February 14, 2023

Swimming in Pee

We had the kind of weekend this weekend that hasn’t been possible in such a long time, the kind of weekend that we were wondering if we’d ever have again, even just a year ago, and it felt really good, to be so full of joy, our time full of fun, everything carefree. And something I can write on my blog that I would be less comfortable posting to social media, which is so much more amplified and devoid of context, is that we thoroughly forgot about Covid this weekend. 24 hours in Niagara Falls, staying in a hotel, visiting an indoor water park, and eating in restaurants—the object was enjoying ourselves and beyond packing hand sanitizer, we were going to not worry so much, leave our masks in our pocket for once.

Which I know is something we’re very lucky to be able to experience, but anyone who reads here often also knows what a terrible time I’ve had with anxiety over the last few years and how Covid absolutely fucked with my brain, made me think that keeping our health system functioning was my personal responsibility, and that every single one of my actions was so gravely consequential that I eventually was unable to do anything except walk around weeping at the sadness of it all, crumbling under the weight of this imagined burden of personal responsibility and my own catastrophic thinking. It was really bad, and terribly debilitating, and also really freaking hard for my family, and no doubt my kids will be talking about this in therapy for decades to come.

(I really really hate the way that bad actors hijacked the conversation around the pandemic and mental health right out of the gate so that it became impossible to have good faith conversations about any of this, to acknowledge that Covid is real and threatening, but also that there are dire consequences of having an entire society living under a perpetual emergency for literally years.)

And so it was actually really important, and even healthy, to have this little holiday away from it all, a bit like tearing off a band aid, pushing myself out of a strange uncomfortable comfort zone. If we got sick this weekend, we reasoned, so be it. Which is the kind of gamble that’s always been necessary for a trip to an indoor water park anyway, right? We were pretending that there was no circulating respiratory viruses, just as we were pretending that the wave pool wasn’t populated by people (hopefully mostly just the small ones, which is somehow less disgusting!) who were freely urinating without compunction.

So naturally, my youngest child woke up this morning puking—an inevitable water park aftermath. (She has been well since mid-morning, however, and will likely be returning to school tomorrow.) And then I headed to the hospital for my annual thyroid check, where it was found that one of my nodules had grown larger and so I had to have a biopsy (which I have had fairly often, and they’ve always been benign, thankfully), cystic liquid being sucked out through a needle in my neck.

And in the lab where I was sent for routine bloodwork, the technician was dressed in red for Valentines Day, just like I was, and we remarked on how we matched my blood, which filled four small vials for testing, and it somehow seemed fitting on Valentines Day, it being about hearts and all, my heart and your heart doing the amazing work of keeping our remarkable blood pumping through our gross and awesome bodies, and how all of us are connected, for better or for worse, most irrevocably.

I took the subway to the hospital for my appointment this morning, the first time I can recall riding transit at rush hour in such a long time, and the subway cars were packed, and more people than not with masks on, including me, and far more people with masks on than I ever see at off-peak hours (which makes a lot of sense!), and the subway was also so audibly quiet, people possibly on alert and good behaviour due to recent acts of violence on transit, and maybe that calm and quiet was what made it a little extra easy to feel in love with everybody today. All these people who’d woken up and had their breakfast and gotten dressed, and maybe nursed sick kids, or walked their dogs, or watched the sunrise with a cup of coffee, and now they’re out in the world, surrounded by strangers, following the rules, going through the motions, minding the gap.

It isn’t necessarily how badly our society functions that is remarkable, all of its faults and flaws, as I’ve written many times before, but instead that it functions at all. That most days in this city hundreds of trains take people places, and those people make room for each other, and move over on the stairs to let others pass, and help somebody up who has stumbled and fallen. That lab techs who dress up in red to make someone’s day a little brighter, going to work to poke needles, drawing blood, performing work that just might mean the difference between life or death. The miracle of socialized medicine and that I get the care I need to stay healthy. The miracle of ultrasound. The mask I continue to wear, when it makes sense, in my day-to-day life, and the knowledge that all of us, always, are swimming in pee.

And somehow, this is love.

This is life.

Happy Valentines Day.