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Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience - Softcover

Saslow, Eli

 
9780593312797: Voices from the Pandemic: Americans Tell Their Stories of Crisis, Courage and Resilience
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593312791 ISBN 13: 9780593312797
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic—from feeling afraid and overwhelmed to extraordinary resilient—told through voices of people from all across America • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and author of Rising Out of Hatred

The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans to capture their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after forty-six years; an Arizona teacher wrestling with her fears and her obligations to her students; rural citizens adamant that the entire pandemic is a hoax, and retail workers attacked for asking customers to wear masks; patients struggling to breathe and doctors desperately trying to save them.

Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts constitute a crucial, heartbreaking record of the sweep of experiences during this troubled time, and show us America from its worst and to its resilient best.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ELI SASLOW is a reporter for The New York Times, and the author of VOICES FROM THE PANDEMIC, TEN LETTERS, AMERICAN HUNGER, and RISING OUT OF HATRED, which won the 2019 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He was awarded The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2014 and Feature Writing in 2023 and was a Pulitzer Finalist in Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. The series on which this book is based won the 2020 George Polk award for Oral History.

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Chapter 1

“Anything good I could say about this would be a lie”

Tony Sizemore, on the death of Birdie Shelton

Indianapolis—March 2020

She’s dead, and I’m quarantined. That’s how the story ends. I keep going back over it in loops, trying to find a way to sweeten it, but nothing changes the facts. I wasn’t there with her at the end. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I don’t even know where her body is right now, or if the only thing that’s left is her ashes.

From normal life to this hell in a week. That’s how long it took. I’d barely even heard of this damn virus until a few days ago. How am I supposed to make any sense of that? It’s loops and more loops.

She transported cars for a rental company. That’s where all this must have come from. People fly in from somewhere for a meeting and fly out a few hours later. You’ve got germs from all over the world inside those cars. I didn’t like the fact that she was working so hard, sixty-nine years old and still climbing in and out of Ford Fusions all day, driving from Indianapolis to St. Louis and back with bad knees, bad hips, diabetes, and all the rest of it. Sometimes she hurt so much after work that I had to help her out of the car. I guess I should have told her to quit, but nobody told Birdie anything. She liked to drive, and we needed the money.

I think she’d been feeling bad for a few days, but I don’t remember much about what happened early on. She wasn’t a complainer, and I’m not always the best at noticing. There was a cough somewhere in there. Probably a touch of a fever. But this was a few weeks back, when those things didn’t mean so much. I thought she probably had a cold, or maybe bronchitis. She would get that sometimes, lose her voice and be fine a few days later, no big deal. But then she woke me up at about four in the morning and kept pointing to her throat. She said she couldn’t sleep. Said her eyes hurt. Said it felt like somebody was pounding on top of her head. Birdie’s usually one of those who wants to rub some dirt on it and keep moving, so when she told me to take her to the emergency room, I knew it was serious. I knew she was sick.

First it was a fever of 103. Then the doctors decided it was pneumonia and went ahead and admitted her. Then it was pneumonia in both of her lungs. If anybody was thinking it was the coronavirus, I didn’t hear it—at least not at first. Nobody in Indiana had it yet. Nobody here was even talking about that. Maybe you’d see it on the news every once in a while. But even if it was killing a few people on some cruise ship or infecting a nursing home in Washington State, it was basically just happening on TV.

The best precautions weren’t taken in the early stages. Nobody really knew what the dangers were or what we were supposed to do. A few nurses wore gloves or masks when they came to see Birdie, but that seemed normal for treating pneumonia. I didn’t wear anything to protect myself, and nobody really asked me to. I was lying next to her in the bed or sitting in a chair and holding her hand. She didn’t have much other family, and if I got up to go out into the hallway for a few minutes, I’d lean down and kiss her goodbye.

Would it have gone any different if they knew what was making her so sick? Maybe. Or maybe they would have quarantined her right then, and I would have lost a few more days with her.

See, I could analyze this to death. I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life.

It was hard for me to sit there. I’m almost ashamed to say that, but it’s true. She was in the bed, and I was usually a few feet away in the recliner. It was two or three days in that room, but each one felt like a year. I’m not a natural caretaker, and never claimed to be, but it seemed like no matter what I tried, I couldn’t help her. It was just watch, wait, touch her forehead, apologize, try to hold myself together. I couldn’t do anything. Nobody could.

She was taking so much oxygen, but it was never enough. She had two little tubes put in her nose, and she still couldn’t get enough air. They put a big mask on her face to get her oxygen back up, and that made her claustrophobic and panicky. She got real freaked out. I tried to count breaths with her to calm her down. I kept saying: “Easy. Easy. In, out. In, out.” I couldn’t distract her because she was so deep in her head with panic. It labored her to talk. It labored her to breathe. I said, “Don’t talk then, honey. Just sit. Save your energy.” There was a TV in there, but neither of us could focus on it. I sat in the quiet with her, for whatever comfort that might have brought her. I don’t know. I listened to her breathing. I watched her. When she was asleep, she was taking these real quick, short breaths, like she was gulping air more than breathing it. When she was awake, she was kind of mumbling to herself. I tried to understand, but she wasn’t making any sense. Maybe it was the medication they were giving her. I hope to God it was the medication. She was talking about how her eyes hurt, her insides hurt. She would clutch her fists and hit the bed and stuff, and you don’t really know how to help somebody in that frame. I mean, when she’s just clutching her fists and moaning and—I don’t know. I don’t know what I could have done. I sat there for as long as I could and then I got up every few hours to pace the hallway, or I’d drive eight minutes home to feed the dogs. I was starting to go a little crazy myself. I couldn’t keep sitting there, feeling helpless, feeling useless, listening to her breathe.

It was an awful time. I should be thankful she’s not suffering anymore, but she did suffer some.

It got worse. Her breaths got raspy. Shorter. They put her on life support. They rolled her across the hall one afternoon and tested her for the virus. At some point in there, I went home after midnight to check on the dogs, and when I came back early the next morning there was a sign that said “No Visitors” taped to the door of the hallway that led to her room. The whole thing became confusing to me. They said I couldn’t go in. They said nobody could. I sat in the waiting room for hours. I peeked through the window down the hallway once and saw them moving her to a different room. It looked like she was sleeping with the tube down her throat. The doctor said she was heavily sedated to stay comfortable. I’d like to believe that, but I don’t know if she was comfortable or not.

When they told me the COVID test was positive, I started learning more about the virus from the doctors. Right away I thought it was a death sentence for her. She had every underlying condition this virus attacks. Damaged lungs. High blood pressure. Her body wasn’t strong enough. She was lying there waiting to die.

The doctors told me to go home, but I didn’t. Most of the time, I sat by the elevators in the waiting room. Nobody else was in there. Sometimes one of Birdie’s friends would come sit with me. The doctors kept saying “No change.” “No change.” It had been five days at that point since she’d woken me up pointing at her throat. They sent a chaplain to talk to me. He was wearing a mask, but he put his hand on my shoulder. Their voices kind of kept getting softer and softer. Everyone knew what was coming. I was up most nights and sleeping some in the day. My body wore down. I started coughing, and they told me I didn’t have a choice. They said I needed to go home and quarantine. Here I was worrying that Birdie was going to be the first victim of...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593312791
ISBN 13 
9780593312797
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
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