Our friend in England went into hospital yesterday with breathing difficulties.

At the time, he’d had the coronavirus for ten days. After speaking with him on the phone, a National Health Service doctor told his wife to drive him straight to hospital. She was advised to drop him off and go directly home, where she had to go back into isolation. His wife is my very dear friend. She told me that it was heartbreaking to drop her husband outside the hospital and drive away. She said he looked so frail.

Fortunately, today brings some good news. Our friend isn’t in intensive care, but remains in a ward bed while doctors test his lungs.  

I give you the pandemic version of good news.

Our friend is wearing an oxygen mask and isn’t able to talk on the phone, and he’s so weak, he’s only managed one text since being hospitalized. But the text contained more good news, pandemic-style. He’s being allowed one short phone call this evening, so the family is setting up a conference call that will let everybody speak with him, however briefly. 

It was his older daughter, the doctor, who first pegged our friend’s incipient breathing problems when she phoned him on Saturday morning. Growing alarmed, she told her mother they had to follow protocol and call the NHS hotline. It was hard to get through, given England’s rising load of cases, but eventually they managed to leave a message. When the doctor called back, she ran through a list of tests and questions with our friend. Then she told him to go to hospital immediately. Do Not Pass Go. 

After he was hospitalized, the family passed a terrible night, imaginations going into overdrive. All except the doctor, heroically on the front lines, who was rushed off her feet on night shift. Fortunately, she managed to phone one of the equally heroic, overworked nurses on her father’s ward this morning. The nurse said not to worry. He’s doing well. 

We all feel reassured, although it’s probably better not to ask, Doing well compared to what and whom? These days, we all have to winnow out whatever good news we can. 

And our family has some. My husband’s sister has emerged from her 14-day quarantine entirely healthy and virus-free. She’d worked closely with a woman who ended up in hospital with COVID-19 and pneumonia, and spent a nerve-wracking couple of weeks inside until she was cleared. 

There’s also the fact my husband’s 98-year-old-old mother remains well. She’s in lockdown in her retirement residence, which is very well run, and sounds fine on the phone. The only problem is that she’s getting very little exercise, and this is a woman who usually walks a kilometre every day. 

In summer, my mother-in-law heads outdoors to noon-hour concerts, window-shopping, people-watching. In winter, she goes fifteen or twenty feet south to the entrance of one of Toronto’s maze of underground malls, where she mall walks. When there’s too much uncleared snow to get to the mall, she walks around the public areas of the residence, a very determined woman. Her mother lived to be 100, and we’ve always figured she will, too.

But now she spends most of her time in her room, only allowed out for a brief isolated walk inside the building. This leaves us worried about deconditioning; how she’s losing muscle mass and resistance to the virus. Not that we can do anything about it. This is the best of two bad choices, and watching it unfold leaves me feeling fatalistic and powerless.

Too much these days leaves me feeling that way–and as a writer, fixated on how quickly our vocabulary is changing. Deconditioning? Who ever used to say that? Our e-conversations have become medicalized. Self-isolation? Viral load? When I slipped out the other day to go to the drug store, the cashier looked worried about the mask I was wearing.

“It’s all right, I’m not sick,” I told her. “I have to wear this thing outside because my husband is immuno-compromised.”

Immuno-compromised? She got it immediately. Which is too bad.

At least our friend isn’t in intensive care. Winnow the good news, that’s what I figure. Distract yourself with gardening, housecleaning, baking, vocabulary.

I particularly like the word winnow.