COVID-19 DIARIES: ENTRY THREE

Essential worker. This soon became my new reality. Four months ago I would’ve never expected this term being applied to me, nor that nearly 240,000 people are dead worldwide. Should I feel special?

It is safe to say it took a little while for people to catch on and realize the serious nature of this deadly virus. I noticed this lack of awareness from early on. Some people found it hard to break social behaviors at the local neighborhood pharmacy I worked at in Washington Heights. One man still wanted to shake my hand after he won a scratch off game. The chances of me getting coronavirus would soon become much higher than winning the lottery. 

In the beginning school wasn’t canceled yet. Work wasn’t canceled yet. Social distancing was just starting to be mentioned. After March 11, that would all change. Everything would be put on shut down. New York City would go from being the busiest city in the world, the city that never sleeps, to a scene out of a zombie apocalypse movie. The streets started to get emptier. Yet my good old local pharmacy remained open. It’s an essential service. People need their medications, especially when there is pandemic, of course. Business was booming, and to be honest, I was happy to still be employed, knowing how hard it was to keep a job in this current environment. I wanted to be able to help out my parents who are now unemployed.

The masses came in looking to stock up on their immune boosters like Elderberry and Vitamin C. One of my job requirements was to stock the aisles. The aisles started becoming emptier than ever. I experienced fear first hand. Every person who came into the pharmacy asked where the hand sanitizer was. Once that ran out it was the rubbing alcohol and then the cleaning wipes. Once those ran out it was aloe and other ingredients to make homemade hand sanitizers. Within a week we ran out of toilet paper at the store. I put out the last pack on March 19, and it was gone in seconds. Paper towels followed, along with hand soap. Eventually thermometers would become sold out along with Tylenol, which was supposedly better than Advil for fighting the virus. Almost everyone who entered through our doors had the same question: “Where’s the rubbing alcohol?” I told them we had none. Then they naturally asked when we would get it. The answer was that we truthfully didn’t know. The manufacturers we ordered from had everything on back order. We soon lacked the essential items that make a pharmacy what it is.

One day I was stocking the shelves and I overheard a young lady asking another employee if we had any face masks. We did not. We ran out of them a couple of weeks before. She said her parents lived in China, and she wanted to send some over there to them. Everywhere else she had looked they were sold out, and even on Amazon they were either sold out or going for high prices. She left, and I still sometimes wonder what happened to her parents.

Soon face masks and gloves would be worn by everyone outside, yet my store was slow in requiring the employees to follow these simple safety measures. I thought about how I could work in a high-risk environment, interacting with customers who at the best of times have a higher percentage chance of being sick. Eventually the boss supplied employees with gloves but no facemasks. I had already made countless deliveries to customers by this point. Every time I touched a door handle or elevator button, I became increasingly nervous. Could this be the doorknob containing the virus? Is this the woman who gives me the virus? I started wearing gloves every day and washing my hands after every trip back from deliveries.

Once I started becoming increasingly conscious of my environment, I started thinking about quitting my job. Every time I heard someone cough, I became paranoid and walked to the other side of the store. But it was a rational fear at the same time. I had to deliver to people with instructions to leave the package outside because they were feverish. I used to have to ask the receiver to sign for the medication for the pharmacy’s records. I soon stopped asking and just signed for the people. At work when I was working at the cash register, I also made sure to sanitize the register and payment screen, but personal sanitizing supplies were running low. Some of the customers knew we had a bottle of Purell behind the counter and asked if they could use it. When it got really low, I said it ran out, which annoyed a few customers. I was trying to preserve the last few drops for my co-workers and me who were in constant contact with germs.

Yet the final moment that led to me quitting my job was not this. It was after my stepmother contracted the coronavirus. My dad was devastated. My mother was shaken. My step-mother was in critical condition at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was surrounded by people who were dying feet away from her. Next to her another woman her age had just died and was being taken out in a body bag. She stayed one night in the hospital. After that night she knew she had to leave or she too would die there. “That place was like the final pit stop before death,” she said. She had a vivid dream where her dead sister visited her and was making her dinner. After this and a phone call with her priest, she mustered up the strength to leave the hospital.

It remains a mystery how she successfully achieved this. Nonetheless, she was able to get in a taxi while wearing her hospital gown and travel back home where my dad had left groceries. She managed to make some home-made remedies and use a humidifier that helped. The days after she got home she was still immensely weak, but my dad kept bringing supplies to her, and she gradually got better. She is doing well today and can now say she overcame the coronavirus. While hesitant at first, I am glad I quit the job and reduced the chance of spreading the virus to loved ones. I realized through this that when things become personal, they become real. What was at first a distant virus across the world soon became my dad, a nonreligious guy, praying for his wife’s life.