The first responders arrived 10 minutes after I called 911, suited head to toe in the white hazmat gear you see in disaster films. One of them came into the house and helped my husband down the stairs, shouting down to another EMT that he didn’t think they’d need a BiPAP. I made a mental note to ask my doctor-cousin what a BiPAP was and whether it was good or bad that Josh didn’t need one.
“I love you,” I yelled through the screen door as they wheeled Josh on a stretcher toward the ambulance. Our six-year-old son, AJ, stood in the foyer, watching the whole scene unfold with wide-eyed wonder: Who were these guys? And why were they wearing space suits? A scary thought crept into my mind, but I quickly told my brain to shut up. We’re not going there. Of course he’ll survive this. I grabbed my son’s hand as the ambulance sped off to the Northwell Health Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, New York, siren blaring. He didn’t understand why I was crying.
If you told me on November 9, 2016, that in fewer than four years we’d be hiding in our homes, terrified, fighting for our lives as society shut down around us, the only thing that would surprise me was that it didn’t happen sooner. Whether it was a terrorist attack, an economic disaster, war, a global pandemic, or some combination of the above, I always knew that Donald Trump was beyond ill-equipped to handle a crisis, and that if—or when—one showed up, it would be an unmitigated catastrophe. This is why I cried after the 2016 election. This is why I still can’t talk to people who didn’t vote because they thought Hillary Clinton, the most qualified candidate to ever run for president, would have been just as bad. The situation in which America now finds itself is simultaneously shocking and totally inevitable, the Chaos Candidacy taken to its logical conclusion.
On March 15, when New York City schools were ordered closed, we packed up our car with food and over-the-counter medications and drove out to my parents’ unoccupied home on Long Island, grateful for a place to ride out the quarantine, not yet realizing that a 120-nanometer passenger had hitched a ride with us. Within days—only two weeks after Trump told the American people that only 15 people in the U.S. had the coronavirus, and that “within a couple of days [the number] is going to be down to close to zero”—my otherwise healthy, 45-year-old husband was admitted to the ICU with a serious case of bilateral pneumonia, likely due to COVID-19. We suspected that he picked up the virus while traveling for work to Seattle, Sacramento, and Los Angeles in late February and early March, while our federal government publicly downplayed the severity of the crisis. “Just stay calm,” Trump had said on March 10. “It will go away.”
It’s easier to be furious than scared, so I let the rage wash over me. I marinated in it. This was avoidable.
The week before Josh was hospitalized, as he isolated in an upstairs bedroom coughing, barely eating, and running a 103 fever, I tried desperately to get both of us tested. After all, Trump had told us on March 7 that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” But like most things this president says, it was a lie. What he meant was that anybody who is a celebrity got a test. As a parade of NBA players, actors, and TV hosts came forward with the ultimate humblebrag of 2020—that they had tested positive for COVID-19—I turned to Twitter to express my outrage about the Kafkaesque hurdles I was experiencing.