A Very Covid Christmas

(I used "Christmas" because that's the main holiday we celebrate, but feel free to insert your own mid-winter celebration here).

The holidays are going to suck this year. There's no two ways about it. It's going to be hard to have a "zoom Thanksgiving," or whatever people are planning. No caroling, no holiday events, shopping will be difficult, another zoom session for your Christmas dinner, explaining how Santa is handling social distancing with the elves — I get it. It's hard and it sucks. No one wants this.

We're all exhausted and bone-tired of this. We all don't want it to be this way. We want to get back to normal. We want things to be ok "for the kids" (and also we really mean for us.) The fact that we've been living through this since March and now the holiday season — the time we are usually grateful, and spend time with family, and celebrate — the fact that that is being taken away from us now seems unfair and unreasonable, and we all want to scream and cry and say we just don't want it this way. It's all too much.

Well, lucky for you, I have some experience with sh*tty Christmases.

You see, a truly terrible Christmas is when you rush your seriously ill mother to the hospital in December. While she is there things go up and down, until one day a few days in she tanks so completely, due to not being checked by an overworked nursing staff, that they rush in the code blue team and the hospital chaplain. She — amazingly — recovers from that, but develops serious pneumonia and there is discussion of putting her on a ventilator and you don't even know how to face that because, if she were to go on it, how would you ever know how to turn it off. You spend every day, all day, in the hospital negotiating her care. You entirely miss every part of Christmas planning, your first Christmas with your new husband and stepchildren, because you are at the hospital (and luckily, they understand or at least try to). You worry about every thing you are not doing, every misstep you made in care. You sleep in a cot on the floor of the room and the nurses wear Santa hats and try to be cheerful and Sven Sundgaard is the grand marshall of a mini-parade that goes through the hospital (along with a collie in Christmas socks), but the parade can't even come into the ward because everyone in it is too sick. Your mom slips into a coma and you watch her body start to shut down. On Christmas Day, you're talking to her because you've been told that hearing is the last thing to go, and she takes a deep breath, and a tear rolls down her face. And then she shudders and then she dies.

Ok, so you don't want that kind of Christmas? 

This week we are admitting roughly 200 people a day today to the hospital with covid, and those cases are stemming form when we had "only" a couple of thousand cases a day; today we had 8,700. There are a LOT of people who are going to have that kind of holiday season, and I sincerely hope that you are not one of them. Because I swear to you, not celebrating in the way you usually do is a freaking picnic in the park compared to Christmas in a hospital room.

Stop gathering. Stay at home. Wear a mask. Take this seriously.