February, 2020. As Covid-19 wrapped around the globe, I knew the world would change day to day, as would my work as an emergency medicine physician. I started keeping a journal, something I’d done only once before in my life. I wanted to capture how my knowledge, understanding and emotions were changing. How the world was shifting, and me and my workplace along with it.
As I continued to write, it became clear that the original premise was giving way to something broader and deeper. I was experiencing the pandemic on multiple levels. Professionally…as a frontline doctor and the chair of my hospital’s Covid Task Force. And personally…as a child of two Holocaust survivors and a witness to my family’s history of loss and resilience.
Then, the pandemic’s enduring theme. The unexpected. On March 23, 2020, a colleague encouraged me to make a video urging the public to shelter-in-place. Its views and shares beckoned me to wade further out into social media, a space I had barely ever explored. I started to post my journal.
This book is a compendium of my writing, but not a mere regurgitation. It does not simply flow from start to finish, from first entry to last. Even for those most familiar, the experience will be different, including the epilogue written in the second quarter of 2021.
The chapters are themes. The main characters if you will. The entries in each chapter are the supporting cast, arranged in chronological order. In this format, the reading invokes the memory of our shared passage. That in the throes of the pandemic, it felt like the rhythm of time itself had been partially upended.
Through it all, our greatest challenge and hope emerge.
Steven Zlotowski, MD