Tiny Moments of Terror and Telling Stories

I posted this to Facebook on Sunday, when I was still twitchy as fuck about everything that happened. Now I’m revisiting it, 48 hours later, because this shit has derailed things pretty badly on the writing front, given the way it spiked my anxiety..

The story begins like this: our local pharmacy was out of the medication my partner uses to ease their chronic arthritis pain. For our household, this qualifies as a very bad thing, so we made plans for me to try the pharmacy at the local shopping centre when I did the weekly shopping.

That pharmacy has been locked down, with signs on the doors alerting everyone there was an active COVID patient on the premises over the last few days. I start doing the math, figure trying a third pharmacy is a better choice than doing shopping. So I hit Google, search for other small pharmacy outlets in my local area, and hie over to a hole-in-the-wall place about ten minutes away.

It’s not exactly a place doing a lot of business at 3:30 PM on an Easter Sunday. The woman behind the prescription counter is one of those cheerful customer service types who asks how your day is going and chats as they take your order, which is a surprisingly comforting trait in a world where you don’t leave the house more than once a week.

I put in my partners script, and the pharmacy is well stocked. Their chemists go to work, and I loiter out of the way so that any new customers have a clean path along the spatial distancing markers when they come in.

Then the fuckhead appears. Young bloke. Late twenties or early thirties. Not looking well.

This sniffly, coughing motherfucker walks in without giving the spatial distancing markers a second glance. Woman on the counter asks how his weekends going, and he tells us his tale: he’s got bronchitis, but the hospital put him in a COVID ward.

“Oh no,” the woman on the counter says. “Good that your tests cleared okay, though.”

“Didn’t wait,” this asshole says. “They weren’t treating us like adults, and I’m a grown man, so I discharged myself. Going to head home and eat my mum’s cooking while I recover.”

Woman at the counter stares at him in semi-professional horror. I am far less discreet as I back the fuck away to get as much distance as possible between us. My brain is a riot of questions, the firs six or seven layers of which are panicked variations of what the actual fuck? Which is followed by how the actual fuck do you discharge yourself from a COVID ward?

Meanwhile, this stupid motherfucker stands in the middle of the store, trying to tell us the hospital is a hellhole and a man shouldn’t have to put up with that. All the ways in which he is personally aggrieved and affronted by the way he’s treated by hospital staff in the middle of, you know, a fucking pandemic.

They call my name, so I collect the medication and bail the fuck out. He’s coughing into his hand as I leave, positioning himself in the walkway between doorway and counter. It’s easy enough for me to go around him, skirting the fringes of the store, but nobody coming in has the background.

I feel sorry for the woman on the counter, and even sorrier for this asshole’s mum.

I keep wanting to tell this story to people, even now that I’m calmer than I was, because it was basically two minutes of horror. A short window where the permeability of the steps we take is laid bare–my partner and I have careful as heck about spatial distancing and exposure, and started a week or so ahead of the guidelines for such.

Those precautions are so easily undone, all because this asshole with a head full of toxic masculinity was affronted by the way hospital staff dealt with him.

Sure, the odds of infection are significantly slimmer than it seems on the surface: COVID is more reliant on an hour’s exposure than a few minutes, and it’s more likely this guy was in an observation ward than an actual COVID-specific treatment if he hadn’t been positively tested.

Still, it’s a wake-up call. I’m living on our couch for the next week or so while my partner takes the bedroom. A precaution, because the odds may be crazy slim, but neither my partner nor I are eager to take chances.

Right now, the urge to retell the story is all about regaining some small measure of the control I lost.

That’s the nice thing about writing. Every experience gets transmuted, somewhere along the line, transforming from a moment of hideous panic into a more reasoned and reflective understanding of the moment.