Sapana Adhkari’s “Covid’s Agony,” an evocative and gruesome depiction of the sagittal section of a human head screaming in agony, represents, in a single image, the anguish seen in the corona-captured characters of my short story, “Resuscitation.”
© Covid's Agony by Sapana Adhikari. Spring 2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Dr. Adhikari describes her detailed rendering of the brain as a metaphor for “the complex emotions that run through each and every one of us: denial, desperation, uncertainty and fear—in particular, the fear every single healthcare worker on the front line is experiencing. Fear at the number of people who will die. Fear at potential exposure while helping others. Fear at the utter helplessness.”
Just as “Covid’s Agony’s” brain is crying out in anguish, so are the brains of “Resuscitation’s” cast of characters. The story’s protagonist, Slater Knotts, a pulmonologist on the frontline of the battle against the pandemic, walks in disbelief and despair through his hospital while seeing people sick with the coronavirus struggling to breathe, being placed on ventilators, or getting CPR. He agonizes over making the right choice about saving a critically ill COVID-19 victim under his care. At the same time, he fears that in fulfilling his duty to his patient, he risks bringing the deadly virus home to his family.
Knotts’ wife worries about the chances her husband is taking with his own life and the impact his separation from his family has on their marriage and their children. “The kids need you,” she says. “I need you.” The doctor’s young son and daughter don’t understand why their father, in self isolation, is no longer part of their lives, and they go to bed at night in tears because he doesn’t want to risk contaminating them with a hug.
Lastly, there is Amoto Bertini, an elderly and chronically ill COVID-19 patient. Unresponsive, air hungry and helplessly alone, he cries out silently to be saved and put on a ventilator.
Albert Camus recognized the ubiquitous agony imposed by infestations of lethal organisms when he wrote in The Plague: ”No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.” Sapana Adhkari’s “Covid’s Agony,” and my short story, “Resuscitation,” both illustrate how Camus’ dictum applies to our collective destinies and shared emotions in this time of corona.
Daly Walker is a retired surgeon. His fiction has appeared in numerous literary publications including The Sewanee Review, The Louisville Review, The Southampton Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Saturday Evening Post and The Atlantic Monthly. His work has been shortlisted for Best American Short Stories, a Pushcart Prize, and an O’Henry award. His collection of stories, Surgeon Stories, was published by Fleur-de-lis Press. A second collection of his stories is soon to be released. He divides his time between Boca Grande, Florida and Quechee, Vermont. He teaches a fiction writer’s workshop at Dartmouth College in Osher@Dartmouth’s summer program. His short story “Resuscitation” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.