Christopher Frerichs Discussion #3

I’m a little reluctant to talk about the trials and tribulations of COVID as a plague because most of my memory of the pandemic’s course of events is dictated by my experience as a health care provider.  And to recount it is to recall its horror and the desperation of those times.  But I do think most people in history are reluctant to believe that their experiences are not exactly unique and COVID as the newest advent in the long history of plagues and pandemics is no different.  The one distinct factor that has always struck me about its course is that I think people were unprepared for the scale of its devastation given the curative power of modern medicine.  We can keep people on the brink of death alive forever: we have machines to breathe for you (ventilators), machines to pump your blood for you (ECMO-extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), and even machines that will filter your blood for you (dialysis machines), and we can even feed you through a tube in your nose or surgically placed in your stomach.  So, when COVID landed on our shores that fateful day in March of 2020 I think people really did respond exactly like the people of Thebes when recounting the plagues course to Oedipus at the start of Oedipus the King.  And to be frank, the results of it burning through the population of NYC were probably eerily similar.  I remember working in the ICU and it being full of intubated sick people, and at this point I was working 5-6 nights a week because we were so short staffed and so many people were out sick.  I would leave one night to an ICU census that would be drastically different the next day, as half the people that we had admitted the night before had died and were replaced by equally sick new people.  I remember being told that we weren’t performing CPR or any resuscitative measure on patients, because there was no hope of bringing them back.  I remember transporting bodies to a morgue overflowing with deceased COVID patients and walking past the cooling trucks outside the hospital filled to the brim with the dead.   I remember riding empty trains littered with the detritus of the homeless people who had taken up residence, riding into Manhattan from my apartment in Brooklyn only to have to get off the train far from my destination because there weren’t enough conductors to run the trains.  Leaving the train station, I would walk through Midtown Manhattan which looked like the site of a nuclear holocaust, completely devoid of all life.  Doesn’t that all sound like the chorus from the first part of Oedipus the King?