We're Trying Our Best Not to Hate You

It was the winter of 2022. Keri-Sue took her son Micah to a hospital in New York six times, begging the doctors and nurses to help him. He was weak and dizzy, struggling to recover from an infection. You know which infection…

Yes, that one.

The staff told her to stop bringing him. They blamed Keri-Sue for causing her son unnecessary anxiety. It was making his condition worse, they said. They told her to calm down and have patience. Her son would get better on his own, with some antibiotics or a little allergy medicine. The receptionist even started chiding her. “I knew you’d call. You call here every day!” Doctors refused to run more tests. One of them even said, “Kids are not getting Long Covid.”

On her sixth visit, the hospital finally admitted them overnight. Doctors and nurses spent most of the time insisting her son would be fine, even after tests revealed that he had an enlarged heart and clots in his liver. They refused to start treatment with blood thinners until they could “run more tests.”

That night, Keri-Sue’s son died.

His eyes turned yellow. He started gasping for breath. He wet his bed. At first, nurses just wanted to give him a diaper. Keri-Sue yelled at them to look at her son struggling to breathe. Finally, a team of medics rushed in and tried to revive him, but it was too late. One of the blood clots had traveled to his lungs, causing a fatal pulmonary embolism. There was nothing else to do.

What happened to Keri-Sue and her son is every parent’s worst nightmare, especially for those of us who’ve been keeping up with research on the virus that everyone in our lives tells us to stop living in fear of. Versions of this story have happened to countless families. This is just one of the most heartbreaking ones, one newspapers have bothered to report in such agonizing detail.

I remember the winter of 2022. It was the winter pediatricians wrote a letter to the current administration, urging them to declare an emergency for children’s respiratory illnesses. It went unanswered.

That was the winter my spouse and I teamed up with two other parents to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for our preschool. It was the winter we begged our school to bring back masks, with partial success. It was the winter we spent hundreds of dollars on PPE for other people’s children. It was the winter we kept our daughter home for three weeks during the peak. That was what we had to do to keep her from dying of a pulmonary embolism. Meanwhile, every single one of our friends and families treated us like we had a mental illness.

Two years later, nothing has changed.

If anything, it’s gotten worse.

We’re angry.

We’re angry at the toxic positivity, denial, and wishful thinking we’re greeted with every time we try to talk about masks or clean air. We’re angry at the charlatan grifters in public health who’ve made lucrative careers out of denying chronic illness, particularly in children. We’re angry at the corporate media who continues to platform them, even while occasionally printing stories that acknowledge the depth of our crisis. We’re angry at our public health officials who decline every single opportunity to correct misinformation or speak out against poor policies. We’re angry at our politicians who make everything else their top priority, while telling us how much they care about our children and the future.

Until we finally embrace public health again, there is no future. There is only rising sickness and suffering, forever. This disease is not some afterthought to be tacked on to public discourse. Along with the climate crisis, it’s the single defining issue of this decade, and likely the rest of the century.

We deserve better.

We’re angry at our friends, our coworkers, and our families for abandoning us and gaslighting us every day, projecting their own anxieties and fears onto us as they turn their own desires for normal into a feigned concern for our mental health. We know what they mean. They don’t care about our mental health.

They simply want us to shut up.

After reading about Keri-Sue’s loss, all of this feels fresh as we approach an election that supposedly pits democracy against fascism (again). I’m going to explain this as objectively as I can to anyone who still doesn’t think this disease is worth taking seriously in adults, or in children:

Honestly, we hate you now.

Keri-Sue’s loss is the same loss that parents in Gaza feel when their children die from American bombs. It’s the knowledge of that loss that reminds me and my spouse that we’re doing the right thing, despite the costs.

We don’t want to hate you, but that’s an appropriate response after the last four years. Some of us are doing our best not to hate, but it’s hard. It’s hard not to hate someone when they’ve spent nearly five years making your life unbearable, creating a world filled with invisible hostility and danger.

Every single parent who knows about the risks to their children has lived with the daily fear of what happened to Keri-Sue and her son.

It could happen to any of us.

Or it already has.

Every single person we ever thought we could trust has spent the last several years telling us to stay home while they go out shopping. Then they ridicule us for salting their vibes anytime we dare to talk about anything that could actually make everyone’s lives a little better. They don’t want to hear it.

It’s infuriating.

We know hate leads nowhere. We’re trying to redirect it. We’re trying to channel it. We’re trying to deal with it.

After I read about Keri-Sue’s loss, I watched cartoons with my daughter and held back tears. That’s how it goes for many of us who are homeschooling our children through this nightmare, or just doing their best to keep them protected. We spend part of the day trying to live in the moment. We spend part of the day managing our more intense negative feelings and keeping them under wraps. We spend the night recovering and preparing for what comes next.

We repeat.

Nobody gives us a break. There’s no babysitter. There’s no relative to offer relief. We’re the babysitter. We’re the teacher. We’re the nurse. We’re often the playmates and family they should have. We fill all the roles, keeping them safe, happy, and healthy. Our daughter goes to an outdoor school once or twice a week to “socialize” with members of a “community” who we can only pretend to trust because it’s outside and she knows to keep her mask on. If we let our guard down for a minute, we could easily end up like Keri-Sue and her son.

That’s life now.

At the height of campaign season, we never stop hearing about fascism, democracy, freedom, and human rights. Those words mean almost nothing to those of us who’ve been prisoners in our own homes or forced to sacrifice our own lives to make the lives of others more convenient. So if you find us a little distant, a little lackluster, a little unenthusiastic, a little standoffish, a little bitter, a little salty, a little reluctant to support your crusades, that’s why.

We’re trying not to hate you.

It’s hard.