On What Life Becomes When Covid-19 Won't Go Away

By Darlene Krawetz and Eli Saslow, The Washington Post

11 May 20

’ve hardly moved from this couch in weeks, but right now my heart rate monitor says I’m at 132. That’s double my normal. That’s like if I’m climbing a mountain. How come? Nobody knows. Nobody ever knows. And why has my fever been spiking again? Do I need to go back to the ER? I’m on week six of this crap, and I still don’t know if I’m getting better or worse, but people want to act like the threat is behind us?

Wait, no, that’s not right. This is actually week eight for me. I started getting symptoms right before New York shut down. I mix up my dates. My mind is all foggy. I’ve been a nurse for 30 years, and now I can’t even remember if my last Tylenol was five minutes or five hours ago. It feels like electricity is burning through my spine, and nobody can tell me why. It’s like I’m sucking air through a straw. When I stand up, my ears start ringing until dizziness forces me back down. Every symptom is a whole new mystery. This virus is unpredictable and so, so violent.

I’m up to 140 now. See? It’s relentless. How long can a heart last like this? The palpitations come a few times every hour and go on for a minute or more. It’s just banging, banging, banging, banging.

It hurts too much to talk. I’ll try again later. I have to lie down and breathe through it. That’s what they tell me to do.

The next morning, Wednesday, May 6

My heart rate is back down now to 105. That’s nothing to celebrate. That’s still considered abnormal, but it’s typical now for me.

I didn’t use to be like this. I’m healthy. I’m a vegetarian. I’m only 52. I’ve got grown kids in the military and a teenager at home, and we hike and kayak. I’m a positive, hard-charging person. Maybe I got it at the VA hospital where I work, but we didn’t have any confirmed cases yet. Or my son might have had an exposure and given it to me. Who knows? It’s one more mystery. I didn’t even notice I was sick until another nurse asked why I was coughing. I figured it was allergies. Take some Zyrtec and get on with it. Hardly anybody here in Syracuse had covid at that point. What were the odds?

Then, after I tested positive, I thought I’d get a mild case. I told my husband: “Relax. I’m fine.” I don’t have diabetes. I don’t have hypertension, COPD or anything like that. I thought I could stay home, take care of myself and be back at work in a few weeks.

Right away I started running a temperature of 103, and the Tylenol couldn’t control it. I was shaking and cursing all day in bed, and the symptoms spread from there. I was head-to-toe exhausted. I wanted the whole world to let me alone. I had equipment at home from my nursing work, and I started checking my vitals and saw my blood pressure shooting up. I’ve never had that. I’d get up to shower and start gasping for air. My son was also covid-positive, and he ran a high fever and recovered within a week while I kept on getting worse. Maybe because I’m older? Or because I used to be a smoker? You can’t get a definitive answer on anything with this. I started coughing to the point of throwing up. I coughed until I was incontinent. My lips were chapped from dehydration. I had headaches. Migraines. Heartburn. Rashes. I lost 16 pounds in the first few weeks. I would lie down at night after taking melatonin and Benadryl, soaked in sweat and terrified of what might be coming next. What if I fall asleep and stop breathing? More Benadryl. More melatonin. Maybe try a Xanax. I’d lie there for hours but it was nonstop insomnia. I’d turn the TV to Lifetime for a distraction, but I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying.

One day, my son needed money to buy groceries. I said I’d give him $80, but I couldn’t count it out. I couldn’t do the math. I handed him $50, then $70. I asked him: “Is this really happening right now or is this a hallucination?” He took the cash and counted it himself. He begged me to get help.

I went to urgent care. The X-rays showed pneumonia, so they told me to go to the ER. I didn’t want to risk a secondary infection at the hospital, and I knew they didn’t have any magic treatment for this virus, but I couldn’t take care of myself. There wasn’t any choice. I wrote down my end-of-life wishes, and I had my son drop me at the ER.

I’m having another palpitation. Hang on. Are these panic attacks? I never had them before. It feels like my heart is trying to jump out of my chest.

Breathe. Stay calm. What is there to be calm about? It’s up over 150 now. Something is really wrong with me. I need to go rest. I need to figure this out.

A few hours later

Okay. I’m a little better. It’s hour by hour. I’m not sure I can handle it again if I have to go back to the hospital. That first stay lasted 10 days, or at least that’s what they told me. I couldn’t tell days apart. I had a little glass isolation room with a curtain they kept closed. There was nothing to see out the window except a parking garage across the street. I couldn’t have visitors, and most of the doctors and nurses were afraid to stay in the room. It was okay. I was too sick to talk and too scared to feel lonely. I appreciate what they did. They were honest about what they didn’t know, and they tried. They kept throwing stuff at the wall to see what might stick.

They gave me a malaria drug, but it did absolutely nothing. They gave me an antibiotic for pneumonia, but I still couldn’t breathe without 15 liters of oxygen. They tried vitamin C, magnesium, shots of blood thinner, baby aspirin, Tums, multivitamins, Xanax, cough syrup with codeine. It was like fixing a car when you don’t know what’s broken. They gave me inhalers and breathing exercises to do every hour, but my oxygen level kept dropping. They wanted to put me on life support, but I was afraid I’d never come off. The doctor came in and said: “We have a team ready to revive you in case you start to code. We’re going to watch you closely.” Watching was all anybody could do. Then, one morning, my fever started to go down. Nobody knew why that happened either. But it stayed down for 36 hours, and they said I could go home.

Now I’ve got my oxygen on a long extension cord. I can make it to the kitchen or the bathroom if I’m feeling good, but usually I stay here in the den. My husband never caught it, so we’re staying apart. He works as a manager at Wegmans, and if he got sick, we might be out on the street. The $1,200 stimulus went to rent and hospital co-pays, and now we’re burning through our savings. I try not to think about it. I watch the news and check my vitals, but they’re always bad. My family stands in the doorway to visit sometimes, and other people text or call. “Are you feeling better yet?” It’s like they’re becoming impatient. They want to feel safe going out. We managed to buckle down for a while, but now it’s getting nice outside, and people need to work. The deniers and the protesters are coming out. One of my relatives went on Facebook and wrote that this whole virus is overblown, or maybe even a hoax. People want to minimize.

“Are you better yet? Why aren’t you better yet?”

I don’t know. I don’t know anything. My brain keeps racing with unanswered questions. Are my lungs scarred? Is my heart damaged? Can I get sick again? Will I be hiking the Adirondacks this summer or lugging this oxygen tank from the den to the bathroom for the rest of my life?

I hate this virus. It’s been two months of uncertainty and I don’t think I can take any more. Why are my legs burning? Why is my skin so hot? I need answers. I need help.

The next morning, Thursday, May 7

I’m back at the hospital.

My fever won’t come down. The doctors say I have blood clots on my lungs and a mass on one of my organs. They’re trying to figure it out. There’s no timeline and no prognosis. All I know is they’re admitting me. I’ve been crying my eyes out. The morphine is making me in a fog. When will this damn thing let me alone?

The Empire Has No Clothes: In the Classroom That Zoom Built

By Belle Chesler, TomDispatch

11 May 20

Somehow, it seemed apt to do a different kind of introduction today to TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler’s piece. After all, she’s the daughter of my first childhood friend from the building in New York City where I grew up in another century. She’s also a teacher who, in this Covid-19 moment from hell, has had no choice but to become both a homeschooler for her public school students and just another parent homeschooling her own child.

In this same period, I've left New York City, my birthplace and home for much of my life, and am now a high-end refugee in Connecticut, helping, among other things, to homeschool my seven-year-old grandson. I’m officially his daily writing teacher and the deal we made was: when he does his writing, I would do the same to accompany him. One afternoon, we agreed to spend our half-hour scribbling on what we missed about New York. Below is my contribution, which perhaps catches the mood of the moment, at least for this old man:

“Here’s what I’m missing while being in Connecticut:

“I’m missing my photos. The old ones, the ancient ones, the ones in my mother’s album that have lost their glue and come off the pages, the ones that sit in the bottom of the drawer under our bed that I would normally never look at but now wish I were near, those old photos of me as a boy atop that station wagon under the tripod of a camera in the Macy’s Day Parade (when, as I still remember, Hopalong Cassidy came riding by on a horse and shook my hand) or the one of my cousin Lorie and me in front of St. Patrick’s church when she was a girl and I was so very young. Now, I wish I had brought them with me because there’s something sad, at my age, about leaving all the traces, all the evidence of a lived life in your apartment in the midst of a pandemic.

“I’m missing the little magazines in that bag at the bottom of my closet that my mother made for my father -- filled with photos of movie stars cut from newspapers and the drawings she herself did for him -- while he was off at war thousands of miles away. I’m missing the attaché case way up in the top of that same closet with my father’s World War II memorabilia, including those two-sided colored silk maps of Burma that could be wadded up and put in a pocket. I’m missing all the letters in those plastic bags in the top of that very same closet that I wrote once upon a time and that so many people wrote me -- who even knows who they all were -- and that I haven’t looked at for years and years and years. I’m missing them, not because (if I were home) I’d be looking at them now, but because it feels like I’ve left behind the raw material for the very history of my life, everything that adds up to me and that’s now not just a two-hour car ride away but, or so it seems -- until, of course, I do return -- a lifetime away in some other land on some other planet in some other history entirely.

“I’m missing my friends, some of whom are stuck alone in their apartments in New York. I’m missing being able to go to my local Chinese restaurant (now closed) to get an order of tangerine chicken to take on the subway to a friend stranded and alone without the ability to walk very well. I’m missing inviting over for dinner on Sunday nights another friend who has, in a sense, long been a self-isolator, since I know he’s stir-crazy in his apartment right now. Both they and I could use company (even though, if I were actually in New York, I wouldn’t be able to see them at the moment).

“And perhaps above all I’m missing bird-watching in Central Park during the spring migration with Jim and my grandson. Of course, I speak to Jim almost every day up here and, most of the time, I don’t see him in New York anymore anyway (since he lives in Washington). Still, we’ve been spending a spring weekend birding in Central Park for so many years that it feels like a real break for the migration season to begin without him migrating to New York to be with me. And that, since again it comes out of the deepest part of my personal history, out of a relationship of 65 years, out of a love of bird-watching that began in our teens, represents a deep missingness.”

Now, consider the far deeper missingness that teacher Belle Chesler has found in a public-school world that has collapsed into a Zoom heap amid the deep inequality and unfairness of a system that was already a mess before the coronavirus even arrived.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

o you hear that silence?

That’s the absence of footsteps echoing through our nation’s public school hallways. It’s the silence of teaching in a virtual space populated with students on mute who lack a physical presence. It’s the crushing silence of those who are now missing, who can’t attend the classroom that Zoom and Google built.

Maybe you heard the shouted pleas of teachers across the country last year as we walked out of our classrooms and into the streets, begging for affordable housing, health care, and access to equitable funding and resources for our students? Or maybe you heard the impassioned screams of frightened kids as they stormed into the streets and onto the news, demanding safety and an end to the threat of gun violence in our nation’s school buildings? Now, there’s nothing left to hear.

Today, all we’re left with is a deafening silence that muffles the sound of so much suffering. The unfolding public health, mental health, and economic crisis of Covid-19 has laid bare the fragility of what was. The institutions charged with caring for and guiding our most valuable assets -- our children -- were already gutted by half a century of chronic underfunding, misguided curricular policies that prioritized testing over real learning, and social policies that favored austerity over taking care of the most vulnerable members of our society. Now that so many teachers are sequestered and alone or locked away with family, our bonds of proximity broken, we’re forced to stare into that void, scrambling to find and care for our students across an abyss of silence. The system is broken. The empire has no clothes.

Not so many weeks ago, I used to be a teacher in a sprawling public high school outside Portland, Oregon. Before the virus arrived, I taught painting, drawing, ceramics, and filmmaking in three different studio classrooms. There, groups of students ranging across the economic, ethnic, religious, racial, and linguistic spectrum sat shoulder to shoulder, chatting and creating, day after day, year after year. Music played and we talked.

On some days, the classes were cacophonous and chaotic; on others, calm and productive. In those spaces, we did our best to connect, to forge thriving communities. What I now realize, though, is that the physical space we shared was the only thing truly tying us all together. Those classrooms were the duct tape securing the smashed bumper on the wreck of a car that was our public education system.

Now, it couldn’t be more obvious: no one’s going to solve the problems of our present and near future with the usual solutions. When desperation leaves us without imagination, clinging to old answers, scrambling to prop up systems that perpetuated and solidified inequity, it means missing the real opportunity of this otherwise grim moment. The “great pause” that is the Covid-19 shutdown has allowed us all to stare into the void, to see far more clearly just how schools have long shouldered the burdens of a society that functions largely for the privileged, leaving the rest of our nation’s children and families to gather the crumbs of whatever remains.

The Privilege of Homeschooling

In the first weeks after schools closed across the country, as parents struggled to “homeschool” their children, memes, rants, tweets, and strongly worded emails to school administrators popped up across the Internet. They expressed the frustrations of the moment. Those shared tales of the laughably insane trials and tribulations of parents trying to provide a reasonable facsimile of an education to kids sequestered at home, while still trying to work full time under the specter of a pandemic, amazed and depressed me.

Television producer and writer Shonda Rimes tweeted, “Been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.” Rimes's tweet seemed to encapsulate the absurd reality of life at home with kids in the time of the coronavirus. As I read her tweet, I laughed out loud and in utter solidarity with her. A teacher no less, I, too, was trying and failing spectacularly to oversee the “education” of an increasingly frustrated and resistant third grader from home.

For those of us siloed in our privilege -- healthy, with plenty of food stocked away in cupboards, quiet rooms with doors that shut, ample Internet access, and enough Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share among the members of our households -- our quarantined home life is challenging, but not impossible. Our daily frustration continues to be a function of that privilege. For those without it, those who were already living in poverty or at its brink when the pandemic struck, homeschooling poses yet another crushing hurdle in life. How can you provide an education for your children when simply securing food, work, and shelter is your all-consuming reality?

Meanwhile, as exhausted parents screamed at school districts, teachers, and administrators on the Internet about providing virtual learning resources and online curricula to engage students during the school day, public school officials (at least in my world) were scrambling to deal with a far more immediate threat: kids going hungry. What this pandemic promptly revealed was that the most fundamental and urgent service schools provide to many children is simply feeding them.

The gravest and most immediate threat to our most vulnerable students was, and continues to be, hunger. If schools are closed, so is the critical infrastructure that helps keep our nation’s children fed. Aside from SNAP (the food stamp program), the National School Lunch Program is the largest anti-hunger initiative in the country. It feeds 29.7 million children on school days, with an additional 14.7 million children fed thanks to the School Breakfast Program and more than 6.1 million via the Child and Adult Care Food Program. And those numbers don’t even include the informal system of food distribution that teachers often provide students in their classrooms. On average, teachers spend upwards of 300 of their own dollars yearly providing food to students.

So, no wonder that, as soon as Covid-19 closed the doors of our schools, administrators, teachers, custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and volunteers across the country mobilized on a large -- and downright heroic -- scale to attempt to keep those students fed. In the Beaverton school district where I teach, a “Grab and Go” curbside meal distribution program was quickly set up, making daily meals accessible to every student in the district. As economic conditions head for Great Depression-level misery, think of these as 2020 versions of the infamous breadlines of that era, only in this case they’re for children (and sometimes their families).

The responsibility for feeding students was not the only immediate concern. The adults in our school typically also serve as first responders for those students. We monitor their moods and listen to their stories. We notice when kids are struggling emotionally and, as mandatory reporters, step in when we suspect a child is living in a perilous or unsafe situation.

In the first weeks after we left our classrooms, calls to Oregon’s child abuse hotline dropped by more than half. Other states across the nation reported similar declines. The drop in calls has frightening implications. Coupled with increasing economic insecurity and social isolation, rising rates of child abuse are undoubtedly imminent. When teachers, counselors, and school social workers are no longer able to observe and communicate openly with students, signs of neglect or abuse are much more likely to go undetected and unreported.

The closure of our buildings also poses a huge barrier to the normal support of students struggling with mental-health issues. Our children are already suffering from alarming rates of depression and anxiety. Isolating them from their friends, peers, mentors, caregivers, and teachers will only compound their mental-health challenges.

Trying to Bridge the Digital Divide

Add the surreal nature of an invisible foe to a lack of clear directives from both the federal and state government and you have a formula for problems. When we were finally instructed to leave our school, it was without advanced warning. In my classrooms, half-finished clay projects littered the countertops, while palettes loaded with acrylic paint and incomplete canvases were left to desiccate and gather dust on the shelves.

Students departed without cleaning out their lockers or often even gathering their schoolwork and books, not to speak of the supplies they’ll need to complete that work at home. And even though our students do have access to technology -- three years ago, our district adopted a policy of providing a Chromebook to each student -- it soon became apparent that there were huge obstacles to overcome in transforming our brick-and-mortar classrooms into virtual spaces. Many students had, for instance, broken or lost their Chromebooks. Some had missing chargers. And even many of those who had their Chromebooks with them at home had limited or no access to Wi-Fi connectivity.

Trying to reach all my students across that digital divide became the central focus of my waking hours. I made calls; I texted; I emailed; I posted announcements in my digital classroom stating that we’d be reconvening online. Still, none of these efforts mattered for the students stuck at home without Wi-Fi or lacking the necessary devices.

Before our nation’s schools closed, the Federal Communications Commission estimated that around 21 million people in America did not have broadband Internet access. According to data collected by Microsoft, however, the number who can’t access the Internet at broadband speeds is actually closer to 163 million. While districts across the country scrambled to provide mobile hotspots and working devices to students, teachers like me began the demoralizing and herculean task of scrapping years of thoughtfully crafted curriculums in order to provide an entirely new online learning experience. We stepped into our virtual classrooms with the knowledge that, no matter how many shiny new digital resources we have at our disposal, there’s nothing we can do to provide equitable access to education remotely.

And even if we were to solve such problems, we couldn’t offer the space or the support students need to learn. Kids living in cramped situations will struggle just to find a quiet place to attend our online classes. Those whose working parents suddenly need childcare for younger siblings have sometimes found themselves taking on the roll of primary caregivers.

Some students whose families were in ever more perilous economic situations increased their work hours and scrapped the idea of attending school altogether. And many of our English-as-a-second-language, or ESL, students, as well as the 14% of students nationally who require additional “learning supports,” are now in trouble. They’ve been left to navigate a complex web of digital platforms and new learning approaches without the individualized attention or frequent checks for understanding that they rely on from their teachers.

What virtual learning can never stand in for is the moment when a student leans over and asks me or a peer for help. That simple act of vulnerability that builds a bridge to another human being may be the most important moment in any classroom and now it’s gone. In Covid-19 America, when school kids need help most, they can’t simply lean over and ask for it.

The Time to Pivot

Today, I teach from my kitchen, my dining room, or the floor of my bedroom. I stare across the digital abyss into the pixelated faces of just a handful of students. It’s impossible to read their emotions or body language. Even when I unmute them, most choose not to speak.

Each day, fewer of them show up to class. Sometimes, students turn off their videos, and I speak only to a sea of black rectangles, the white text of the student’s name the sole indicator of his or her presence in my new classroom. Not surprisingly, our sessions together are stilted and awkward. I try to make jokes and connect, but it’s impossible to replicate online the intimacy of a face-to-face interaction. The magic of what was, of 25 to 40 students working cohesively in community, is lost.

And in the darkest hours of the early morning, when I wake with a start, crushing anxiety pushing on my chest, I think about all the third graders unable to participate in my daughter’s distance-learning classroom. I wonder about the students I’ve still been unable to reach -- the ones who haven’t responded to my emails or completed any assignments, and whose faces I never see online. Where are they? How are they? I have no way of knowing.

Our world no longer looks the same. This pause, which has caused, and will continue to cause, so much suffering may also be a gift, offering a shift in perspective and a chance to pivot. Perhaps it’s a rare opportunity to acknowledge that our nation’s public schools should not be left so alone to provide food, mental health care, and digital connectivity for our nation’s children. That should be, in a fashion almost unimaginable in America today, the role of the larger society.

Now is not the time to be silent but to raise our voices, using any privilege we may have, be it in time, money, or simply access, to demand major changes both in how all of us think about our American world and in the systems that perpetuate such inhumane and unconscionable disparities for so many.

There is no way to continue putting yet more duct tape on that smashed bumper of a public education system that was already such a wreck before the coronavirus arrived on these shores. Nor is this the time to retreat into our silos, hoarding privilege along with toilet paper and hand sanitizer, too cowardly to demand more for all the children in this country. It’s time instead to reach out across the six feet of social-distancing space that now divides us all and demand more for those who aren’t able to demand it for themselves.

Belle Chesler, a TomDispatch regular, is a visual arts teacher in Beaverton, Oregon, and is now teaching from her home in Portland, Oregon.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.