Being alone is not the same thing as going it alone
One particularly grim night, I awoke to find my husband walking our home in misery, his forehead burning. He was exhausted and couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t had food in days but didn’t want to eat. No identifiable body part hurt, but he felt awful. There was nothing to do but just share the misery. I rubbed his back. We sat in silence. Eventually I figured I might as well remake the bed. That finally helped him get some rest.
It took me a lot longer to accept my fate than it should have. I needed to ask for help. Actually, I didn’t even need to ask, I just needed to accept the help that was offered. When a colleague gently insisted, against my protests that we were, on dropping by with her own thermometer and acetaminophen, and threw in some lemons, bread, vitamin drinks, chocolate and latex gloves, the floodgates broke.
Mostly what these friends and strangers told me was that I was doing what could be done: Keeping up the fluids, trying to keep the fever in check, monitoring the breathing. They helped me make a plan for what to do if things got worse. While my husband slept I occasionally counted his breaths—one doctor told me that more than 25 a minute meant he may be struggling to get enough oxygen. I made a record of his temperature and noticed when it seemed to rage .
Possibly, we would have come through it without help, but I wouldn’t have wanted to. One of the most indelible lessons of this scary time is that you can survive alone, but you need others to flourish. The most dangerous pre-existing condition my husband and I had for fighting the virus was our devotion to self-sufficiency. Independence can be its own kind of social isolation.
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