April 7, 2020: Swiss Ski Vacation Thriller, Stigma! -

I have a great story, and (spoiler) NOBODY dies, so you can read on for the thrills and happy ending, if you like.

I have a guy I see once a year, and the calendar (filled in long ago) said it was to happen this week. Well, no. But I thought maybe we could do a phone meeting, so I called his answering machine, which reported, “We will be back from vacation on March 24^th!”

Hmmm.

I left a message:  Hi. If you have shut the office, that makes sense, and I was just going for a phone consult, but if you are okay, and back from vacation, and picking up messages – that voice mail is a bit alarming. You might want to change it. Or if you are doing biz over the phone, please let me know.

Three days of silence.

Self-talk: Okay, hopefully he is home safe, not even picking up messages, no worries. (Mild worries continue.) (There was “hopefully,” btw.)

Yesterday afternoon, the phone rang. How are you, I asked? Oh, he said, we are LOTS better now.

Here commences an exciting story, please remember, NOBODY dies: 

My advisor and his wife were on a group ski trip to Switzerland, long planned, sixteen people on the trip. All of a sudden, pandemic-related “get home now” stuff breaks, so it’s time to cut the trip short, time to head home, all sorts of trouble with that, connection through Milan shut down, went through Munich,  possibility of having the leg from JFK to Portland cancelled… . (Chipper airline rep: But if it IS cancelled, we will give you a refund!!)

Finally got to PDX, wife having spent the whole trip sitting next to a seatmate who was coughing, and who (coughing seatmate) was married to a doctor who was also coughing the whole way, and who (Dr. and Mrs. Coughing, that is) (this part of the story is a bit odd) had both already tested positive (in Switzerland??) but who didn’t tell anyone else on the plane. Just coughed on them.

Plane landed in Portland, passengers were greeted by public health types and informed that two people on the plane had tested positive, SO: please go home and assume you will get it, please take your temps twice a day and report in, but otherwise go nowhere, and NO, YOU cannot be tested because there are precious few tests in Oregon, just stay home and ride it out unless it gets really terrible. (Note: this was way back when I was sick, too, the precious-few test times, though I understand there still aren’t all that many out here – though a good many more.)

So home they went and quarantined, and three days later his wife got sick, and three days after that he got sick, and they didn’t get as sick as I did, for as long, but they had four or five bad days apiece, and they are now well, hooray, wish that they could get a serological test for antibodies and have a badge to wear saying: I’M IMMUNE, IT’S OKAY, but that is not to be. ( At least not for now. And I know, I know, there are debates about lasting immunity, we’re still telling a story, here.)

So I said: When you were sick, did you tell anybody?

He said: NO! NOBODY! We just hid in our house!

(And now, friends who have been with me from the beginning, a payoff: this is about to tie back into the twinkly lights crisis of many, many posts ago.)

I said: Right, it was hard to tell people, wasn’t it? All that stigma, you couldn’t prove you had it, you weren’t dying, but you felt horrible, but you didn’t want to be a whiny baby?

And he said: STIGMA! Oh, my gosh, STIGMA! That’s the word! STIGMA!! We have this neighbor who is on… what is that thing called, Neighborhood? That thing?

I started laughing.  NextDoor. It’s called NextDoor.

He said: If we told ANYBODY, she would have gotten on NextDoor, and she would have gone nuts.

So I told him the twinkly lights story, how a nice person from my neighborhood had suggested we all turn on our Christmas lights at night to make the place less dreary, and she had been attacked mercilessly on many fronts, including Wasting Electricity and Shoving Her Religion Down Other Peoples’ Throats, to which she had replied I’m an ATHEIST!

Anyway. We had a good laugh about that part.

And the resolution:  EVERYONE on the plane survived, including the Coughings. MANY of the people on the plane had symptoms, some bad, some mild.  Presumably some people on the plane were exposed but remained asymptomatic. Perhaps some escaped exposure. Those are mysteries. But it all turned out okay. There you go.