Non-Fiction

—A Day in Acute ICU for eating disorders during COVID-19—

I hold my own hand in the hospital bed and it feels like my house keys, sun streaking my window with her thousand fingerprints. It is morning and while the rest of the world shuts down businesses, closes schools, and cancels church services, here at the hospital breakfast still arrives at eight thirty. I still step on the scale backwards at seven and get my IV bag replaced at five. My nurse, with eyes red and swirling as NBC night news over the mask the attending handed her on her way in this morning, it wasn’t required yesterday, still tells me that food is my medicine, and when I stir my granola and yogurt with a bent spoon, I eat the shame too, thick and clotted like the cream at the top of the cup, chew and swallow and almost choke on bites of shame that I am safe.

Outside, across the cul-de-sac, where the emergency room looms, magazine mothers scurry, masked, infants loud as advertisements.  Inside, trays dotted dark with Jell-O swarm the hallways while my nurse turns off the news, says I don’t need to see, and I look away, I do, down from the window at the empty, decaffeinated street, and while I am sobbing over a ham sandwich on rye, spearing wildly with my plastic spork, another girl on another floor of the hospital is sobbing over a Styrofoam cup of hospital coffee while she waits for her father’s test results to come back, tears soaking through her paper mask and I think about her, maybe Maria, without a last name, but dinner still ends at six thirty, same as always so I keep my eyes on the clock.

As I am writing this, “Spider Man Far From Home” is on the TV. In the movie, Peter Parker (aka Spiderman, aka Tom Holland) is on a school trip around Europe. Peter’s life is very different from the reality we face today, for multiple reasons. You could say that Peter feels isolated like we do; he has to keep his identity a secret and is seen by himself quite a lot. But I’m not really into metaphors.

A month ago, I sat in class, whilst my teacher read out the statement the Taoiseach (the Irish prime minister) had released saying all schools were to close for at least two weeks. Each line she read caused my class to let out giddy shrieks. For us, this seemed like a good thing, an extended Easter break. So, we packed up books, said goodbyes and promised to FaceTime. But, a week later, that giddy feeling had more or less faded as reality sunk in.

Flash forward to the present, the Taoiseach made another statement that lockdown would continue for a further three weeks. It wasn’t surprising, but it was still disappointing. Days in lockdown are long, boring and it feels like I’ve been here for more than a month. My siblings watch movies and play to keep themselves busy. I try to fight boredom with at home exercises and music.

I suppose we’re lucky as both my parents can still work, earn an income and we’re actually saving money by not leaving the house. Still, reality feels distorted. The days are almost normal but not quite right. Schoolwork seems like more of a trek than it did when I was actually in school. Every so often, I’ll forget about quarantine and go to text my friends about hanging out this weekend or I’ll try to do some online shopping only to find out that the site doesn’t ship to Ireland. Once a week, my mum does the shopping. Every shop has a queuing system, where they ask her if she’s alone and what she’s doing. Then she waits to be called in.

I guess, even though we try to act as normal as we possibly we can, there’s fear in our house. I worry that I’m not going to see my friends until September. My parents worry that something’ll happen and they won’t be able to work. And we all fear the virus.

In the movie, if Peter gives in to his fears, the bad guys win and people’s lives are at stake. You could apply that to our lives. If we give in, to the fear of the virus, doesn’t it win? Aren’t people’s lives already at stake? I might only be fourteen, but I think if we let this virus control us more than it has already, then it wins this fight. So, if you’re reading this, I know this is an awful situation but please don’t let this fear control you or your daily life. Don’t let it win.

 

I’m scared of the hate more than the virus itself. To me, it’s the unintended yet inevitable consequence of our innate sense to blame and point fingers.

I see news stories of increasing xenophobia toward Asian Americans. I watch webinars hosted by national Asian organizations trying to encourage solidarity in a time period where my community lives in a newfound sense of fear. I speak with my fellow Asian American peers and see how our uneasiness is contextually reflected upon each other.

When I check social media, I see photos of people wearing masks that say “Thanks chinks”’ and listen to videos of Americans complaining about the presence of Asians because apparently, our “cousins” brought this pandemic upon the world. Even as I’m stuck in my room, cut off from the rest of the world, I feel these racist sentiments slap me across my face.

I know racism is an unfortunate factor of a region-originated disease. Yet, that doesn’t validate or give an excuse to perpetrate it, especially when the president encourages the rhetoric of the “Chinese virus.” In a country where racially instigated hate crimes still run rampant, I’ve seen articles about how a two year old and a six year old were stabbed in Texas, or how an Asian man was pushed and harassed on his way to the bus station.

And I wish I could just shrug these concerns, that these incidents would never happen to me or my loved ones, but living in East Tennessee, in a small town where only one percent of the population is Asian, I am nervous every time my family goes out. When my mom wants to go down to Wal-Mart to pick up groceries, I tell her to be careful. I have to explain to my twelve-year-old younger sister why I’m weary of wearing masks and drawing attention in public.

We are living in a world pandemic. At age seventeen, I am seeing my reality being turned upside down. I’ve experienced troubles from difficulties in online school, my inability to take the SAT for college admissions in five months, and important summer programs being canceled. My main priority should be to try to get through this, safely and with my health in mind.

My greatest fear should be getting COVID-19 and getting sick, not my Asianness.

COVID-19 was something that came unexpectedly. It ultimately turned our lives upside down, especially for me being a first-year student in the University of Cape Town. In a way it was a saving grace from not needing to submit any assignments, but I didn’t really think about how it would impact the new relations I had made.

Even though it isn’t as devastating here as it is in other countries where mass lives have been lost, you can still sense the fear people have of the crisis that they cannot handle. At this rate we do not know who potentially has it, as the amount of people getting sick increases every day and being in a province (I live in Gauteng, in the city of Pretoria) which has the most infected makes you paranoid to some point.

Indeed we do love being on our electronics, not really wanting to be socializing on our devices, not wanting to communicate face to face but ever since this pandemic hit us, I value all the little physical contact I had with my friends. Having barely known these girls, our bond was deeper than one could acknowledge. It makes you realise that ever single relation you make  should be treasured.

Slowly you start to miss the things that you really didn’t take seriously, like lectures or waking up in the morning to get to your nine o’clock even if you feel tired from the day before. You miss how far your classes were and how you used to walk from point A to point B, already breathing like a runner who ran longer than usual. You remember all the little conversations you made with people who you sat next to and how you can relate to a situation one of them faces.

I miss the feeling of breathing in the fresh air, letting the cold breeze brush my face as I walked along the sidewalk of a park not to far from where I live. I miss the body warmth of someone hugging you, as if its been years since you have seen each other even if it has only been two hours. I miss being able to sit in a small circle and being able to express yourself, and having people there who can relate and cry with you over a tub of vanilla ice cream. I wished we could have made more coffee dates or dinner plans, I wish we could have more study plans, even if we weren’t studying at all. I wish we could go back to a reality where we weren’t worried about anything but what we’re planning to do the next day, the work due, or what we’re going to wear on the weekend.

 

These times are intimidating; upon that fact, I think we can all agree. They are also unfamiliar, unnerving, uncertain.

Uncertainty is one of the issues that I struggle with the most in my personal life. I thirst for knowledge; I thirst for knowing. When I do not know, I am not comfortable. And in these times, there is very little that I do know. The logical conclusion to arrive at is that I am uncomfortable—and I am. But it is a quiet kind of uncomfortable, the kind that is easily pushed to the back of my mind and ignored. It is not the kind that leaps to the forefront of my thoughts, constantly demanding my attention, and for that I am grateful. This quiet kind of uncomfortable allows me to cope, allows me to go about my days and weeks and what will quite possibly be months as though nothing has changed.

And if I’m being honest, not much has changed in relation to my personal life. I have been homeschooled my whole life; the only difference now is that the weekly meetings with my class are online instead of in person. I can still walk the beach in the sunlight, or surf if I’d prefer. No longer can I spend time with my friends in person, but I can busy myself on Instagram or Snapchat and make plans for the summer as though it’s a surety that we’ll be able to socialize freely by then.

But, both of my parents are out of a job, and the reality of a lack of income in both of my houses is a frightening thing. No income means that in order to compensate, we will have to dip into the savings that have been scraped painstakingly together over the years. It means using money that should never have needed to be used, that can’t afford to be used because what if something even worse happens after this and then there is no backup. It means that my uncomfortable is a little closer to the surface now, thinking about it.

We will be fine; that is what I tell myself. We will be fine, we will pull through, we will be all right. But the veracity of the words that I tell myself is uncertain, and I know that, and that knowledge catches at the back of my mind, and lingers.

The other day, my mom read some articles about how people have been putting stuffed bears in their windows so that other people can go on “bear hunts,” walking around and looking for them. Yesterday, I think it was, there was an article in our local newspaper about it, and we put all the stuffed bears we could find in our house (we have quite a few) in our window. She also taped some paper hearts up that were left over from Valentines Day. Yesterday my brothers and I went with my dad to the high school where he is the principal. Because the mascot of the high school is the Bears, they have a carved wooden bear, maybe five feet tall, as you walk in the door. We loaded it on to a handcart we found in the hallway, and put it in the back of our car. When we got back to the house, we hauled it up onto the porch over our front steps, and mom put a mortarboard on its head. My dad made a sign, “We ❤️ the class of 2020!” They won’t get to walk when they graduate. School is closed for the rest of the semester. I hadn’t thought about that before. Today, I think he’s getting another bear from the high school, this one stuffed, to put in the window of Mom’s elementary library. I like the bears in the window. It’s like the videos you see of people singing with each other from their balconies in Italy. People supporting each other. People acknowledging that this is hard and new for everybody else. Maybe if we keep being decent to each other, if we keep the awareness that we all matter, maybe we might come out of this better. Maybe this pandemic will bring us together.