David Vega has a story.
“My name is David, and I am an otherwise healthy 27-year-old male with no past medical history. I am a fourth-year medical student, who will soon be a doctor starting residency in June. I am a health freak, I work out five to six times a week, I have a six-pack on a good day, and I completely took my health for granted.
I thought I was INVINCIBLE—I thought I was immune to this coronavirus because I am healthy and young. But I was wrong.”
So begins his message, posted on a Student Life blog hosted by Indiana University School of Medicine, where he is enrolled. He’s one of the more than 2.3 million people who have contracted the virus. Of those, more than 157,000 have died, leaving grieving family members and friends to tell their stories.
Those who have overcome the virus are tremendously grateful, and it has perhaps left the rest of us feeling a bit guilty for complaining about the hardships we face, even the very real and significant hardships of lost work and wages, lost retirement savings, lost milestones like weddings and graduations, lost companionships.
We’ve gone from asking, “Are you living your best life,” to “how are you living life?”
David’s blog: “The fact is, you never know. A day after arriving in Indiana, symptoms started to kick in. On Thursday, March 12, I woke up with fever, chills, fatigue, generalized muscle aches, and joint pain. Probably just a bad case of the flu, right? No cough, no shortness of breath, no difficulty breathing, no respiratory problems whatsoever. No nausea, no diarrhea. JUST Fever and chills.
Deseret News staff writer Ethan Bauer has begun chronicling “People of the Pandemic,” but not necessarily those like David the medical student, who have become ill. Basically anyone else. This pandemic affects everyone. We are all connected to it in many different ways.
People like nurse Lynne Hewett, who left her comfortable home in southern Utah to give care in a hot zone at a New York City emergency room. People like Thelma Jackson, a children’s hospital custodian in Florida who embraces the emotional labor of her job now more than the custodial work. She provides smiles and comfort to patients while families are kept outside the hospital.
It’s also people like David Ball, a BYU tennis player who now weighs whether to come back for another season or start the rest of his life. He’s not sick, but the decision likely makes his stomach ache.
Ethan’s talked to park rangers, survival experts, a defense attorney, a pastor, a radio host and of course, an ER doctor all about how they are living life; how they are coping; how they are contributing.
Ellie Mae the clown talked to Ethan. She goes by Elinor Blankenship when she’s wearing civilian clothes. Her service is laughter, and it’s getting harder to find opportunities to spread it.
David’s blog: “My symptoms, however, only continued to worsen. The fever was unrelenting. I had no appetite. I had lost about 10 pounds. I loaded up on my daily multivitamins and Emergen-C; I continued to use Ibuprofen and Tylenol every six hours because my body was asking for ANYTHING to take away the misery.”
I asked Ethan how he has cast his net to find the stories of people of the pandemic.
“It’s pretty random,” he said, an apt metaphor for the spread of the virus that is quickly covering the world. “We get a balance of famous and not famous. From people on the front lines to not. Like a couple that got married last week at the courthouse,” he said. That story is still to come, later this week.
We describe the Deseret News “People of the Ppandemic” as a series exploring the COVID-19 experience through brief, vivid interludes in the lives of interesting people across spectrums of class, occupation, age, ethnicity and geography — sketches of our world’s new temporary normal. A special eight-page section of photos and profiles appears in Sunday’s print edition. The profiles will appear daily online at deseret.com for the duration of the crisis.
David’s blog: “After waiting SEVEN ENTIRE DAYS in self-quarantine, I finally received my results: positive for COVID-19, continue self-quarantine for another seven days. Ironically, this arrived an hour before receiving my Match Day residency assignment for emergency medicine at the University of Miami. March 20th was certainly a big day of ‘results’ for me.”
I asked Ethan what surprised him about the project.
“It seems like a fair number of the people I’ve talked to have managed to stay somewhat positive. ... I couldn’t be happier about that. It’s a bad time, but it’s surprising and refreshing to see someone who is not down about it.”
It’s a perfect blend of hope and responsibility. It’s what was happening at that courthouse — a wedding day not anticipated by the bride and groom, but still carrying the promise of a bright future: “for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.”
I’ll give David, the fourth-year Indiana medical student, the final word from his blog. The sick and the dying, after all, still have the heaviest burden in this crisis, and that’s not to be forgotten:
“We NEED you to do your part to FLATTEN the curve and prevent the growing spread to more and more people every day. If we all do our part, then this self-quarantine can eventually come to an end and we can soon resume what our lives used to be.
My name is David and I am NOT Invincible. And neither are you.”