COVID-19 is in our city now, and our medical student clinical duties are cancelled. I left the hospital early today and saw it as a great opportunity to take time to teach myself about the novel coronavirus that is infecting people around the world. I also saw this (sorta unfortunately unexpected) long weekend as a chance to refresh myself– get centered again after the slog of my school’s women’s health rotation which felt interminable and soul-crushing and rife with examples of social injustice for poor, immigrant, non-English speaking women of color. But ya know, life is unpredictable. Nothing is in our control. My weekend is no longer fully mine.

My mom needs help, so say my three aunts who talk with her the most out of anyone in my family aside from me. She had surgery and is recovering at home– alone. An aunt is there supporting her today, and they all wanted to talk to me today because they’re concerned about her memory (i.e., they think she’s demented and specifically they believe she has Alzheimer’s dementia). I’d agree with them that there’s reason to be concerned about her memory. Her and I have been talking about her memory troubles for years now. The trouble seems to wax and wane with a slow, steady overall decline over the past 5 years. What they don’t know– possibly because my mom hides it so well– is that my mom’s memory issues probably don’t simply spring from some underlying neurodegenerative process like one of the (very many) different kinds of dementias; her memory is also impacted because she is seriously, chronically depressed. I know that her chronically depressed and anxious mental state and her chronic, under-treated sleep apnea for which she uses a CPAP machine inconsistently and her lack of exercise and her poor diet and her lack of hobbies/interests and her lack of cognitive stimulation other than her TV all contribute to her cognitive and memory abilities. She isn’t simply demented. At least, this is what I believe given what I know about my mom right now.

Truly, my mom needs neuropsychologic evaluation. I think the only way we can have that happen is if she comes to visit me here in the city where I’m in school so I can take her to a clinic with me and we can get her evaluated together. How am I– someone not trained thoroughly in neurological/psychological evaluation– supposed to discriminate between Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) vs early Alzheimer’s vs some other kind of dementia with amnesic components? To me as a learner, they all kinda look the same right now.

I’ll be going home to be with her for a few days. To make matters more complicated, I don’t even know if I should be spending time with her right now, given my extended time spent in hospitals and clinics for the past weeks while on rotation. But what can I do? When I called her today to see if she’d be ok with me coming home to visit her this weekend and make sure she’s taking her meds and comfortably recovering, she cried. I heard the loneliness and the anxiety and relief in her voice when she said that she’d love to have me at home. Virus or no virus.

What a sacred and intense time illness is. Our lives are literally in each other’s hands. What are we other than our care, our effort, our vows to one another and to ourselves? If this viral outbreak and my mom’s declining health teach me anything, it is that.