It was just days after my child was born. As she was premature, she was immediately admitted to the NICU, and it was heartbreaking to leave the hospital without our daughter coming home with us, but we tried to take comfort in the fact that she was exactly where she needed to be in order to play some physical catchup to where she would be allowed to come home.
Every single day afterward, mythical wife and I would go to the hospital twice a day to spend some time with our child. Except for those first few days, I didn’t go, because I had come down with a pretty nasty cough, and given the situation that was rapidly spreading across the globe, understandably, there were some major red flags about an Asian guy having a cough, especially not just at a hospital, but at a NICU.
Fortunately, it was most likely just allergy-related, as like a true genius, I had participated in a double 5K event that involved running two 5Ks in an eight hour span; one at 1 am, and then one at 7 am the following (same) morning; it was daylight-savings themed, and the novelty of it alone made me want to try it. But in doing so, I had inhaled a metric fuckton of early Georgia spring pollen, and my body was revolting as a result. However, it cleared up fairly quickly, as the pollen coursed through my system, and I would get to go into the NICU later on.
However, it was on one of those days in which I dropped mythical wife off at the NICU, and came back home to log into work, I have a memory of swinging by the nearby Publix on the way home, and knowing we were low on bottled water, I made a point to pick up some more. There was a display upon entering for a buy 2, get 1 free, so I figured, why not just get three cases? With this whole pandemic thing starting to gain momentum, I figured three cases of water between two adults should be sufficient for all this shit to blow over, right?
Funny how perceptions are when you’ve never really lived through a global pandemic in your life.
So here we are, one year later; people with brains larger than a pea, are still wearing masks out in public, if they’re even leaving home in the first place, and coronavirus has officially killed over half a million Americans, and countless many more over the rest of the globe, but pretty much nowhere worse than it was in America. Several vaccines have finally come to light, but the distribution of them leaves a lot to be desired, considering an entire planet’s population all need it in order to hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy, so in spite of the supposed cure existing, it’s still a slow and still dangerous path to the finish line.