am feeling for one person who still is alive but also in a lot of pain makes my heart hurt for every person impacted by every single one of the 135,991+ persons who have died, most of which that could have been avoided had we handled this better. The impersonal becomes very personal.
And yet, dealing with not being there, with being powerless, isn’t much different than how the country as a whole is handling quarantine. I try to find distractions. I try to drown myself in work at weird hours or for a couple hours at a time, because focusing for a full work day is too hard and exhausting. I scroll through my Twitter feed, watch IG stories, and refresh the same websites tens of times each day. I eat way too much pizza. I binge Parks and Rec for hours because it’s the one thing that consistently brings me joy. I act erratically and have wild mood swings and struggle to think or talk. I try to cope. I try to feel numb.
Even if I shouldn’t be numb, when the matter is as personal as it can be, I do the same things everyone else does. How else am I (or us) supposed to get through this when I (or we) have no power to change it?