GOPlague Fighters: In Their Own Words

Golden Foothills Press publicity

Michael Sedano

Who would have lived, with effective national leadership, beginning on Day 01of the pandemic? Who would have grudgingly agreed to vaccinate, mask, socially distance themselves, with effective national leadership? 

With national leadership presenting chaos, safety and health became everyone's personal mission because each of us was thrown into a storm with little protection. When our personal protective measures failed and we got sick, we went to the hospital. When everyone got sick, they went to the hospital. 

Chaos would have ruled the hospitals but it did not. Sure, the newspapers played up the medical crisis of  gurneys parked along dark hallways with sick people, but they got seen, and they got a room. Patients got seen and got cured, or died. Chaos lost; the people working in those hospitals made sure of that.

The people working in those hospitals write. Here is what some of them say (from the Publisher):

 

Status Update 

by Rodica Stan

I am healthy. Sanitized. Masked. Vaccinated. Alive. 

My tears collect in empty espresso cups, 

As I mourn my father’s death, alone, asphyxiated,

As I fear my mother’s death, alone, across 

An ocean and two continents from me.  

There is COVID everywhere,

In the space among us, them, all… 

Infiltrating the air, our intellect, 

History, death, and the earth that inters us.

S.O.S. 

Face Time

By Peter Young

I held an iPad for Miguel as he lay in his hospital bed

so he could see his family sheltered at home.

He was suffocating, this man who at the worst of times

would only tell his loved ones, Me siento bien.

All around us the equipment of life

and death was buzzing, humming, beeping,

a stubborn choir of mockingbirds.

 

I turned the camera on myself so they could see

the plastic shield, the gown, the precious N95.

Outside, a train pulled away from Marble Hill; the city was fleeing.

Sunlight gleamed down the Harlem River, catching the red oaks

just starting to get their leaves back. It was blinding.

It was the first day that felt like spring.

I saw a dozen family members on my screen, squeezed

into a small apartment somewhere in Washington Heights.

A man my age held a young girl in the air; it seemed important

that I see her. She was laughing. Another man rose

to his feet and began to clap. Soon the whole room

was doing this. Someone whooped — for me! What gratitude,

like a prayer over my meager talent. I understood

they expected me to save him.

Miguel turned sixty-six in the ICU. His family gathered

outside his window to release balloons into the sky. I watched

as they sailed over northern Manhattan. Later that night

his daughter called and asked me to sing “happy birthday” to him.

And I did.

Tranquilo, I learned to say, todo va estar bien. I was lying

in a second language. There are few roads back

from where Miguel’s body had gone, his lungs

full of something like cement. The rest fell

in sequence: kidneys, heart, then brain. From the start I knew

that when he died it would be like this, alone and pierced

with tubes. When his monitor stopped beeping, I peeled

his name tag from the door and let my intern

call his daughter. I walked home down Dyckman

still in my scrubs as neighbors leaned from windows

banging pots and pans, swinging matracas, making noise for me.

A virus is such a tiny thing

to demand so much from us.

In this anthology, 26 poets and essayists—physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, private caregivers, holistic practitioners, medical school students, and a hospital chaplain—share their personal experiences tending to patients, dealing with loss, uncertainty, grief, and isolation, surviving in a world turned topsy-turvy by a once-in-a-century pandemic. Surviving through resilience, selflessness, and the eternal flame of hope.

• . . . Here we have the young ICU doctor at the bedside of a ventilated 66-year-old patriarch, speaking on the doctor’s iPad to his patient’s large, boisterous family gathered for this virtual visit: sons, daughters, grandchildren, cheering for the doctor to heal their loved one. We hear in this poem, “FaceTime,” the pain in the doctor’s soul, for he knows his patient is mortally ill with COVID.
• . . . Here we have another doctor talking on an iPad to her physician sister in Spain, who is fighting to breathe as she reassures her sister in America. The COVID patient had gone to care for a dear friend stricken with the virus and became infected in the hospital. In this personal essay, the pain of separation by an ocean makes loss even more excruciating.
• . . . And here we have a psychologist, and a chaplain, and a young frontline physician, in personal essays and poems, wondering if they’ll survive, wondering if our nation and world will be healed and can ever be put together again.

But there is also resilience and hope: a poem celebrating a good neighbor, Jean, who brings comfort food to her sequestered community with a smile and warm heart, keeping spirits up with her cooking and devotion; a psychologist who daily goes to a cul-de-sac street high in the hills in her neighborhood and openly prays (to no god in particular) to give strength and courage to the healers and other essential workers; a poem by a young convalescent home caregiver describing her work with lonely patients, and with her grandmother at home in the after-hours, realizing that her simple tending to these elderly folks, keeping them safe, and the attendant love she gives them, makes a difference in their lives.

For details on the anthology and the press, click here:  www.GoldenFoothillsPress.com or email Dr. Reyna (link)