Self-Quarantine

Thursday I saw my oncologist. Friday I saw my primary care physician. While both appointments were made weeks ago for relatively routine matters (if you can consider cancer routine), the question foremost on my mind was how I should understand my risk relative to the coronavirus.

Without question I'm at relatively high risk: I'm north of 70, I have a compromised immune system (due to multiple myeloma and the ongoing chemotherapy regimen I follow to contain it), and I'm normally on the road a shade more than once a month, mainly to continue my work as a group process consultant and facilitation trainer. 

Happily, I like my doctors and I trust them. They're bright, they're personable, they don't talk down to me, and they give me straight answers. While they did not have completely aligned views about my risk, they agreed that I should take the coronavirus seriously.

My oncologist advocated staying home for the next four weeks and then reassessing. In four weeks we'll know a lot more than we do now. My primary care physician thought I could still travel, so long as I was rigorous about hand washing and social distancing.

Part of the problem, of course, is the unprecedented nature of the threat—the influenza epidemic of 1918 was 102 years ago and the world is a much different place today, so what can we usefully compare our current situation to? Another factor is all the uncertainties. We don't yet know:
•  How many will ultimately be infected
•  How many will die (to what extent will the capacity of health care facilities and personnel be swamp by demand)
•  How many people are already infected and don't know it (this problem will persist for a while as we don't have anywhere near enough testing kits on hand to determine who has it).
•  How much people will modify their behavior to reduce the risk of spreading infection

In addition, there are many facets that complicate the Rubik's cube of my risk assessment:

—It's a much better strategy for me to avoid getting the virus than to count on surviving an infection. Despite my confidence in local health care services, my oncologist estimated that the mortality of someone in my risk category might be as high as 40 percent. That got my attention. 

—No matter how diligent I am about watching for signs of infection, I have to anticipate that if I get the virus and am actively traveling and working, that I'll be inadvertently infecting others during the time lag between the onset of infection and the diagnosis—and that would feel awful.

—If I persist in traveling during the pandemic, it encourages others to take risks, as students and clients will be paying to have me come and their fees may be squandered if they boycott group sessions in order to protect their health. Is that acceptable to me?

—Traveling by train—my preferred way to get around—is definitely less risky than traveling by plane, but it's not risk free.

—I hate canceling work. But I also hate being stupid.

While it took me 48 hours to wrap my head around it all, I ultimately came to peace with taking the advice of my oncologist (and the decided preference of my partner, Susan) and pulling the plug on everything I had scheduled through early May. Smack in the midst of a highly choreographed five-month stretch of travel (I had seven trips planned from late January through mid-June, encompassing five facilitation trainings, three contracts with communities, two vacations with Susan, and a partridge in a pear tree one cohousing conference), I hit the pause button and will be staying home. 

Suddenly, there will be a lot more jigsaw puzzles, library books, board games, and Netflix in my immediate future.

I made a list of all the travel plans I need to cancel and shift, trying to secure whatever compensation or refunds I can. It's about 20. Ugh. While this is not my favorite way to focus my life force, it's a necessary consequence of my life choices. 

(I was thinking just the other day about how lovely it might have been to have had a secretary or administrative assistant to handle this kind of thing through the years, but I never did. The shiny side of that coin is that I know how to take care of this myself. Even if it's work that I was not that drawn to, it never sat well asking someone else to do it for me. And when you live low enough on the hog, I never generated enough money to fairly compensate someone else for this work. Thus I became, by default, a logistician.)

If nothing else, the coronavirus has given us all a blessed respite from the mind-numbing drumbeat of divisive politics. I was getting pretty sick of it. Now, I guess, I'll get the chance to get sick of hearing about people being afraid of getting sick.