Brooke Baldwin: How fighting coronavirus taught me about the gift of connection
New York (CNN)It took a full two-week beating on my body. I went to some very dark places, especially at night. Evenings would bring on an eerie melancholy, which was particularly odd for me -- a glass-half-full/chemically blessed kind of gal.
But under the influence of coronavirus, as each day came to a close, I would often cry, unable to stave off the sense of dread and isolation I felt about what was to come.
I was fighting constant body aches. In the evenings, I started a habit of climbing into the bathtub for 45 to 60 minutes just to try to use the hot water to distract my skin from the all-encompassing ache that would begin in my lower extremities -- the kind of ache that only two extra-strength Tylenol could eventually dull. Looking back, my sense of time feels warped and inexact. Some days crawled by tortuously slowly, while others disappeared unaccounted for in my memory, lost in the wash of emotion, sleep, and illness.
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But what preceded this haze is still crystal clear in my memory. I remember how I felt when the pandemic was first taking hold of our country and my beloved adopted hometown of New York City. I had a job to do. As a journalist, my focus and sense of purpose are galvanized during times of duress. I felt a deep responsibility to tell the stories of this pandemic, to connect our CNN audience with the facts they needed, to show them the human faces enduring this crisis right along with them.
In the few days before I got sick, I interviewed former Vice President Joe Biden, who talked about the urgency of flattening the curve. I interviewed a woman named Michelle Bennett who had just said her last goodbyes via FaceTime to her Covid-stricken mother. And I spoke with a nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Emily Fawcett, who told me about the ways she and other nurses were buoying each others' spirits between grueling shifts helping patients fight the virus.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/coronavirus-diary-sickness-brooke-baldwin/index.html