We are humans, not just numbers, and we need to tell people’s stories and acknowledge our fears, writes Eusebius.
When we were told a work colleague had tested positive for Covid-19, I froze. You only enter the true hell that is this pandemic once you know someone who has been infected with this virus. This is not to say that we lack the imaginative capacity as humans to empathise deeply with people we do not know, but there is no mistaking the cold reality that you deal with when a pandemic is no longer an abstraction but a workplace or domestic fact.
When our Covid-19 reported cases exceeded 1 000 over a 24-hour period, I remarked on social media that this was a scary development. One person challenged me to explain why I had described it as scary when it was near inevitable and predicted.
But we cannot forget that we are living through this pandemic as humans. And so we owe it to ourselves to also centre our experiences, our inner emotional landscapes, our fears and our inventiveness on display as we find new ways of being. When the first case at work was reported, I had been experiencing headaches for a while, a little cough and the back of my throat felt sore. I had already been on antibiotics during the previous few weeks. But my GP had said that I did not need to test for Covid-19 because, on examining me, and knowing my body very well since he first attended to me in 2009, he knew that I had inflammation of some sort but no fever or any other symptoms warranting a test.
So if a symptom like a menacing cough is to be dealt with, the syrup is in the cupboard. If Imodium is needed for a runny tummy, Eusebius can sort you out. Struggling to sleep? I’ll give you something to make you relax and say, as a friend puts it, “the world comes slooooowly at me!” I was reminded of waiting for results from HIV tests. Having some comorbidities, like millions of South Africans, I feared a positive result because my body can do without extra challenges. The first time I tested for HIV, I found the waiting for the result to be frightening. I had a similar dread about Covid-19 and could not sleep that night.
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