IN THROUGH THE DOOR - How our Medical Families are Coping with Covid-19
Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash
I asked my high school students this week to share how the Corona Virus is affecting them. No school. More downtime. Extra projects. Those are some of the answers I got. One student, however, whose mother is a nurse in the local hospital, gave us a glimpse of the added stresses on a family in the medical field. Here’s an excerpt of her journal shared with permission:
This has been affecting me more than I thought it would. I’m not so much stressed about the disease itself, but it’s bringing a lot of stress on my family. First of all, my mom is taking care of a lot of Corona patients, so she’s working overtime and often comes home crying, sleep-deprived, and exhausted. She works the night shift, and all the doctors she works with are high-risk and can’t go into the rooms to evaluate the Corona patients, so she does. They don’t have enough tests or beds. Someone stole their proper masks, so she doesn’t have the right protection for her job. When she comes home all the boys go to their rooms, and I help her discretely undress before coming inside. While she showers, I wash her scrubs. Then I sanitize everything she’s touched, including the entire laundry room before the boys are allowed to come out of their rooms. My dad is working 14-hour days from home, plus doing night school. And my mom is either working or sleeping, so I have taken over a lot of the general responsibilities, like grocery shopping for my family and for my grandparents who live 20 minutes away but can’t leave the house. I help my grandma too with her 16 medications like my mom normally does. And I am cooking meals for my family and cleaning. My life has totally stopped. My mom’s job has added a lot of stress to our whole family. She says that it’s almost definite that she will end up with Corona, and probably we will too because of exposure to her.
Let’s remember to pray for our families serving sacrificially during this time. Those who are going above and beyond to help others at the risk of themselves and even their own families.
Thank you, nurses, doctors, and medical staff. Thank you, teenagers who are shouldering more than you ever thought you would or could in this time. Our hearts go out to you. And we are grateful!
From the Desk of CS Lewis ... on fear and dying.
This is an excerpt from Steve Laube’s blog:
I want to thank Matt Smethurst for posting the following on his blog for the Gospel Coalition last Thursday (you can find the original here). He found a brilliant selection of words from C.S. Lewis that apply to us 72 years after they were first published. Just substitute the words “atomic bomb” with the word “coronavirus.”
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays