Impact on Me and My Community

by Monique Sager

In the first two weeks, I scrubbed everything. I became paralyzed with fear when another person walked by me on the street, and I washed my hands until they were raw, wondering if soap did anything to kill the virus. I Lysol-ed the mail. I Lysol-ed my shoes, I wanted to Lysol my hands but my boyfriend stopped me. I went for a walk on the Schuylkill River Trail and was so terrified by the hundreds of people running by me, brushing against my shoulder, that I vowed never to do it again.

As the days went by, I have stopped leaving the house, for anything. We wait until we are down to our last can of tuna and bag of lettuce and then, together, holding hands, we go to the grocery store, in our masks. Other than that, we do not even leave for walks.

As my time in the hospital grew further and further away, my mind seemed to let go of the reality of the situation. I pushed the look of fear on my residents faces as they coughed and coughed out of my mind, and focused on studying for my shelf exams. I felt safe in my apartment, shielded from the tip of the iceberg I had just witnessed in Penn Presbyterian.

I stopped Lysol-ing my mail, my shoes, my keys. I’m in contact with no one, and I am no longer worried about being a vector to my patients. If I get this virus from my amazon package, so be it.

We waited, day after day, both of us suspicious of our sore throats and runny noses, waiting for the inevitable to hit. And it never did. Over a month later and we are both still here, sitting on the cough attending to our respective business. We are healthy. We are terrified. We are complacent with the situation, guiltily enjoying the time off from clinics and work, the ability to be together. We watch the news each morning, watching our meager life savings grow smaller and smaller in the stock market. We make each other coffee, fall asleep to reality TV, languish in these 800 square feet and move our laptops from the kitchen to the bedroom and back again, trying to make it feel like it has more rooms, trying not to get sick of each other, all we have now.

I’m supposed to be a medical student, but I don’t feel like it. I feel like a zombie, devoid of purpose or emotion, wandering from room to room in my apartment and unable to sleep. I’m supposed to be watching online videos, learning, taking exams, but I don’t feel I can. I only exist in this endless cycle- watch the news, drink my coffee, sit on the couch, run out of food, creep from the house. Repeat. Monday is no different from Saturday and I forget the date as April slides by me, quietly warming the air which I will not feel on my skin.