We are all, I suppose, a bit Ebola weary. This, despite the diminishing of headlines and broadcasts about this disease that barely a month or so ago was thousands and thousands of miles away.
I’ve read and listened to detail after detail of Ebola’s path. The growing number of lives its evil, gnarly fingers touch is head-shaking and horrific. Yet the more I hear, the more I keep coming back to three truths:
The first is that health care workers really do put their lives on the line. What they do isn’t pretty. Yes, when we visit someone in the hospital and see doctors and nurses and aides, they’re wearing clean white coats or colorful scrubs and, quite frankly, don’t smell like bodily fluids.
They tend to our loved ones and say hello to us and type notes into computers or jot down directives on paper-filled clipboards. But there’s a whole lot of stuff they do that we can’t even imagine, or at least try not to let ourselves think about.
Knowing that two devoted nurses — who undoubtedly grieved when their patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, died — contracted the disease that killed him brings goose bumps to my arms and a prayer of thankfulness for their courage.
The second is that nothing is 100 percent certain or infallible. I will unabashedly say I am as devoted to Texas Health Presbyterian right now as I was six weeks ago. My father spent so many days and nights there that we lost count. And in what would turn out to be some of his final days, everyone who cared — not just “took care” of him, but cared — showed kindness and compassion and professionalism.
So when everything began coming out about how Presby had messed up on a grand scale, I felt horrible about it for those who work there. And wonder just how well any hospital would have done.
The third truth is the most important: We are all in this together.
That’s true in the way the disease has spread, of course — not easily, as we really should know by now. One Ebola victim’s bodily fluids get into a cut or blister or eyes of a loved one or of one health care worker. Each of them is in contact with other people, who are in contact with others. It’s like one of those big family trees that begins with two people and then doubles and quadruples and keeps on going.
True, a lot of people are taking this connection thing to the extreme: plucking out of school, for instance, kids who had the most tangential of connections to an infected person. But I tend to look at how the disease has united us in a less fearful way.
It has made us cry together over the death of a stranger who got sick because he was said to have driven a pregnant young woman to a hospital when nobody else would. It made our collective hearts clench when we learned a nurse who cared for him was infected with the virus that killed him, made us gasp a shared single breath when we heard that a second nurse was ill.
This past month has been darkened by unknowns and clouded by confusion. But it has reminded us of the fragility and the blessings of life, and how grateful we should be to live in a country where, when what was unthinkable a few months ago does indeed happen, we deal with it. Clumsily at first, but less so as the days pass.
And so we keep plugging away. We wash our hands and we try to be cautious without being silly. We echo greetings of “good morning” and hug those we love, and we remember to say thank you.
On Twitter: @ohlesliebarker
