Front lines

The corona virus pandemic which is making its way around the world has come to the little spot here in Wisconsin we call home. It's affected our employment, to the extent that my wife is completely working from the bedroom, and while I still have some patients available to me, most of them are in nursing facilities that have locked down, a few to the point where they won't allow our RNs inside. I go out almost daily, often to homes but sometimes to a facility or the grocery store. I have taken to occasionally wearing a medical mask, because I see so many patients.

But that's not what I want to talk about. The phrase "on the front lines" annoys me.

It's not just the use of military terminology, although that's a poor choice when it comes to healing. It leaves me at least with a feeling like being so categorized I should be up to my gaiters in mud and blood, bullets and shells whizzing past. The sense behind this phrase is we in healthcare, by dint of our continuing to practice, sometimes among people we know are infected, more often (since this is a novel virus as it's been called, and we're finding out just how it moves through a population with new permutations almost daily) among those who are susceptible, we are at the cutting edge of both the science and the danger.

I don't mind in my little way being at the cutting edge of technology. But I am not in danger. Or at least not more so than most people, and probably less than some.

Think of it. I'm given protection in the way of masks and sometimes gloves and gowns but more effectively in information. I'm updated daily on risks to others and to me, and when a new potential for risk is identified I'm warned of it. If anything, I'm in the rear, sort of a member of the DUO, helping to keep others calm and protected, serving donuts and pouring coffee.

But the misapprehension that bothers me most is that there is anything brave in what I do. What there is is care and training in my profession. I'm not brave. I'm not particularly cowardly--I'll own up to being what a recent New York Times essay referred to as the healthcare workers who aren't running from coronavirus but confronting it--but I have a good sense of my limits. And I know that, rather than running toward the choppers in the opening moments of M*A*S*H,  I'm likelier to amble along to visits like Jimmy Stewart walking Donna Reed home from the dance. (Yes, sometimes holding my pants up.)

Still. I walk into hospitals and facilities and homes where I'm unsure of what I'll meet because that is what I do. I comfort. I hold hands. I talk gently or I don't speak but listen or I sit while someone sleeps.

It's not brave. It's just what I and a lot of other people do. Thank us and pat us on the back (metaphorically, of course), but don't call us the front line. We aren't dodging bullets, even metaphorically. We're showing up to do what we know. In the worst instances we are reminding the suffering they aren't alone or forgotten. At the best we're comforting them. It's no more or less than you would do for your loved ones if you knew how.