COVID started early for me. On January 11, 2020, we'd just gotten home from spending Christmas month at our second home in Santa Fe. That day, I was diagnosed with an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. The ultrasound image sported a suspicious shadow that looked distinctly cancerous. The doctor confined me to the couch (lest the cyst burst and spread cancer throughout my body), and set me up for surgery on February 11.
From that couch -- already quarantined, in effect, though I didn't know it yet -- I watched the pandemic roll ashore in the US on my laptop. In late January, the first US case cropped up just 15 miles from my home in Seattle. Then the first superspreader event, 10 miles up the road. Then the first institutional spread, three miles across the lake. By the 25th, I'd begun to brace for the worst, and warn my friends. The Amazon boxes of alcohol, bunny suits, masks, and sanitizer started piling up in the basement. I'm a futurist by trade. I can read an exponential graph -- and I knew by instinct what was coming. It's my job not to be caught by surprise by this stuff. And I was not.
The surgery went off without a hitch. There was no cancer. (And I'm still here, and fine.) But I did need to spend another couple weeks on the couch recovering from a major abdominal operation. By the time I was back up and around, Seattle was shutting down all around me. I had just a few days to see friends and say goodbye. I had my last lunch out on February 29. We made a final Costco run, then came home around sunset and shut the door behind us for the last time.
We were ahead of the curve because Seattle ran about three weeks ahead of the rest of the country. By the time everybody else had caught up to our reality, in mid-March, we'd already shuttered churches and schools, fortified our hospitals, put the entire University of Washington onto online-only footing, canceled mass events and banned public gatherings, and had put the world's first vaccine injection (the one we'd come to know as Moderna) into the arm of a Seattle nurse. To my East Coast friends, I sounded like a lunatic. But I was just living 21 days in the future that they'd soon be forced to reckon with. By the Ides of March, it came to them, too.
We didn't get back to the Santa Fe house for a year and a half. When we finally returned in August 2021, my husband went into his small office and booted up the desktop computer. He was stunned at what appeared on his screen: a Safari page, loaded with tabs -- most dated the first week of January 2020, all about a mysterious virus coming out of China, and how nobody knew what it might mean.
It felt like a missive from past world we didn't even know how to remember, like reading our grandparents' letters from WWII. Whatever world we had before, it was that long ago, and had about the same chance of ever coming back.
COVID started early for me. On January 11, 2020, we'd just gotten home from spending Christmas month at our second home in Santa Fe. That day, I was diagnosed with an ovarian cyst the size of a grapefruit. The ultrasound image sported a suspicious shadow that looked distinctly cancerous. The doctor confined me to the couch (lest the cyst burst and spread cancer throughout my body), and set me up for surgery on February 11.
From that couch -- already quarantined, in effect, though I didn't know it yet -- I watched the pandemic roll ashore in the US on my laptop. In late January, the first US case cropped up just 15 miles from my home in Seattle. Then the first superspreader event, 10 miles up the road. Then the first institutional spread, three miles across the lake. By the 25th, I'd begun to brace for the worst, and warn my friends. The Amazon boxes of alcohol, bunny suits, masks, and sanitizer started piling up in the basement. I'm a futurist by trade. I can read an exponential graph -- and I knew by instinct what was coming. It's my job not to be caught by surprise by this stuff. And I was not.
The surgery went off without a hitch. There was no cancer. (And I'm still here, and fine.) But I did need to spend another couple weeks on the couch recovering from a major abdominal operation. By the time I was back up and around, Seattle was shutting down all around me. I had just a few days to see friends and say goodbye. I had my last lunch out on February 29. We made a final Costco run, then came home around sunset and shut the door behind us for the last time.
We were ahead of the curve because Seattle ran about three weeks ahead of the rest of the country. By the time everybody else had caught up to our reality, in mid-March, we'd already shuttered churches and schools, fortified our hospitals, put the entire University of Washington onto online-only footing, canceled mass events and banned public gatherings, and had put the world's first vaccine injection (the one we'd come to know as Moderna) into the arm of a Seattle nurse. To my East Coast friends, I sounded like a lunatic. But I was just living 21 days in the future that they'd soon be forced to reckon with. By the Ides of March, it came to them, too.
We didn't get back to the Santa Fe house for a year and a half. When we finally returned in August 2021, my husband went into his small office and booted up the desktop computer. He was stunned at what appeared on his screen: a Safari page, loaded with tabs -- most dated the first week of January 2020, all about a mysterious virus coming out of China, and how nobody knew what it might mean.
It felt like a missive from past world we didn't even know how to remember, like reading our grandparents' letters from WWII. Whatever world we had before, it was that long ago, and had about the same chance of ever coming back.