Fighting the Virus, Gaining Hope

Chapter 1

(For S.I.)

Jean St Martin fought back tears of despair as he plodded down the cobblestone slope towards the hospital. He knew he’d do a lot of good today as he had in the last few weeks, his first weeks as a fully qualified doctor, but he knew for a fact that it would not be enough to save everyone. He’d been ready for unavoidable tragedies, for hard decisions and deaths on his watch during a hopefully long career. What he hadn’t expected was to debut that career during the first global pandemic in a century. The hospital was struggling to cope with the influx of cases, and so was he, although he’d never admit it to his colleagues.

So Jean allowed himself some measure of grief on this otherwise pleasant commute through the old-fashioned streets of his hometown. He was only human, and would have enough time to compose himself before assuming the role of a perfect, reliable medical machine as best he could during his shift. Jean the person would take a back seat to Dr St Martin. Jean felt the wave of sadness begin to pass and allowed other thoughts to distract him from it, such as how very empty the streets were. The shelter-in-place measures were less than a week old and Jean still wasn’t used to being one of the only people with a good reason to be walking somewhere. Most of the townspeople were living and working in their homes as best they could, only leaving for supplies and brief exercise. Jean wondered how many were able to make the most of the mandated indoor time and how many were focused on mourning their lost lifestyles. He suspected the latter made up the majority.

It was therefore unexpected that as he descended through the hillside neighbourhood he saw what he caught himself later that day characterising as a vision of happiness. In a second story window ahead a woman stood looking out, bathed in morning sun from the east. The light let him see her remarkably clearly, and the first thing to strike him even at a fair distance was her wide smile. He hadn’t seen many of those in a while, but this lady seemed near ecstatic as she warmed herself.

As he approached the next detail to become clear was her profound thinness. Her arms were up above the window and the loose top she’d probably slept in rose above her midriff, which was so narrow Jean initially thought the image was warped by refraction through the window. But no, this young dark-haired woman was borderline emaciated (Jean’s inner doctor had already started listing possible causes and consequences) and right now it didn’t seem to matter because her angular face was absolutely beaming. Jean looked down as he passed her house with the image now burned into his mind, and filed away a generalised hope that the woman was all right and a little gladness that she’d found a bright moment in such dark days.

That moment came to Jean a few times during his shift, but it was little comfort as he dealt with the business end of a widespread and volatile respiratory disease. Some who caught it barely felt it, others hardly felt worse than if they had influenza, but everyone at the worst end of the spectrum was right in front of him. Under layers and layers of protective gear he watched and toiled as the patients wheezed, coughed, struggled, panicked, burned from the inside out, wept, raged, adjusted to respirators, choked down breathing tubes, sometimes recovered, occasionally died, and above all, suffered. Jean did his best to fight the suffering however he could with every tool the hospital had at its disposal; thankfully it was a small enough town that the sheer number of cases was not (yet) overwhelming and resources were not too badly stretched. Jean was spared the kinds of heartbreaking decisions he’d read were becoming common in some countries, especially where there weren’t enough ventilators.

The shift was nevertheless long, and they all would be for the foreseeable future. It passed quickly enough as there was always useful work to do, but Jean was utterly exhausted as he peeled off the layers of plastic and started off home. He was young and fit but the uphill tread back to his street was a slog in his present state. He distracted himself by attempting to purge his thoughts of the worst events of the day, some of which had been literally life and death. His personal strategy for this was to gently scramble himself with a mess of frivolous thoughts: movies he’d seen, impenetrably written passages from medical texts, odd patterns in the cobblestones under his feet, happy memories with his wife. The thin woman in the window did enter his mind, but he had already passed by her house so the thought was left behind.

He dragged himself through his front door and into the arms of his welcoming wife Charlotte. Figuratively so, because after yelling a greeting down the hall he actually went straight to the shower to scrub himself off one last time. Protocols at the hospital were such that he was reasonably confident he wouldn’t bring home any germs from inside, but who knew what had been hanging in the air outside. Clean, comfortable and slightly damp, he headed to the modest living area to kiss Charlotte over her books at the table then collapse in an armchair to gather the strength to help start dinner.

Jean had met Charlotte in medical school, just as he was finishing up and she was starting out. Her chosen field was oncology and she had a long way to go yet. As students they had fallen rapidly in love and struggled along as a poor couple until Jean’s qualification and new position markedly improved their circumstances. Charlotte was using the lockdown to power through her studies with a minimum of distractions, so Jean nearly always found her buried in textbooks or her laptop at the table. Her shoulder length auburn hair and round spectacles usually hid her fair, friendly face until she found a reason to look up. Once she pried herself away from her cancer textbooks (she called the really thick old editions “grimoires”) she was always happy to see and hold Jean, and run the little household with him as a partnership.

Jean lived for the brief but intimate evenings with Charlotte at the end of each shift. She was everything to him, and was a critical source of emotional support whenever he came home near-broken from his time on the front lines. As grateful as he was, he could see that it was affecting her too, like the psychological equivalent of second-hand smoke. She was steeling herself over time for a long career with cancer patients, but recent stories from his hospital and others had horrified her. Moreover she was justifiably worried for Jean’s physical and mental wellbeing, which was stressful enough in itself. She had always neglected to eat well when studying hard, but her appetite had failed further of late and she was starting to appear what Jane Austen might have called “drawn”. Jean had accepted responsibility for this and resolved to make it up to her, but it was hard to soothe and pamper her properly while he had no energy to spare. This would not be the night; he dozed off in front of the TV and started awake again before heaving himself off to bed.

The next day, like the next weeks, would be more of the same. Jean tried to ward off some of the morning despair by admonishing himself for the previous morning’s breakdown. He might be human but for the sake of the patients he needed to stay strong, and that would take work outside of the hospital as well as in. So he looked up, looked out, put a spring in his step and tried to enjoy the simple stroll to work. It worked, a little.

Looking up and out, it was easy to spot the same young woman in the same spot at her window. The image was almost the same as he remembered: same night clothes, same lighting, same huge smile. The sole difference was that her arms were not raised over her head, but rather crossed over her abdomen. She was holding and even caressing her seemingly concave stomach, still beaming as if the source of her joy were not the morning sunlight but something within her. Perhaps she had received the blessed confirmation of a long-awaited pregnancy, Jean thought. With this likely hypothesis the woman seemed a little less enigmatic, but still a genuine good news story he could smile about as he continued on.

The day proceeded as expected, no easier than the last, but the journey home was more surprising. Having thought of the woman before passing her house this time, he looked up the hillside just in case and happened to see the upper window brightly lit from inside. The woman passed in front of it just as he drew close, showing him an incredibly slim silhouette. He could tell nothing of her clothes, but one thing was very clear: as she passed she was drinking enthusiastically from a wide wineglass. The red liquid inside the clear crystal produced a momentarily odd lighting effect through the window, making the object unmistakable. Dr St Martin immediately felt great concern for the unborn baby, before Jean reminded himself he had no way of knowing whether there was one. Still, the thought was unsettling that this woman might be actively sabotaging her pregnancy - but then why was she so happy in the morning? Good God, was she simply drunk? Jean knew he was leaping to conclusions in the absence of any real information at all, but also that it was absolutely not his place to investigate. Still, he’d be keeping an eye on that window in passing, just in case...something. If nothing else it would help take his mind off work.