BY DANI TIETZ
dani@sjodaily.com
When my daughters were pretty little, we went to Meijer on one of our weekly grocery shopping trips. I remember putting the girls in the cart and one of them put her mouth on the metal. It was late winter, and I was horrified. About 24 hours later, she was very sick.
She was too little to make it to the bathroom so as she vomited, I caught it on a towel or on my shirt as best I could.
Inevitably, her sister came down with the same illnesses pretty quickly. She couldn’t keep anything in her belly, not even water, and both girls became dehydrated. One of them had to go to the hospital because her skin stuck together when we pinched it.
I did what I needed to to protect my kids. We got flu shots, we washed our hands often, we cleaned their toys. But no matter what I did, they were susceptible to the stomach virus; a strain that was particularly harsh for them at the time.
I will admit that I am prepared for my children to be exposed to and potentially even get COVID-19. My guess is that because they are healthy and young, they’ll more than likely be okay.
But, I know that this is not how we should look at illness. What we need to be really cautious about is when we are in situations where our health could impact someone else.
I’ll be honest; I don’t quite know how to do that. If my throat gets that early-morning throat feeling, do I cancel things? Am I at risk if I don’t have any symptoms? Could I be carrying something and not even know it? I have a couple of meetings set up with people who are over 60 set up in the next week. Do I keep those meetings or cancel them?
I don’t have the right or wrong answers, but these are the things that I’m thinking about.
There are a lot of viruses out there. Yes, a lot of them have high contagion rates. But they are so common that we just get our flu shot or take our tamiflu and go on with life. At least some of us do, because some of us also die; the people who are at a greater risk die because someone, somewhere didn’t take the necessary precautions to ensure that the virus could have been contained.
COVID-19 and our reaction to it or its potential, has me thinking a lot about how we are just humans.
We are all just creatures in this very complex world. We yell at and judge one another, but at the end of the day, our bodies are all made up of the same things and that is why our bodies are all susceptible to viruses, bacteria, cancers and disease.
We have to take care of our self in order to take care of one another. If I am in tune with and take care of me, that impacts you. If you are in tune with your self and take care of you, then that impacts me.
The reality that we live in, though, is that we push through and we make excuses for both need and social pleasure. A single mom who is raising kids needs to go to work so that she can continue to take care of those kids. A boy who is running a fever feels like he needs to go to a track meet so that he can earn his varsity letter. Students who are getting out on spring break need to have fun so they take advantage of very low airfare to travel the world.
These decisions ultimately impact my mother-and-father-in-law, who are over 60 years old. These decisions affect babies whose lungs aren’t fully developed. These decisions impact the mother with stage 4 breast cancer who just wants to live long enough to see her daughter graduate.
If we take anything away from this moment, even if we think that the world has lost its mind and is causing hysteria, we should remember this: we are human beings, made of skin and bones, and we are not the most powerful creatures in the world. We are fragile and susceptible, just like everything else in this world.
We have viruses, bacteria, cancer and other diseases that can really affect us, even if it means that we spend a few days in bed or at home. There’s something beautiful about being in tune with that because maybe it can help us see that there are other creatures, human or not, that are also affected by forces that can be harmful to them.
