Irrational Rational Fears

March 28, 2020

I am familiar with ICUs. As the hospital chaplain at one of the busiest hospitals on the night of the Aurora movie theater shootings, I am also familiar with how quickly life can shift from joy to uncertainty. Covid-19 is creating a new normal even for me.

To be honest, I never fully bought the whole “young, healthy people are safe” and “at risk, immunocompromised people are at greater danger” take on this pandemic. Yes, I get that people who are already medically fragile ARE, in fact, at greater risk. But the extremes to which it was being repeated gave the impression that young, healthy people would experience nothing more troublesome than a common cold.

We are starting to learn that Covid-19 doesn’t care how healthy you are. If it can find a foothold in your lungs and progress far enough before treatment begins, it will take down a young healthy person just as easily as elderly person with a history of lung disease.

Still, there’s nothing reassuring about the recent stories of the previously-well succumbing to this pandemic. The latest stories just add to my irrational rational fears.

Ten treatments into my twelve-treatment chemo cycle, I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And the good news is, unlike some of the stories I have heard, I am not experiencing increasingly more severe symptoms from the side effects of chemo. At least not to an extreme.

I am 52 years old and, until my colon cancer diagnosis, would describe myself as someone who is in very good health. I have been carrying some extra pounds for the last ten years but, before that, I completed the Triple Bypass bicycle ride over three mountain passes west of Denver and I finished the Steamboat Triathlon ten years ago when my first born was less than a year old.

Now, that has changed. After my first chemo treatment sent me back and forth between the hospital for fluid infusions as I lost 30 pounds rather drastically, I’ve settled into some more sustainable patterns on my new chemo regimen. For the last several chemo cycles, I have described my symptoms as “the new normal.” I’m not ready to train for a marathon but I’m not constantly fatigued either. When I get an infusion on Monday, I have come to count on a level of fatigue on Wednesday and Thursday that sends me to bed shortly after dinner. By Friday, I’m almost feeling “the new normal,” a level of energy that isn’t my old self but is very manageable. Two weeks later, I start the cycle again.

My body is already hard at work, fighting off the chemo toxins, letting the chemo toxins work on the cancer cells. My body is not fully prepared to start a new struggle against a novel virus. Enter my rational irrational fear.

When I first learned of my colon cancer diagnosis last June, I marked the date on my calendar as the day my thoughts about the future had changed. No longer was I completely confident that I would live to watch my son get married or my daughter graduate from college. All of those events drift somewhere on the horizon of another decade. I didn’t feel like I was given a death sentence. I was just working out the terms of some new possibilities.

Covid-19 is setting some new terms.

I read a news report about a relatively healthy man in his late 50s, not much older than me at all. Two weeks ago, he was speaking lightly of Covid-19. Today, he is dead. Suddenly my irrational rational fear is not that I won’t see my children’s big coming of age events. I’m beginning to get worried that I could get this and, being at the tale end of six months of chemo therapy, not even make it to my son’s next birthday party – which should be two weeks from today but is indefinitely postponed until we can all come out from under our respective rocks.

I’m walking through my normal routines – the Covid-19 new normal. I wake up a little later than usual, gather my children’s school schedules for the day and set them to their work, go for a walk with them in a local open space park for “recess,” make their lunch, take a shower, do the laundry, wash the breakfast dishes, set up a plan for some kind of practical life learning around the house for them, start to make dinner. Somewhere in the middle of one of these many activities, my brain takes a leap from whatever I am doing and imagines the possibility of being intubated in the not so distant future. Making lunches for the last time to ICU to intubated. Washing dishes for the last time to ICU to intubated. Making love to my wife… to intubated.

This is completely irrational. Aside from being at the end of chemotherapy, I’m relatively healthy. I am exhibiting no signs of fever, cough, et cetera. (The questions I get at each clinic visit ring through my head like a familiar grocery list.) I have been taking all the precautions to reduce my contact with possible disease vectors. Aside from walks in the park and trips to the hospital for chemo infusions, I have been mostly confined to the square footage of my home and yard. My wife is working from home but takes chlorox wipes with her whenever she goes out in public. My kids are mostly confined with me. And EVERYONE washes their hands as soon as they return from any voyage beyond our own yard.

And this is completely rational. The potential carriers have been growing exponentially around the country. I can no longer feel confident that the closest carrier to me is simply somewhere in my county but not on my path. Once the virus takes hold, it moves swiftly. From fatigue and hassle to ICU in a couple days.

So, here I stand. Balancing on my irrational rational see saw. Hoping that this wave will crash over me and not on me. Taking action to increase the chances that I won't even get the virus. Taking precautions to make sure that, not only do I not end up being intubated in a time of increasing medical scarcity, I will not become a vector for a person even more medically fragile or disadvantaged than I am. Despite well-publicized behaviors to the contrary, what I have seen around Denver tells me that I am not alone. Most of us are acting on our rational irrational fears and changing our behaviors.

The NEW, new normal.