The first tremors of chaos started here on Friday, February 28th, and I had no idea. I stopped by Costco that morning because I needed a few essentials. As I made my way to the back of the store to pick up paper towels, I encountered a roadblock. There were so many people circling the paper goods that you had to wait your turn and get into a slow single file line the flowed in one direction around the entire pallet. I grabbed paper towels and almost picked up some toilet paper.
“Nah. We don’t really need any yet. We still have at least half a pack.”
It was my most foolish thought of this whole pandemic.
When I finally made it to the front of the store, I was surprised by the long lines on a Friday morning. It felt out of sorts, busier than a weekend even, but I just shrugged and weaved my way through the crowd.
That same evening my friend, Meg, flew down from Seattle to visit for the weekend. She mentioned that things in Washington were escalating and that she had sent her husband to Costco earlier that day where it was crazy busy. There were rumors of quarantine and people were starting to stock up, just in case. Suddenly the long lines I had experienced at Costco that morning made sense. Panickers and preppers were gearing up for an apocalypse. It seemed a bit extreme.
During this time frame, my main concerns were my upcoming c-section, attempting to avoid my c-section, and trying to finish up my classes before maternity leave without suddenly needing to go on bedrest if my placenta started showing signs of distress. I could feel the pulse around the doctors’ office change at each prenatal visit. Warnings about influenza and the measles were being replaced with facemasks and questions about “dry coughs” at check-in. I did not feel fearful, but I began to sense that having a c-section in the middle of Coronavirus was not ideal. Extra days of being cooped up in a hospital after surgery while a mysterious respiratory virus was circulating the state was not my dream birth plan.
Meanwhile, a few school districts in Washington decided to shut down temporarily to prevent the spread of the virus. At first, these closures were for just two weeks. My own college sent an email a week before spring break with a few somber announcements: spring break missions trips were canceled, they were discouraging student travel abroad over the break, and if any student visited a country with a Level 3 travel advisory (China, South Korea, Iran, or Italy), they would not be allowed to return to campus for the rest of the semester but could finish their classes in an independent-study format.
If the first week of March was similar to a full-term pregnant woman thinking, “Was that a contraction?”
…then the second week of March was when her water broke.
[…] mean, graduation isn’t until May.” My second most naive moment of this pandemic, after not buying toilet paper at Costco when it was still in […]