Stay 😷 Home, just a little longer, please

     Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. As Americans, we watched the coverage in the days following the attacks. Watched as first responders, fire fighters and so many other emergency workers swarmed over the rubble looking for possible survivors. We saw the Search and Rescue dogs crawling through narrow openings, over girders and piles of concrete looking for any sign of life or death. These brave dogs gave their all.

      I found this description of these brave SAR dogs.

“Search & rescue dogs really like people. And dogs, while they don’t have the ability to know death happens to everyone, they do recognize death when they see and smell it. Search & rescue dogs at major disasters, not just 9/11, do get depressed when they are finding too many dead bodies and not enough living people needing to be rescued.”

     The handlers of the dogs working the Trade Center found their dogs getting depressed. So they would have people hide so the dogs could rescue a living being. Just finding a “ live” person every once in awhile kept them from getting too depressed to do their work. There were Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, German Shepards; not unlike your family pets. The SAR dogs were suffering from PTSD just like their human counterparts.

     If you are following what is happening during this pandemic, you have to have seen interviews with those working in hospitals all across the country. The common themes are unbelievable exhaustion, unimaginable fear and heart-breaking sadness at so much death. Patient after patient dying alone because their families aren’t allowed to be there. But the nurses and doctors and other care givers are there. Holding hands or setting up that last teleconference with loved ones. Many of the nurses are new to the profession, they haven’t experienced this much death in their careers. They are working twelve hour shifts, day after day, separated from their families, their homes. Even if they do go home, they must isolate from their families because they don’t want one of their own to get sick and possibly have to die alone.

     Many cities haven’t had to deal with the hospitals and care givers being overwhelmed by massive illness. They are lucky. Being inconvenienced because you can’t have dinner at your favorite restaurant or go for a drink with friends seems like a very small price to pay in the face of what these courageous men and women are experiencing and sacrificing every day. Not sitting in a bar on Saturday and Sunday watching your favorite team or someone chasing a little white ball around a park seems a very small price to pay to honor their hard work.

     I know there are hardships. People need to work. It’s getting harder to feed the family. Rents and mortgages aren’t getting paid. It’s terrifying. Not testing, not enough testing. Food processing plants shutting down causing shortages which we all know will lead to more hoarding. With the lack of any knowledgable or comprehensive leadership, we must feel a way forward on our own. We must learn who to trust, what source of factual information we can rely on.

     Don’t we, at the very least, owe it to those who risk their lives everyday, to stay at home? Continue distancing, lessen the spread so our medical communities don’t become more over-whelmed than they already are? Unlike SAR dogs who felt better finding a live person, no one working on the front lines of this war will be exempt from PTSD. Not one of them will ever be the same. Shouldn’t we show the same concern for our caregivers that we do to a Search and Rescue dog?

     Let’s all just take a breath, stay home a little longer. Stop worrying about your gray hair, your nails, drinking with friends, your FOMO (fear of missing out). This will be over someday soon. Don’t take risks with your life or those you love. The person you are standing or sitting next to may be asymptomatic or just in the early stages and you will get it and spread it, perhaps starting a second surge. Remember, the Spanish flu had a first round of 3 – 4 million deaths. The second was four times as many. Let’s stop this pandemic before it gets that far. Stay home a little longer. If for no other reason, we owe it to everyone who has had to work from the very beginning of this, risking their lives working tirelessly every day. It’s a very, very small sacrifice to make.