Life as I knew it changed when I wrapped my knee around that tree, exactly 3 weeks before the first two Coronavirus cases hit Kauai.
“I need your help,” I yelled, with more panic in my voice than a good dad would want his son to hear.
The boy unbuckled my snowboard’s bindings. My knee clunked back to where it was meant to be.
“Go get ski patrol. I’ll make my way out of the woods.”
And then he was gone, and I was alone.
I bent forward. Clenched my jaw. Pushed hard against the pain. Scooting my weight onto the snowboard’s tail, I picked up the floppy stump of bone and flesh and centered it on the board’s nose. The pain was extreme.
Mittens clawed at powder. My board slid in 3-inch chunks of time outstretched. And then, finally, I had paddled out of the woods. Panting on the open slope, I closed my eyes. The pain, the same. Metal edges pushing snow, the sound of others too close, not stopping, not feeling. My eyes opened. Nothing changed. The tops of trees so far away. They swayed in a slow-motion silence, in a wind I couldn’t feel.
And then the heroes came. They loaded me onto their toboggan and we followed gravity down, down. Each bump like a spear’s blade in my knee. Facefulls of ice with every turn. I clung to the tarp, hid my face from the wind, the cold, the pain. I hyperventilated the way my wife did when she birthed our son — too quick to last, between lips drawn tight with fear.
And then the ambulance ride. The offer for something to take away the pain. My polite decline. I’m a doctor. I don’t like drugs.
But your pressure’s 183/98.
Is there another way?
Respirations are at 60.
OK. Do your thing.
The needle’s sheath within my skin. Molecules before unknown swim and swirl in a universe brand new.
And then the pain and its world disappeared, along with every boundary that separates man from man, race from race. Through the clarity, it was obvious. We are all the same, connected, the same one. Separate vessels – yes – but each containing the same miracle that is indivisible, that is life.
Back home, on Kauai, my mind tried to make sense of the injury, of the why. Maybe it was to slow me down. To enjoy these kids. To write again. To sit on the couch and bear witness as the sun turned to rain, as the rain turned to sun.
Time passed. I walked with crutches into the clinic, back to the role of doctor. Each swinging step was a chore, each touch of Earth a new pain. I sat in the same room through the morning, through lunch, through the afternoon. The nurses wheeled a stool beneath my injured leg. The patients came. The patients went. So much illness, so much suffering, so much pain. We were closer the same now, doctor and patient, healer and pained. I cried as I consoled. I begged for help as I tried to give.
And then Coronavirus came. And I, as medical director of the urgent care that has served this North Shore community of Kauai for 27 years, was forced to the fight.
We would stop them at the door. We would swab them in their cars. We would contain the contagion outside the clinic’s walls, reserve the corona swabs for the ones we suspected, the ones with fevers, the ones with coughs. We would save the Plaquenil for the old, the sick, the weak. Like toilet paper at Costco, all things, in time, run out. Resources never last.
And then the phone with all its dings. So many messages piling up.
Hey, doc, there’s an article being released tomorrow. It shows good evidence for plaquenil, an old drug used for psoriasis. It cured 15 out of 15 in the treatment arm. All the placebo patients are still sick. Would you mind calling the pharmacy with enough for me and my family? Before there’s a run?
Hey, doc, a Silicon Valley VIP is coming on island. He’s compounding up with his family and friends behind the gate. They need a doctor. Would you take some time off the clinic, stay on property, just in case.
Hey, doc, what about that new drug from Gilead? I saw it on CNN. Can you get me in that trial? Get me and my wife some meds?
Hey, doc, I almost called an ambulance last night. The cough is getting bad. I know the test isn’t back yet, but can I get some antibiotics? And maybe call me in some oxygen?
And then a desperate mother ignored the sign that said stop, the one that was meant to keep her on the other side. The little girl had a fever of 101.4. She coughed and coughed. She wouldn’t leave.
My receptionist was scared. The nurse was mad. I called the mother back the next day.
But, doc, the clinic is supposed to be our haven, the place that cares for us when we’re ill. Besides, it’s not a big deal with kids. They don’t get that sick. Those rules weren’t meant for us.
Those rules weren’t meant for us.
And that’s when it hit me. All things with their reasons. The quarantines. The fear. The closed schools. The lost jobs. The crashing stocks.
Coronavirus and its why.
A disease has plagued humanity for too long. Before that bat was turned to soup in China and before the single strand of RNA with its protein coat became a household name. Before this moment, right now, in which life is being squeezed from the lungs of someone’s grandpa, in which someone else’s daughter reaches for the phone despite the contagion that waits in the ambulance, in the ER, in the hospital floors above. It was here before we could see the mass graves from satellites, before the virus landed on Kauai’s shore, before all those dings and messages stacked on the face of my sleeping phone.
That disease that plagues us is selfishness.
And if there’s any silver lining to this pandemic, any light of hope burning through all this dark, it’s the potential of breaking through this wretched selfishness. Through this greed. Through the relentless addiction to the self. Maybe, like that dose of clarity delivered mainline through so much pain, this tiny virus will help dissolve these walls. The ones that separate me from you. The ones that make your suffering less than mine.
Now is the time to come together. To stay inside. To do what’s right. To only ask for yourself what you absolutely need. To give to others what you can, when every instinct inside screams to keep it, to hoard it, to guard it for yourself.
These eyes, these ears, these senses. We have used them for too long to define the world around the I. But a new day is dawning. And maybe now is the time to look out, and to listen, and to bear witness to these reflections of ourselves all around.
The tree tops are getting closer. I’m beginning to feel the wind.