May / Exhaustion

This morning I woke up around 9 am, still feeling as exhausted as I have for the last few days. I feel like I had an exhausting week, even though it probably wasn’t exhausting at all. It was… difficult. Being confronted — as a bystander and somewhat of a participant — of an overburdened, clearly all-beds-full, go-elsewhere private healthcare system was tiring and terrifying. I think for a long time I had imagined or tried to imagine what it would be like if one of us got sick, what we’d do, where we’d go. The preview to that situation — being told to call ahead of going to one ER, denied entry to another ER, having to find transport to get to another — and then witnessing that the isolation units were full, and to imagine myself faced with that prospect was draining. It’s like that moment in a dream when you realize its a dream and you feel a sense of relief, except the absolute opposite of that, this is real, and we’re still so many layers removed from it.

It made me feel a lot of things - anger, exhaustion, and frustration. I felt it was inane, so ridiculous, that I had only just seen this because I’d had to go to the hospital - for a non-COVID related emergency! Why had I not seen this yet? Nothing I had read had prepared me for this. The coverage has been split between politicking and the lockdown and numbers and utterly, utterly inane headlines about extremely privileged people complaining about the fact that the government is mandating quarantine for travellers. We’re supposed to focus on the ‘good news’ of people recovered without understanding what the long-term impact on their health will be, or to imagine that things are somehow ‘better’ here as compared to what? To who? What do those numbers mean? Over 50,000 cases mean that wards are full and ERs are full and isolation units are full and that the doctor who would normally be able to see you in an emergency can no longer see you, and that if you have COVID you have to also hope that there is room at the inn.

Why has this been so missing? Why has this been so non-existent? I cannot stop thinking about this.

And so I am occupying myself with banal things. The next day I cooked to the point of utter exhaustion. I made kheer from scratch, stirring for hours and hours until the milk cooked down, and somehow, magically, turned into kheer. I made daal. I made daal again. Today I started trying to learn a complex dance routine. I cannot relax because it all feels temporary, like a distraction from the fact that this nightmare will become real.