Postpartum (Memories Resurfacing)

Around this time in 2021, everyone started to "vax and relax." I was seven months pregnant working at Starbucks wearing compression socks for my swollen ankles, wrist braces for my debilitating carpal tunnel, and a mask to protect myself from the still rampaging SARS2 virus known to cause pregnancy complications. I stopped working end of August and had my baby less than a month later, after going in for my 36 week appointment and finding out I had pre-eclampsia. He was 4 lbs 15 oz at birth and unable to be vaccinated during the winter wave of SARS2 where a million people were getting infected daily in the US. 

Imagine my horror, holding my tiny baby in my arms, watching people give up caring about the vulnerable. Now he's almost 3, healthy and strong, smart and kind and curious. But I'm still vulnerable. And so is he. Because *everyone* is vulnerable to this virus. Everyone is vulnerable to illness, disability, and death.

So we do our best to continue avoiding deadly pathogens and I watch as everyone I love gets infected with a virus that is known to do serious damage to multiple organ systems. And I worry.

I wish better for us. I wish we were all safer and had clean air and clean water and shelter and healthy food. I wish our schools were safe. I wish we could access healthcare without worrying about being infected by the very healthcare workers we depend upon. But that's a pipe dream, when so many choose to ignore our reality and live as if the world hasn't changed.

I can do so little, right now, with my current pain levels and depressive episode, but I can teach my kid how to protect himself and others, how to adapt, how to empathize and care for those around him. I can teach him all the skills I know: reading, writing, math, art, history, geography, ecology, biology, sewing, gardening, fire tending, cooking, baking, cleaning, designing, creating, imagining, dreaming.

I may suffer from a depression so vast it has touched every decade of my life, but I've survived until now and I mean to continue surviving. Especially now that there's a tiny human to raise.

Many people would say I am over reacting. I think most people haven't experienced chronic pain or pneumonia or pleurisy or depression so bad you can barely shower or brush teeth or eat. A SARS2 infection could make that worse and every infection increases the chance of disability or death. I will not roll that dice. 

The world has changed and if we wish to survive, we must adapt to the way our world is now. Not how it was. How it is. The way we move through this is not to turn our backs but to face it head on, with a respirator well sealed around our breathing holes to protect from the variety of plagues we keep spreading around the globe. ( I will not even get started on mpox and H5N1 avian flu.)

I know, I know. You're tired of the pandemic. So am I! My god, do you think I enjoy this? Do you think I want to relive my memories of the crackling in my lungs and the pulmonary embolism scare and the piles of medical bills every time there's a surge of the virus? Because that's what happens whenever I go in public to do basic tasks. I am not safe there and honestly neither are you.

Y'all get that it's airborne right? That when people cough into the air without covering their mouths it spews virus throughout and then it hangs in the air and when you walk into the cloud left behind slowly spreading with the flow of air and you breathe it into your lungs and if you're unlucky it takes root there and reproduces and spreads and infects your organs and bones all the way down to your mitochondria. This virus is insidious and it doesn't care how exhausted you are.

(Written August 2024)