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Saturday, December 31, 2022

COVID Chronicles XXIX: A New Year's Review (2023)

 COVID, reminiscences, personal experience, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychology of isolation



The following is a bit of an experiment.  I have been posting throughout the pandemic on lived aspects of the experience.  I have done this for a couple of reasons – one is that an early story on NPR suggested that we don’t have many records of what happened during the 1919 Flu epidemic – the author of the piece thought that people were too ashamed of their experience to look back on it and write about.  A later piece opined that the government did not want people to become too upset by the extent of the epidemic and so suppressed journalistic writing about it.  For whatever reason, I thought it might be useful to track the experience from my little window on the world. 

So: the experiment.  Without going back and reading my posts, I would like to write a review of my experience of the pandemic.  I am curious about how the two accounts will jibe.  Of course, as I start on this project, moments from posts are occurring to me, and the posts are about memorable aspects of the experience, so my “free” writing will necessarily be guided by my earlier posts.  None the less, I think that a holistic, after the fact (if that is where we actually are) account may differ in significant ways from the moment to moment lived experience of an author.

 

I think I had COVID.  In the winter of 2019 into 2020 I became very sick.  The sickness was so powerful that it knocked me flat on my back for at least a week.  This is unusual for me.  When I get sick, I tend to just carry on.  I don’t remember much about that time.  Did I take a day or two off from teaching?  I might have, again something that would be unusual.  I do remember feeling in the wake of it that I was having a much more difficult time recovering from what had seemed like a bad cold.  It seemed like I had aged a decade and I had no interest in returning, for instance, to playing basketball and indeed took a hiatus from working out for longer than I could remember.

I think it might have been COVID because I caught the cold from someone who had caught a cold from someone who had just returned from a trip to China.  They were concerned that they had infected me with the cold that had been a doozy for them.  This was in late December or early January.  Perhaps I didn’t miss any classes because it was over break.  The weird thing is that I don’t think anyone caught the cold from me.  None of my patients complained of being sick, and The Reluctant Wife did not become ill.  So maybe it wasn’t COVID, but I am deeply suspicious.

Sometime later, (a month?), COVID became a thing.  I heard about the cases in Washington and in California.  I was not too worried about it.  SARS had been caught a few years before by the Canadians and had never become a thing, but of course, this did.  The next thing I remember is the Reluctant Son’s College shutting down and my driving to pick him up.  He was in school in Chicago and I think there were more cases there than here – I don’t think my school had shut down yet, but I’m not sure of that.  In any case, it was very awkward picking him up.  I didn’t hug him as I customarily would have – I had just driven there and only gotten out of the car to pump gas and, at that point, I was using disposable plastic gloves to keep from getting contaminated by the gas pump – and by using the washroom - avoiding people as much as I could going in and out.

It is somewhat startling to think that I may have had the virus already and was thus one of the few people in the country who, at that moment, may have been immune to it.  I have not become sick since then and have never tested positive.  I took the vaccines as soon as they were available and the antibodies they developed are indistinguishable from the ones I would have developed if I did have the disease.  I have been shocked that I never got the illness (unless I had it at the beginning) especially during the current wave when so many of my friends are reporting testing positive while the media is reporting a very low incidence locally and nationally.

Of course, after the awkward greeting, the reluctant son and I got in the car together and drove for five hours back home, where we would live in close quarters for the next two years.  On the way home, we listened to an NPR story about the inoculation industry and how the COVID type inoculation would sometimes get funded and sometimes not.  Momentarily, a lot of funding was going to go in that direction.  

In any case, it is a good thing for my health that my son came home with me.  He is a bit of a fitness nut and he ran daily and I began running with him.  I’m not sure I would have run at all if he had not come home, I was not feeling like exercising after the illness.  I also think it might have been hard to sustain exercising across the two years without a running partner to get me in the habit of doing more solo working out even it I had figured out how to get over the sense that I was no longer up for exercise after the mystery illness.

The transition at school and in my practice seems, from this vantage point, to have been weird but relatively seamless.  A patient opted not to continue remotely, and returned to treatment when it was possible to meet again in person.  The rest of my patients shifted to meeting by phone or zoom and I started teaching classes by zoom.  Teaching graduate classes and at the Psychoanalytic Institute went smoothly – the classes were small and the students were engaged.  In fact, the quality of the classes at the institute improved – they had been split before with some people in person and others on zoom and I had always struggled to engage those not in the room.  Teaching large undergraduate classes on zoom did not go so well.  Students were outside or turned their cameras off and seemed unengaged.  I was forced to give exams remotely and thus they became open book exams.  Undergraduate students seemed disengaged.

Personally, things did not change all that much except that my commute was just to my home office instead of to school (which is only 10 minutes away).  I had been seeing patients at home and continued to work in the same office.  Going out really meant going to the grocery store once a week.  At first we were disinfecting all the groceries as they came in the house.  We watched a video about how to do this with a clean side of the kitchen table and a side with “contaminated” groceries.  The grocery store limited the number of people inside and we waited outside in social distanced spots until we could go in and then got out as soon as we could.

So life was pretty cloistered.  Mostly work with a lot of streaming of entertainment in the evenings.  The reluctant son and I would watch Jeopardy every night and compete – he took an early lead and never relinquished it, though I would sometimes get closer.  I had a greater fund of information, but he has much readier access to the information that he knows.  He and I would run and/or work out daily and this was an opportunity to catch up on what he was studying and to tell him about things that I was interested in.  At some point, he read about how pandemics work and informed me about that.

The Reluctant Wife and I had just been settling into being empty nesters, so things were upended for a bit.  For a brief period of time all three kids were home again, but it was the reluctant son who stayed with us the longest.  Perhaps I have halcyon spectacles on as I look in the rear-view mirror, but I think things went pretty well.  There were hiccups, and one protracted period where one the kids was having some pretty significant difficulties, but, I suppose, all’s well that ends reasonably well.

I used to think that I was an extravert, but as I have developed across the course of my life, it has become clear to me that I am just fine with a limited amount of contact with other people.  I missed the people with whom I played basketball, and missed the casual interactions with colleagues at school and the institute, and I found the zoom meetings frustrating in that they were all business – we never found an effective way to simply chat in those meetings.  Across time, I grew increasingly isolated from my colleagues whom I had thought of as friends, but that feeling began, I think, to erode as I lost track, except through things like Facebook, of things like kids maturing and relationships evolving.  Interestingly, this is a new thought as I write – I have noticed a lingering sense of alienation, especially with my colleagues and this seems like a more sensible articulation of the development of that feeling than I have had to this point. 

At some point we learned that COVID transmission was through the air and we stopped wearing disposable gloves and switched to using facemasks; cloth ones at first, then, as they became available, KN95s. I went back to teaching in the classroom and the girls went back to their schools, but the reluctant son’s school was still teaching remotely, so he stayed with us through his graduation and then his gap year. 

Teaching undergraduates got, if anything, worse.  Instead of teaching online, I was now in a classroom, masked, with half of the students, who were masked, and the other half were on zoom.  This was a little like teaching while juggling chainsaws.  At some point, all of the students were back in the classroom, but we were still masked.  This was difficult, but not quite as impossible.  What was tough was the transition back to closed book tests.  The scores of my students, which had risen considerably with open book tests, now plummeted below where they had been pre-pandemic.  My tests had always been hard, but they now seemed impossible and the students revolted, claiming that I was a particular poor teacher while I complained that they had not learned how to take exams.  This led to a very difficult semester with one class in particular.  I have since had a better experience with the subsequent class.

By the way, I suspected that many others had done what I had done – gone to open book exams, so I asked the University data people to figure the average GPA for our graduating seniors in 2012, 2017 and 2022.  The numbers were same for 2012 and 2017, but had risen by 3 tenths of a point in 2022.  Fully half of our students graduated with honors.  This is concerning because I don’t think the learning experiences of those students were of the quality as the cohorts before then.  Reading transcripts of the students who are currently applying to our graduate program, some have notations on semesters during the pandemic suggesting that the grades may have been affected by the learning conditions.  The implication is that they may have been lower because of the challenges the students faced.  It may turn out to be that there was massive grade inflation, not deflation, during this period.  We will need data from more than just our institution to know this.

In fact, my experience is far from normative.  Each age cohort had their lives affected differently and each individual reacted differently to the challenges of this time.  If this had happened when I was in college, and suffering from the delusion that I was an extravert, I would have felt cheated out of the best social years of my life, and that would have been true!  For my colleagues, those who had young children in school who suddenly needed to be home schooled were much more challenged than I was.  Some of them found the challenge to be beyond what they were capable of managing and resigned from positions at the university to move to places where they had more familial support. 

Each of the cohorts of children will have had an altered experience that will vary from age to age and that will likely have their impact, for instance, on their experience when they wash up on the shores of the university in different ways.  Those who missed first and second grade will have more time to recover than those who missed sixth and seventh grade, and they will have different social and learning impacts to recover from.

My patients have largely returned to meeting in person, though we are mostly masked when we meet (though some patients do not wear masks and I don’t insist that they do).  Some continue to meet remotely, though not out of fear of infection, but rather because of convenience.  My practice became quite full during the pandemic.  Many patients I had not seen in a long time returned to treatment.  Other people’s practices became full, and people begged me to take on patients they could not see because of that, and so I stretched to accommodate as many as I could.  This meant that I worked many more hours per week, doing research and preparing to teach in the evenings and on the weekends because most of my daytime hours were filled with teaching and seeing patients.

Perhaps I would have been becoming more and more ready to retire from my academic position, but I feel readier to do this than I expected to at this point.  I have found it challenging to remain connected to the University and to care about it – I have not felt particularly cared for by the University, I suppose.  We returned to the classroom before there were effective vaccines, and I felt like they were more concerned with the bottom line than with the health of their staff and faculty (the students did not seem to be at grave risk given their age).  I think the disengagement of the students under COVID conditions was also a bit disheartening, though the graduate students continued engagement and that of the students at the institute heartened me about that portion of my work.  Perhaps I will be able to continue doing some graduate teaching – and will certainly teach at the institute and continue to practice, after I retire from the academy.  I don’t plan to retire from the university immediately, but, as I said, I anticipate being ready to do that much sooner than I thought would be the case, though I might have been readier at this point even without the pandemic.

I think I feel not just isolated from the academy, but from the world.  I am very concerned about climate change, about the political polarization and denial of imminent threat that is a part of that.  We are planning to travel this spring – and I am hoping that will reignite my interests in the world.  That said, it is hard to look forward to increasing my carbon footprint to see a part of the world whose riches are largely built on the process of colonization.  I feel bitter about the state of the world and powerless to change it.  Again, this curmudgeonly attitude may have arisen “organically” without the help of the pandemic, but it is not hard to see how, at my worst moments, I have been convinced that the pandemic is the earth’s latest attempt to rid itself of the greatest threat to life.

Perhaps getting out in the world, though, will be a cure for these isolation blues...  Assuming the second wave of infection coming from China doesn't shut things down again...

The NPR story that I referenced at the beginning of this post opined that people were uncomfortable looking back at their own behaviors during the influenza pandemic because they had been selfish and allowed sufferers in nearby houses to die rather than risk being infected by them.  The flu had, in effect, exposed just how selfish and uncaring they were and not writing about this allowed those folks to distance themselves from that existential realization.  The malaise that I am reporting is of a different sort.  The existential concern is similar – I think we are driven by self interest and continue to be even in the face of compelling evidence that self interest will be our downfall – but it is more at the state of the human condition than about something particularly lacking in me.  In fact, when I started on this reminiscence, I was not feeling so bad about the state of things.  Perhaps that is what binds me to the sufferers of 1919 – as long as I keep looking forward – not to the big picture, but to what is in store tomorrow and next week and this semester, things are not so bad. 

In terms, btw, of my little experiment, I have not gone back and looked at the posts.  I will do that in a bit, but I only felt them crowding in as I worked towards a conclusion.  I am curious to see how well this narrative stacks up with the elements I have been posting to this point. 

Hmm...  Now I have gone back and this post sounds a lot like my very first post on COVID.  Perhaps the more things change, the more they are the same...  

What was intriguing about rereading all of these posts is the amount of angst that is in them that I seem to have forgotten.  Reading it, the angst comes back.  Some of it, especially in hindsight (and we aren't out of the woods yet), seems overwrought, but there is, in fact, a thing called long COVID.  Many of my friends and students have been diagnosed during the past three months.  I wore a mask this past semester in class.  I wonder about that - especially given how vocal I have been about how pedagogically bad that is.  Am I reminding myself and my students that we aren't out of the woods yet?

Yesterday I went to my first basketball game since before the pandemic.  I was uncomfortable.  Usually I see lots of people that I know at the games.  One of the people I saw I hadn't seen in three years or more.  She had aged considerably during that time.  But most of the people were strangers.  And they felt like strangers - it felt odd to be in this large group of people rooting for a team that is somehow affiliated with the school where I have worked for thirty years.     

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

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The other posts on COVID are listed below:

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.

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