“Quarantine for 14 days. Quarantine for 10 days. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Watch for breathing difficulties. Call me with any questions.”

These are the phrases I’ve said over and over for months. Now they are the recurrent thoughts in my own mind as my family endures this horrid disease from the other side. COVID, and the isolation that trails beside it and behind it, reaches so many levels. I always say that having perspective brings growth.

Now I have perspective. Now I can grow. My husband and I were isolated from one another. Our children are isolated from one another. Our other children were isolated from my husband.

“Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Quarantine for 14 days.”

Will I be next? Will my family make it through? Will my kids have long term affects? Will my husband? Will tomorrow be my turn? And yet, I still must remain professional while giving COVID results to others who state this is not a real virus. Who fight my advice to quarantine from every angle. I stay calm. I calm them. I educate them the kindest way I know how to. It is all I can do because I can’t change the world. I can only share what I know in a nonjudgmental way.

It’s on others to do the right thing. To be safe. It’s on others to keep my littlest patients safe. The ones I fight hard for every workday in some capacity or another.

“Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Quarantine for 14 days.”

COVID is rearing its ugly head again. It is sneaky, unpredictable, and unkind to many. It has stolen so much from so many young and old. But we can take from its perspective. We can choose to grow. This is hard work when you are living it but in some way takes its power away.  That vaccine helps, too.

“Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Quarantine for 14 days.”

Someday, I will not need to utter those words, day after day after day.

Someday, COVID will lose its grasp.

We will all have perspective. We will all grow.

We win.

Lauretta Stombaugh is a pediatrician. 

Image credit: Shutterstock.com