12 May 2020
My kids have breakfast, homemade gifts, and a shelter-at-home Mother's Day planned. I try to enjoy my bacon and egg sandwich, but I’m distracted because my friend Jenny is in labor in an N95 mask. She tested positive for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) 12 days ago. She was 22 weeks pregnant. She is a pharmacist at my rural North Carolina hospital and 1 of the downstream cases from an interdepartmental outbreak. I’m 1 of the 2 infectious diseases (ID) doctors in our healthcare system and the designated COVID-19 clinical lead. When she tested positive, I tried to be reassuring. I said, “I know this is scary, but I think you’ll be OK.” Instead, she delivered an almost 24-week-old baby on Mother's Day. We are on strict personal protective equipment allocation because of shortages. The obstetrician, the nurse, the neonatologist, and the chaplain don personal protective equipment to enter the room. I talk to her over the phone after her tiny child is helicoptered away from her. We both cry.
Heather vaccinates Jenny for COVID-19.
Author, Jenny, and Jenny's daughter.
I was wrong. None of this is OK.
Her son Grady dies a month later in the neonatal intensive care unit at the academic center. Our mutual friend Heather, an ID pharmacist, comes to tell me. I am 3 patients behind in clinic, I have 2 patients with COVID-19 in the hospital waiting for me to consent them for convalescent plasma, and I have an institutional review board proposal to finish for a COVID-19 study we are hoping to launch. Heather appears in the clinic hallway with tears in her eyes. My phone had vibrated before she arrived, a text about Jenny. I didn’t read it. I knew what it said.
I said, “I know. And I can’t talk about it.” I made the hand motion Elsa makes when she shoots ice out of her fingers in the middle of a ballroom. E-NOUGH. I can’t handle it. Not right now.
I get back to work. In between clinic notes and consent forms, these giant, hiccupping sobs keep erupting out of me. They each last a minute or 2, then I angrily wipe my eyes, shake my head, and get back to work.
9 May 2021
My husband and kids made me a breakfast sandwich, and they are taking me to an art museum for the day. We will wear masks in solidarity with the kids, but the adults are vaccinated. I am also keeping the secret that Jenny is pregnant again. She told me she was pregnant in December 2020. Her due date is June 2021. She said, “Use your genius brain and figure out a plan for what we will do if I get COVID-19 again.” I’ve barely seen her this year—she's been working remotely and keeping to herself. When she comes to the hospital for meetings or to cover a shift, she wears an N95 and big flowing shirts. Hardly anyone at the hospital knows she is pregnant.
Her obstetrician follows her COVID-19 antibodies even though it's not evidenced based. Just for fun. Just for our own piece of mind. We wanted to vaccinate her but hoped to get through the second trimester first. Her antibodies stayed positive until February 2021. In March 2021, her 3-year-old son got a tummy ache and tested positive for COVID-19. She was 25 weeks pregnant.
She wasn’t positive, she didn’t have symptoms, she didn’t have antibodies anymore, and everyone was panicking. We discussed the options: Vaccine? Monoclonal antibody? Do nothing?
Jenny's a pharmacist. She listened to all the opinions but made her own decision. We held our noses, closed our eyes, and vaccinated her. Heather did the honors (Figure 1). Jenny didn’t get COVID-19. I called her every day after her first shot. I kept saying, “This is going to be OK. You are going to have a summer baby.” I tried to reassure myself as I faked confidence to her. Trying not to think about how wrong I’d been last time. Mother's Day 2021 is when I finally start to relax. Her due date is 4 weeks away.
8 May 2022
I am isolated in my bedroom with COVID-19 for the first time. I had a work exposure last week at a lunch meeting with a colleague who tested positive 2 days later. It wasn’t my first exposure and wouldn’t be my last, but it was the first time it ended in a positive test. When my husband told my middle child, she took a deep breath and yelled, “MOMMY, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I DON’T WANT TO STAY AWAY FROM YOU!” Weeks later, it will be a family joke, and we yell this whenever someone leaves a room. My kids keep wanting to come into my room, and I keep telling them no. They show up with masks and gloves to leave my traditional Mother's Day breakfast sandwich on a tray outside my bedroom door. I joke to my friends that spending 5 whole days reading novels and watching Netflix alone was the unexpected Mother's Day gift I never knew I wanted. My symptoms are mild. I surf social media and like Jenny's photos of her cute daughter who will turn 1 in June. They went to Great Wolf Lodge to commemorate Grady's second heavenly birthday. It looks like fun.
14 May 2023
I wake up to breakfast in bed made by my middle child. She made my traditional breakfast sandwich, ignoring all the leftover cinnamon rolls from the Girl Scout troop's celebration trip to Great Wolf Lodge. We just returned yesterday. A trip of almost 40 people to an indoor water park sounds like the beginning of an ID board question, but it was a great time. It was paid for with money from selling cookies. My January 2023 was the first January in 2 years with more stress about the inventory of Thin Mints than the inventory of ventilators. It made for a nice change. On our troop's trip, there were no masks, no distancing, no vaccine card checks, no photos of negative test results. There were waterslides, dancing, and sticky fingers from all the sweets. It felt like 2019. It felt like the opposite of the pandemic. Lying in bed with my breakfast tray in front of me, my middle child eagerly waiting for my approval of her handiwork, I am grateful for a Mother's Day without the taint of COVID-19. The United States officially declared the emergency over 3 days ago, the same day my healthcare system made masks optional. I scroll social media and see Jenny's family smiling up at me, eating cupcakes in honor of Grady's third birthday. In her post, she reflects on her experience. She said, “I decided I had to try… try really, really hard, to not let my devastation become “who I am.”
When I reflect on my experience of the pandemic, often with the help of a therapist, I still have episodes where giant, hiccupping sobs erupt out of me. Jenny's tragedy is just one story, just one loss in an ocean of losses I carry with me. The ocean rises and falls, it can be a calm companion or a tumultuous maelstrom. Sometimes, when I try to navigate my emotions around these losses, I feel like I’m going to drown.
But Jenny inspires me. She quietly demonstrates the bravery to move past the devastation and create a new happiness. She doesn’t forget those lost, but she is trying to not to let her grief define her.
As I eat the sandwich and read my cards, I think about how Mother's Day tastes like bacon, grief, and hope. We can’t let our devastation become who we are. We must move forward and find the meaning, the happiness, the joy. We owe it to those we lost.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Special thanks to Heather Gibson, PharmD, and Jenny Gooch, PharmD, for reviewing the manuscript and giving permission for this to be submitted.
Author notes
Potential conflicts of interest. The author: No reported conflicts of interest. The author has submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest.
