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Saturday, December 12, 2020

First Complete COVID semester done – COVID Chronicles XV

 


This last month at the University where I teach has seemed like a race to the finish.  When we decided to meet in person for the fall, we set the schedule to minimize students’ travel away from school and attempted to shorten the time spent on campus.  This meant that we started school a week or two early, dropped Fall break and various other holidays (Labor Day) and introduced two midweek skip days, and the students headed for home at Thanksgiving.   They then did remote final exams and grades were due earlier today.  Whew!

I looked forward to this arrangement – not only would it minimize students heading home in the middle of the semester – the semester would be over early which would allow for a longer Christmas break and that would allow me to work on some projects that have needed my attention.  I have also always thought of things like Fall Break (a random Thursday and Friday in the fall with no classes) as kind of silly – Spring Break, too, for that matter.  My clinical work continues during these “breaks” and I experience them more as a bit of a lull rather than a true break.

Well, I don’t know whether it was sprinting through the semester, or the strain of COVID, or the weirdness of this political season, but by the end of the semester, I was all but wrung out.  I have not slept so consistently soundly in years.  By the end of day I was tired, and by the time bed time rolled around, I was deeply exhausted, as if I had been hard at work all day out of doors.  I have not posted on this site in over a month, which is unusual for me – and a sign of not feeling like I have had time to do anything but work on what needed to be done.

Another feature of this time is that I have been completely at home except for the six clock hours each week that I was on campus to teach two face to face classes (these were simulcast on zoom – and the last two weeks I was the only person in the classroom – my other class was online throughout and I “broadcast” from our home office).  I have been spending less time on campus in recent years – but even recently, I have been on campus for 30-40 hours each week – seeing patients at home – and working at home on the weekends.  It made a huge difference to be working at home all day every day.  There was no shift in place to work.  Before there was a sense on the weekends that the work I was doing was “not work” because it was at home.  Now home feels like the work place and it feels like I am always at work…

Of course, this is a first world problem, and in the first world, especially now, there could be way worse problems!  The bad news, of course, is that this won’t be over soon.  The novel vaccines are being pushed through the pipeline, but it will be a logistical nightmare to get them to us and we don’t yet know how quickly they will be produced.  To most effectively prevent the continued transmission of the disease, they should go to front line and essential workers.  We’ll see how they are actually distributed.  And we don’t yet know what it will mean to be inoculated.  For instance, one question that has not yet been experimentally addressed is whether a vaccinated person can be a transmitter of the illness.  A corollary question of mine is can a person who has had the illness still carry it?  But of course, we don’t yet know how long having had the illness will provide immunity or whether it will provide immunity from other strains.  And getting to the point Nationally, much less internationally, where enough people are inoculated that this thing will die out will take months or perhaps another year.  

If you detect an increasing line of hysteria underlying the questions above, your radar is working well.  As a dear friend and analyst once told me, living in the world of the unconscious means that we are more, not less prone to the fears, follies and foibles of being human.  The Reluctant Wife just calls me Captain Calamity.

I started this line of posts with the intent of tracking, in real time, my experience of the pandemic.  Especially in the wake of revelations that we really don’t know much about the public’s reaction to the 1918 influenza outbreak, I thought it might serve a useful purpose.  A recent NPR spot on a book about the Spanish flu clarified that part of that had to do with a national media blackout orchestrated by President Wilson who, not wanting the backlash that Lincoln received by allowing reporters to travel with the troops in the Civil War, kept a lid on the news about both the world war and about the ensuing flu.

On our own smaller home front, my fear at the beginning of the semester had to do with being in front of a classroom full of students some of whom likely would be sick.  Very quickly, my classroom was largely empty, as I reported earlier, because the students chose to participate by zoom.  But when one of our reluctant children came home from school to spend a week with their paramour, the paramour’s boss and co-worker became sick, so the paramour was tested and found positive – so the adult child was tested and fortunately turned out to be negative, both on testing and symptomatically, as were the reluctant spouse and I.  Why did we duck that bullet?  Was the reluctant child's spring illness really COVID though she tested negative at the time?  

Based on a near miss, we were more cautious at Thanksgiving – having only nuclear family at our celebration.  This meant that there were about half as many people at the table as usual – and we could hear each other talking!  We also spent the rest of the weekend masked in the house after kids starting connecting with others to celebrate the holidays.

Our world is smaller – and will stay that way over Christmas and the New Year – but more intimate.  Were it not for the sameness of the days, sheltering in place hasn’t been a bad way to live.  The Reluctant Wife is not travelling, so that is a real bonus.  But the uncertainty, the compressed schedules, and living in fear for family members are all things I could live without.

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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For other posts on COVID:
I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.


2 comments:

  1. Isolation. That is the challenge. And monotony. My wife is also an academic at another institution. We see each other in the morning, then she goes to her space and me to mine. Not so different from the past "normal" times, but as you mention, it takes place at home. This used to be a refuge from the frustrations and obligations of work. We now joke that home has become the "Faculty Lounge" with all of the noise that fills the more institutional version of that space. My students seemed to run out of gas by mid to late October. Much less engagement, more names rather than faces on Zoom, late work, etc. I perceive damage there, but time will tell. Glad you are back with this blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, the Reluctant Wife and I work in opposite ends of the house and it is all the more alienating to have been so close and yet so far away all day. We feel more like strangers at the end of every week than we ever have. And my students, too, lost their mettle by the end of the semester. It is rare to have students not finish my upper level class, but there was a cadre who did not make it this semester. Will we continue to be teaching to students who hide behind their name shield and who are not there when we call on them when we are back to normal? I hope not. I think the students were as pressed as we this semester. I do worry about what next semester will bring. Hang in there!

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