I broke my right hip when I was 13 and spent eight months on crutches. As the date approached for the surgery to remove the five pins that helped my hip heal, I looked forward to ditching the crutches even as I feared undergoing another surgery that would reopen the eight-inch incision in my leg.
It all worked out and I was hiking the Grand Tetons two months after the pins were successfully removed. My mind drifts back to that almost-year-long convalescence as we once again collectively (minus a few self-described rebels) don masks in another bid to beat back COVID-19.
Spring and early summer felt like we were stepping away from the pandemic and back into the world that existed before March 19, 2020. By midsummer, a media onslaught of bad news about rising COVID-19 case rates and anti-vaccination fury added “Delta variant” to the pandemic vocabulary list alongside “social distancing” and “remote learning.”
Our societal war against COVID-19 feels like it is being waged by the people groping blindly in the parable about the elephant. Someone grabs a leg and declares they have found a tree. Another finds the trunk and describes a snake.
Medical experts beg us to march in lockstep in a concerted effort to vanquish COVID-19 and its variants once and for all. Vaccinated people (me included) joyfully cast off their masks and declared, “We win.” The more cautious among us wear masks and still assiduously avoid crowds. Anti-vaxxers either declare the pandemic a hoax or fret and warn about government control and eroding freedom.
The best relief from COVID-19’s ceaseless intrusion into our lives has been the Summer Olympics with its spectacle of extremely-fit and excited people from all over the world running, jumping, tumbling, hurdling, swimming and wrestling.
For a couple of weeks, the world became a place where people came together to compete and cheer and not a battlefield littered with reports about mass burials and overburdened hospitals.
I have to stop right here and say I’m a firm believer in science and modern medicine. Actually, it’s absurd to say you “believe” in science because science is founded on facts that can be tested, proved, retested and proved again.
As someone living in Greater Boston in the 21st century, I am grateful to be able to balance on the very tip of the pinnacle of modern medicine.
The surgery and anesthetics I endured in the early 1970s are Dark Ages versions of modern surgery and medication. The goopy yellow syrup that was my only relief from childhood asthma has been replaced by steroid-based drugs that have made the asthma that killed my grandmother an eminently-treatable disease.
The same medical advances apply to COVID-19 vaccines. The eerie blue dot inside a sugar cube I ate as a kid to ward off polio bears little resemblance in terms of curative power to the vaccines injected into my arm to turn me into a warrior in the fight against COVID-19.
We are all in that fight — all of us, the whole world. None of us are safely ensconced in the rear waiting for our turn to head to the front. We are all on the front lines and our beliefs, our prejudices and our fears won’t keep us alive.
Is it scary to live during a time when mass vaccinations are the answer to a pandemic-induced global slaughter? Yes. You know what’s scarier? Dying — take it from a guy who almost died falling off a cliff and survived because his leg, not his head, hit a rock.
I won’t end this on a glum note. The best news all of us can receive in the war against COVID-19 is a full-on return to schools with kids dashing into classrooms, running around at recess and playing with their friends.
Let us go boldly forth to vanquish the pandemic, holding fast to our faith in science and driving away fear mongering and naysaying.
