Aishwarya A. Ghonge
Rajiv Gandhi Medical College, Thane, India
Diapause (n)
A period of suspended development in an insect, other invertebrate, or mammal embryo, especially during unfavorable environmental conditions [1]
Growing up in a country of 1.3 billion people, where 1.3 million students aspire to study medicine every year, you learn to plan your life ahead of time, so you may have a reasonable head start in the brutal rat race. This is why I have always been the kind of person who chalks out detailed schemes in Excel sheets and a myriad of Google docs, planning my life to a tee. My life moves deliberately and with patience--or so it did until a pesky virus brought the entire world to its knees, and me to a rude awakening. In our plane of existence, uncertainty is predestinate.
I have always thought of a pandemic as something that happens to fictitious, two-dimensional people on screen or hordes of masked people from a distant country filling the frontpage of my morning newspaper, true but never particularly real to me. The worst a pandemic ever personally affected me was in ninth grade, when my mum made me live off of vegetables for a whole month because of the ongoing swine flu. The horror! This time seemed no different. When the first whispers of a possible pandemic started, I pictured being forced into submission to a vegetable dominion at the dinner table by a mom who’d sooner let me shave my eyebrows than accept my medical explanations for actual fact. She’d never believe me if I told her that eating a spicy chicken wing wouldn’t in fact kill me, unless I choked on a bone and went too long without a Heimlich to save me. However, not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined my Mumbai, a city normally pulsing with such life and momentum, would lapse into this sleepless dormancy-- bypassing a better part of 2020 like it may not even be happening at all.
But it is happening-- this time it is very real. Without the usual onslaught of traffic and street vendors screeching at the top of their lungs, our city is engulfed in an unsettling quiet, pressing upon my eardrums like pool water after emerging from its depths for a gulp of fresh air. I am standing in the grocery line, under a glaring mid-April sun, drops of sweat trickling from my brow onto my upper lip under the mask that I’m wearing, tasting of salt and humid desperation. Everyone ahead of me is standing in a neatly spaced line, wearing a mask or a tightly wound scarf, eyes swiveling for someone to betray the slightest sign of dreaded coronavirus. So, when an innocent sneeze comes, I try to pass it off as a loud yawn to suspicious onlookers. I’m even about to rub my knuckles into my eyes for added effect but think better of it, just in time. It is moments like these that scare me. What if I scratched my nose unwittingly and exposed myself to the virus deposited on my hands from touching a tainted grocery cart?
As a medical student, I feel the pressure to follow WHO guidelines with precision more acutely than most. How would I feel, if in spite of my education, I made a stupid mistake and became infected with coronavirus? Or worse, passed it on to my elderly parents? It is out of this fear that I mask and wash and mask rigorously when I head out to buy essentials and perishables, shielding and protecting my loved ones from an invisible, powerful adversary, as pangs of guilt threaten to overwhelm my composure. I should be out there, at the frontlines, helping and fighting. But here I am, stuck in a limbo between pushing myself to keep studying for an indefinitely postponed Step 1 exam and a yearning to make a real-world difference, especially during this unprecedented time. I am kicking myself each time I read about the shortage of healthcare personnel and the misery that has befallen them, but the best I can do right now is to keep myself and my loved ones from adding to their burden by following lockdown measures.
In lockdown, life has become routine to the point that I couldn’t tell the difference between yesterday and tomorrow if I tried, as if I were living through an endless rerun of real-life Groundhog Day. Every day, I wake up, brush my teeth, and sit with my glass of milk in tow to make a Skype call to my boyfriend who is studying in Boulder, becoming annoyed when he too has nothing new to offer other than how he napped for two hours instead of three that day or thought he saw a fluffy squirrel butt disappear into bushes. Tensions are running high in our household, with everyone alternating between snapping at each other for walking too loudly or clinging to the latest bits of frustratingly dull gossip for something to do. The most exciting thing to happen in the last few days has been a crow that decided by the occasional act of feeding him, we signed a covenant to adopt him. He now shows up hourly at our living room windowsill, hopping with his beak open, anticipating little bits of food. One of these days, as I am sitting at the window, watching the crow take flight, I wonder about the distant day when the lockdown must end. The day when I must finally appear for my exam, ready to commence my internship year at last, putting my knowledge to actual practice -- saving lives -- possibly in the heat of a second wave of coronavirus. And I swallow the brick of bile refluxing in my throat, feeling not unlike an odd bird afraid of heights.
References
Diapause [Def. 1]. (n.d.). Lexico Online. Retrieved May 9, 2020, from https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/diapause.