A Pandemic Psychosis (Written in June, 2020)

 

A pandemic psychosis

Two months into the pandemic, when the city was empty, fear had cloaked everyone’s soul, and we all lived by the skin of our teeth, holding on to our loved ones and to our little worlds. After being sent home to tend to our patients from the distance of our phones and a few through the strangeness of a screen, we returned to work, to the hospital, to our small offices. To the offices that a new kind of patient came in. At first, they trickled in, one by one, from Honduras, Mexico, the islands, all women, all mothers, all saying the same, describing the same phenomenon. They were scared, they were anxious, and they were falling apart. The diagnoses were all depression and anxiety, severe anxiety, with one additional feature, psychosis. Fear was driving them mad. The fear that clutches the chest at 3 am, the all-consuming heart eviscerating fear which was bringing these women to the clinic for the first time in their lives.

They had managed, overcome really, childhoods of poverty hard to imagine, had travelled long weeks from small villages to the biggest metropolis in the country, managed oppressive bosses and low paying jobs, and the many, many small and large insults to their dignity and to their psyches. They had been involved with men who wanted an easy lay, grabbed them, brought their once courageous capabilities to naught. As they watched death cover the city, when the dark heavy fog that crept into houses and took one here, one there, as they lay in bed shivering with Tylenol and little else, isolating in small, crowded apartments, small rooms, where quarantining is impossible, the thoughts took hold.

This miasma, what was this, that they could succumb to, this flu that made some laugh and took others’ essential breath away. Alone, crowded but alone, they, for the first time saw death staring them down, lives cut short by a senseless and mysterious disease that had come from the bowels of China, brought devastation to Europe, and settled in this city they now called their own. The city that never sleeps went dark, the streets empty, tourists gone, Times Square vacated.

In the endless nights of chills and pains, and fear, they met death at their doorsteps and started to fall apart. They foresaw their children, their little ones, abandoned to family members, neighbors, roommates, alone, returning to worlds they had never known and to which they would never belong. They saw their children become who they had been; hungry, violated, and they found the possibility unbearable. For it was a very real possibility, their fate intertwined with their children’s. They clung, they cried and let their souls and courage set loose and be taken as a bargain for an extension of life, for a chance to guide their children through a few more years of life lived in small, shared rooms, with side gigs and side jobs, teaching their children hurried lessons in life, let they have to take leave to never return. Like them, these babes were helpless and such sweet temptation to the claws of the men who had brought them down and from whom they had escaped.

They did not cry. They did not complain. They suffered until they could no more. And what had been a trickle became a steady pilgrimage, the new holy centers, the clinics that saw them for free and would try to make them whole again. For in this mad, diseased, enclosed and empty city, not even the churches would harbor them. To the mental health center they came, at first, a trickle, and then a steady growing invasion that became apparent to the “healers” who were still standing and had better resources and nicer houses.

They smiled through their hollow eyes that they thought only they could see, spoke of fears for their children. And then they fell apart, fragmented, broken, desolate. They spoke of death, of loneliness, of long lives that felt empty of meaning, shattered common pieces of humanity that we were expected to scoop up and put together again with our soothing cooing sounds and round colored little pills, which they devotionally took as a new manifestation of revelation, wafers of salvation, replacing what in their most acute and cruelest moment of need, abandoned them for the sake of the body politic that knew not where it was drifting. If, it was drifting. But death, this they knew was lurking under every lit door.

Those who could, and many did, left for country houses where isolation was luxurious, green and lush and devoid of danger; new opportunities, actually. For these women, their one-time maids and servants, lost income, no possibility, no opportunity except at the long lines in schools and food pantries for the necessities that would become their salvation. Rations, that that they knew little to do with, Americanized diets to bodies used to tamales and cans of dark frijoles, replaced by flaccid canned green beans and canned tomatoes and lots of pasta, as if they had all just gotten off the boat from Italy and the past was the other one, the one that ravaged with more wanton and merriment joining with the war that would feed another one.

The quiet Pandemic of 2020 did not touch the elites and poor decisions were made by greedy and witless politicians.

Ah, yes, the women… the mad Latina mothers brought down by this pandemic, survivors due to their youth and hard lean bodies, bodies used to hard physical labor. Not slouches, not obese, these domestic workers, cleaning their rooms and the big houses of the wealthy, some so big that they would be told to harbor their isolation/quarantine in some dark and fetid humid corner of the basement with scraps left at their door, food strange to their palates and no remedies. There were no remedies. Only the last, desperate, violent and violating thrust of a cold metal hose of a ventilator down their throats, and into the soft tissues of lungs untouched by cigarettes or the other byproducts of modernity, with the exception of car fumes of which there were no more. Highways devoid of cars, streets dirty, but silent, skies no longer crisscrossed by planes full of the people they would never be. But their daughters? There was hope and this hope was dashed again and again, day by day, week by week.

Most survived and smiled when told that they were for the most part young enough to make it, that this was a killer of the old, and the unwell and the extremeobese. Most were not. A few sessions were all it took, a few sessions of humanity and plain talk, of mutual reassurance that this would come to a quick end. Most after a short period, were able to work, and no longer had time for the new healers that had soothed their fears with some kind words and a few temporary pills.

Postscript:

Little did we know that a year later, there are still people, mostly the elderly and the ill, who can’t go out, who cannot touch their family members, who cannot celebrate Holidays and Festivals. Masks are worn and hands are washed as if we all became surgeons about to go in. A few made out like bandits and most lost much of what they had.