Hope this don't come across as me preaching to anyone as that is not my intent.
After seeing many stories in the news of people choosing not to practice social distancing for various reasons I would like to share a story of an exercise that I was involved in a few years ago when I worked in the oil industry.
Our company was very heavy into the promotion of safe work practices. During an afternoon safety session that I attended, the presenter/speaker at the session asked all of the attendees to take 15 minutes and write a letter. This letter was to be addressed to our closest loved ones to tell them that we had just died on the job because we had chosen not to follow the safety rules on our job site that were meant to protect us and our co-workers. For most of the attendees, the loved ones in question were our immediate families of wives/husbands and our kids.
Now imagine for a minute if you can, that you are sitting there trying to write a letter to your kids, husband/wife, Mom or Dad etc. telling them that you died on the job today because of something stupid you did in not choosing to follow the safety rules that were meant to protect you. I can tell you from experience that writing this letter was the most profound and emotional thing that I had ever tried to do.
After the letters were finished, the speaker selected a couple of attendees to share what they had written. Most of the folks were big burly construction men and to witness them trying to share their letter of what they had written to their loved ones was heartbreaking and so powerful.
I have often thought about this experience as it was the most unique way that I had ever seen anyone approach the topic of on the job safety.
So, I would like to challenge all those who choose not to practice social distancing, to take 15 or so minutes and write a letter to your loved ones and explain to them how you were infected and died from COVID-19 or how they infected someone else, maybe even a loved one, who also died and all of this because you choose not to practice social distancing.
No one knows how this is all going to play out but practicing social distancing is such a small ask of us at a time when things can get really ugly.
Unfortunately this is now more than an exercise for nurses, doctors and medical technologists who are on the front lines of this war.
Since I have been in total self isolation for some time, I have been watching and reading a lot of news in various media. The interview with an emotional doctor and mother for example, talking about leaving videos for her young children in case she does not return to them, is heart breaking. Some doctors and nurses do this knowing their PPE is running low and as one put it, would you expect a fireman to charge into a burning building, dressed only in a bathing suit. The nightmare for some overseas doctors is far worse and some of the interviews with them sound like exhaustion and post traumatic stress, and too many know colleagues who have died serving with them on their hospital battle field.
Remember this virus does not have to kill you to potentially harm you. Some younger fit healthy individuals may become very seriously ill from COVID-19 and while their bodies may be strong enough to live through it, especially since they are likely to be prioritized over older individuals for one of the few ventilators if they need it, that does not mean that some will not have to live with it's long term effects.
As a healthy fit teenager in 1968/69 I caught what I thought was just the regular flu and thought I would get over it in a week or so. I was wrong and was never so sick in my life for over 3 weeks. I remember it to this day in great detail. The worst was the extreme burning pain in my lungs, which was much worse every few seconds with the coughing. I remember not being able to sleep for days on end because the constant coughing and the pain kept me from it. I never went to the hospital and perhaps should have. When it was over and I had recovered and healed up I had permanent scar tissue, mostly in the upper part of one lung which shows up on x-rays to this date. Through out my lifetime, much of the time when I caught a bad cold or flu, it seems like it would want to go to that scar tissue damaged part of that lung, causing burning pain there and I think may have caused me to have a longer recovery time for many of those life respiratory illness events. I also think that scar tissue may make me more vulnerable to a novel virus like COVID-19 along with my age and other medical conditions.
Later, I became aware that I had been infected by an emergent novel virus (like COVID-19) called the Hong Kong Flu which caused a world wide pandemic and is estimated to have killed in the millions. In some ways I was lucky, in that it could have been far worse for me in that the damage and scar tissue was limited to the top part of one lung. Had I survived but with bad scar tissue throughout both lungs, perhaps I may have spent a life time being seriously out of breath trying to go up a staircase.
Something for younger healthy fit people to consider if they are overly reassured by the lower COVID-19 death rate for their age group. This virus may not have to kill you, to get you and yes it is killing some younger people too.