Post-Plague Anxiety

Instagram of hospital window, April 1, 2014.

Six years ago this week, I got into a really bad bicycle accident. I spent 8 days in a hospital in Sunset Park largely unable to get out of bed due to two broken bones and a tube in my chest cavity keeping my lung inflated. I've thought a lot about that recently. Prior to COVID19, it was the the closest I'd been to a quarantine. I saw my mom and often my sister every day, and maybe one person would come to visit me for 10-20 minutes a day. Otherwise, I spent the day in bed, looking out one tiny window, generally just waiting for it to be over.

I remember distinctly the feeling that my life had somehow changed. It was a paradigm shift, and I would forever be affected by what had happened to me. However, in the moment, I didn't really feel any different. All I could do was lay in bed and wait for something to happen. I took a lot of naps. I read books. I waited for doctors to tell me I could go home.

I knew that I had experienced trauma, and at some point it would take hold and impact my mental health, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It is a weird sort of powerlessness, to know you are experiencing something that will change everything, but not be able to do anything except stay where you are.

That is how I feel now. Moment to moment, I'm fine. I'm safely isolated in my apartment, and I am being careful to take steps to minimize the risk of getting sick or infecting others. I stay inside, except for short bouts of exercise, getting groceries, and the once per week I need to go into my office, where I obsessively use hand sanitizer and hand wash and avoid touching my face. As an introvert who badly needed a vacation before this, I am mostly happy to be confined to my house for a while. I am, for now, not sick and still employed. I am so lucky.

But the way I relate to the world has changed, and part of the anxiety is not what is going on now (though there is plenty of that too), but the fear that Corona Panic will stick with us. I fear we will be distanced from one another long after the medical crisis subsides. It's not quite plague anxiety. It's post-plague anxiety.

Over the last three weeks I've increasingly come to fear interaction with other people. I don't want to touch people. I feel a compulsion to disinfect every surface I come into contact with. I wash or sanitize my hands several times an hour. I try to keep six feet away even from the people who I live with. It has become a moral necessity. Social interaction is morally bad. Isolation is morally good. Touching surfaces, morally bad. Obsessive cleanliness, morally good.

I have a vague sense that these steps that we are taking to limit natural human interaction, which in fact are good and necessary in this acute crisis, are lodging in our brains as trauma. When the threat no longer exists, or is at least no longer so severe, how easily will we be able to let go of these compulsions? We have rapidly adapted to registering basic human interaction as a threat. What will the consequences be when we try to go back?

Six years later, I am still impacted by the trauma of my bike accident, in both expected and unexpected ways. I still get flashbacks. I have a hard time going to the neighborhood where it happened. But I also react to stress differently. I'm less able to cope with stimuli like unexpected loud noises. I can't watch violent movies. I have depression and anxiety issues that were probably always there, but certainly got worse after my accident. The things that affect me are often totally unrelated to what actually happened to me, but I've learned to accept that trauma re-wires your brain, and all I can do is learn my triggers and adapt to them.

As I sit at home waiting out this crisis, I just hope that fearing other people is as temporary as necessary isolation is.