The Death of Empathy

Like many these days, I find myself repeating the term “self care” on a loop in my mind. Now into the tenth month of the year, I look back and could never have predicted what was coming when the calendar turned to 2021.

Yes, we are still mired in a pandemic, and will be for the long haul because of the rampant stupidity of so many. That, by itself, has been a communal stressor for 20 months now. Isolation, trying to stay healthy, aware, worried about loved ones and their health — all have taken their toll.

Tackling my parents home of 25 years — clearing it out, painting, cleaning, selling, and then cajoling, handling, and all the machinations to get them moved into a retirement facility where my father’s Parkinson’s now has a built in safety net. Yes, I have three siblings, but two of them are nonexistent and the other was plunged into her own worst nightmare.

Cancer. Watching my sister battle this insidious, equal opportunity destroyer has been crushing. Being able to support her through chemotherapy, give her injections, to hold her hand on this horrific journey? Well, any question I may have had about the universe planting us in Phoenix when it did evaporated. Never have I felt more in the right place at the right time — for her and my parents.

That all being said, once we rang the bells signaling the end of her 16 rounds of infusions; once I injected her for the last time — everything inside me kind of collapsed. (She still has six weeks of radiation in her future, but for now she is in the “wash out” period where they leave her body alone.) To use my husband’s favorite analogy — “You can carry a hot plate just as far as you need to.” — I had carried it as far as I needed to and let it crash to the ground.

Ergo, my radio silence the past three weeks.

Stepping past the shards of that hot plate, I grabbed the words “self care” like a flotation device. I drove to Texas to see two of my kids. I got to hug Kendall and Daniel — newly engaged — and love on their new kitten and her beautiful engagement ring. In Austin, I had the honor of signing the marriage license of Culley and Sean — their wedding plans having been changed five times because of COVID and they just wanted it done. My signature as an ordained reverend (go ahead, laugh) made it official and we are all looking forward to a family ceremony/celebration in November.

Seeing my kids is always balm for whatever aches and pains my heart may be experiencing. Coming back, I began reinvesting in myself — working out, eating better, sleeping more, and just being with Rudy. Yes, I thought about writing many times, but I just needed a break from this, too. A break from being angry, from pleading, from ranting about deaths that never should have happened.

But this morning I clicked on a Washington Post article, and, well, here I am. Angry, ranty, ragey — and it needs to come out. For me, I guess this keyboard is also a form of self-care after all. Even after all we have seen the past six years, I am still blown away by how absolutely STUPID are so many of our fellow travelers.

The article was a heartbreaking (for the medical staff) story of 48 hours invested in trying to find an ICU need for a critically ill COVID patient who had developed a life threatening abdominal hematoma. A 69 year old man and his wife became sick in late July, him more so than her. Neither were vaccinated because they did not trust the shot and never went anywhere except church.

Let’s take that part for a moment — church is SOMEWHERE. And in their piece of Oklahoma — Stillwater — only 35% were vaccinated when the man fell ill.

So once the community hospital ER found his oxygen dangerously low he was whisked upstairs to intensive care. Day after day his condition worsened, he grew more desperate and frightened, once ripping out his tubes. Roughly two weeks into his COVID stay, a nurse discovered a mushy spot in his abdomen — it turned out to be a deadly complication — a hematoma. He was bleeding inside his abdominal muscles and needed lifesaving treatment. And so the clock began ticking.

For 48 hours the hospital staff tried everything they could to find him a bed at a neighboring higher level hospital, expanding their search to neighboring states as one after another reported zero beds available. There simply were none to be found because they were filled with people just like him and his wife who had embraced bullshit and refused to be vaccinated.

In a move that would even surprise Sarah Palin, these anti-vaxxing, conspiracy embracing, ivermectin ingesting, iodine nebulizing cultists have become their own death panels — sentencing themselves to death in the vicious circle of their idiocy. In far too many places, ICU beds only become available when COVID easily snatches yet another life sacrificed on the altar of their willful ignorance.

The man in the article went downhill rapidly as his abdomen swelled with blood — to volley ball size. He was put on a ventilator. He was being pumped with medications. His family was told it was only a matter of time, that there simply was no room at any hospital that could have performed the surgery necessary.

Another note — not all hospitals are created equal. Your little community hospital may be perfectly equipped to handle your child’s fall, a non-life threatening car accident, or an outpatient procedure, but they are not staffed or equipped to handle the multitude of traumas, complications, and life threatening scenarios that are part and parcel of the human condition. Yet another reason why rolling the COVID dice and laughing at the available vaccines is just fucking foolish.

On August 8th, the man died. And he did not have to. Sure, COVID could have still stolen him on its own, but because of COVID easily dining at the buffet of human arrogance in this country, he had no chance, because 40 hospitals in four states had no beds.

I can almost, almost feel sad for his family having to helplessly watch as he internally bled to death, knowing it did not have to be fatal. But then, there’s this…

The wife, weeks later, still mired in her grief, still shocked at how her husband died said this, “I just have so many questions about the shot. I don’t know if I’m persuaded. I guess you want to say I don’t believe in it.”

I. DON’T. BELIEVE. IN. IT.

You foolish, feckless dimwit. You watched as your husband struggled for oxygen. You sat at his bedside amid monitors, and IV drips, and a wall of medical devices all dedicated to keeping him alive. You saw the staff devastated as hospital after hospital told them NO, yet they kept calling, networking, desperately trying to find an open bed for your husband. You saw the toll it took on them as they invested themselves in his survival. You watched him die, fully aware of why he was there in the first place, and why they could not find him a bed in another higher level hospital — COVID.

And all you can offer from your head filled with straw is I don’t believe in it.

Congrats, lady. You are the reason this pandemic blazes on. You are the reason beds continue to become available only when another equally ignorant soul dies from COVID. You are the reason the ages of the people in those beds is younger and younger. And you are the reason that people like me have given up on giving a shit about people like you anymore.

I am done trying to reason with you. I am done caring more about you than you care about yourself. I am over articles that tell us we need to try to better understand you. I am nothing but a seething mass of anger as you and your ignorant cronies pack school board meetings and threaten those who are trying to protect our youngest.

We understand you. Jumpin’ Jesus on a pogo stick, do we understand you. We understand you are selfish pricks. We understand that you are self involved, self important, deluded, not intellectually curious, and too stupid to know how stupid you are. We understand that you feel no obligation to society to work together. And we understand that our lives are being held hostage by you and your crackbrained cohort. You act like pants shitting toddlers over being asked to help out, to step up, to be part of the solution, to simply wear a piece of fabric over your fetid maws, to get vaccinated like you have been vaccinated repeatedly in your lives.

Now here’s what you need to understand.

COVID is real. And it does not care whether you believe that or not. It does not need your approval, your admitting it exists, or your permission. It only needs your unmasked face, your unvaccinated body. That’s all. And you don’t need to be licking doorknobs to contract it. Its teensy aerosolized droplets can find your nose with ease.

You need to understand that another 86,217 people have tested positive in the past 24 hours. That another 2,032 people have died (Yea! Open beds!) And that 1 out of every 445 people in this country have now died because of this virus.

You need to understand that you are not viewed as patriots, but as crybabies. You are not great thinkers, you are nonthinkers. Your Facebook group has not stumbled upon the answer in a Reddit thread. You need to understand that your “Don’t tell me what to do!” stance is murderous. Literally.

And you need to understand that should you contract COVID and find your oxygen levels plummeting to meet your IQ, you may well die because hospitals are filled with irresponsible, fatuous fools just like you who don’t trust science. Until you need it, that is.

You’ve killed more than your neighbors, your parents, your friends, innocent people in the check out line in this pandemic. You’ve killed empathy. Because it is impossible to feel sorry for a damned fool who plays Russian Roulette with a deadly virus and is then shocked when the bullet leaves the chamber.