Covid-19 is Your Surgery

The past few weeks have somehow felt familiar. I couldn’t place it at first, and then it hit me with such clarity; this virus is my surgery all over again. The abrupt halt of activities and re-shuffling of priorities is exactly what I experienced 6 years ago with a Ravitch procedure gone wrong.

Suddenly, everything was different. The future shifted from a clear target to trudge towards, to a vague concept rife with unknowns. In the weeks following my surgery, my focus shifted. I was no longer worried about the meetings, emails, or projects piling up on my abandoned desk. The millions of things that used to add up to a stressful day were instantly made small by comparison. Yet my needs became very basic, like the anesthesia had wiped out unnecessary life clutter in the same way it was depleting my memories. All I cared about was the moment I was in. Was I alive? Check. And thank God! It was the eye-opening epiphany I never asked for, but desperately needed.

And here it is again, in the form of a virus.  Yet this time, I am not going through it alone. We have all had the rug pulled out from under us. Everyone’s plans are changing. We are all standing in front of a line in the sand, marking what was and what will be.

As I learned in my recovery, we can choose what our life looks like once we cross that line. Although each person has experienced the pandemic differently, we have all learned something from it and now see things with a slightly different lens. We have all had mainstays of our daily lives yanked away, but that doesn’t mean every one of them should be reinstated. What do you really need to live your best life, and what is just filler?

I can’t encourage you enough to think about what suddenly mattered to you during this time and prioritize that as we rebuild our (maybe better) lives.