Waiting

I never expected there would be so much waiting when I decided to become a surgeon. On TV, everything that happened in a hospital happened instantaneously — STAT IV FLUIDS, RUSH TO THE OR, CHEST TUBE ASAP! — but honestly things take time. Patients come in; they have to be processed; blood has to be drawn. The labs have to cook. CT scans and x-rays have to be read by radiologists. You even have to wait to become a doctor.

But this kind of waiting — waiting for the coronavirus to strike — is different. It's not something I can cut out. It's not something that's perforated and needs to be stitched back up. It's not something that's blocked and needs to be opened. There's a sense of impotence around a virus, knowing that standard medical care, isolation, and large scale social precautions are the best we can plan on while we wait for the possibility of antivirals or a vaccine. Knowing that has made these last few weeks more challenging because it seems we’re waiting for a possible catastrophe with little in the way of stopping it, except each other.

Based on what one reads in the news, COVID-19 is either nothing more than a simple flu or a pandemic unlike any. It’s probably somewhere in the middle, based upon the data I've seen so far, and it is certainly something to be concerned about. Death tolls are rising in Italy, and early data points to us being on the same track.

It was menacing as it stalked the world outside of my hospital, but no one was quite sure what to make of it; no one knew how seriously to take early reports coming from China and Italy about its severity, and things progressed roughly the same as they had before — until this last week. Now, medical and PA students have been sent home. Elective surgeries have been cancelled; only emergency cases and major cancer cases will be performed, as of right now, as we wait to see how bad things will get.

The slow pace adds to the dread. Watching COVID-19 start in China, waiting for my friends to get home and then get out of quarantine, waiting for it to spread to Iran, then Europe, then Washington, and now to New York… and I’m writing this right now waiting to operate on a patient who is what we call a "rule out COVID 19 patient" — i.e., someone who's been tested, but we don't yet know the result. All I know is they shared a room with a person who tested positive.

I’m also waiting for the rest of my life to get started: I'm waiting for my son to be born. There was a long time I wasn’t sure I’d be a father; I wasn’t sure when I was younger that this would be something I wanted. And damn, I was, and still am, scared. To bring a new life into this world, with its climate catastrophe and with a new pandemic on emerging now… it’s quite an ask.

But his birth (due date March 22, though my wife hopes sooner) is a prayer for the future, a hope that something better is possible. I'll keep waiting. I want to know if I'm right.