Please. Stay Home.
It was the first Global Co-Active Summit in 2011. There were over 400 coaches and other Co-Active enthusiasts gathered from all over the world at a beautiful hotel in Marco Island, Florida. Incredible intimacy is created in CTI’s programs. Gratitude and the shared experience of transformation tends to make for a very huggy crowd. As someone with years of experience in front of those coaching and leadership classrooms, I seemed to get an extra heap of hugs. People were hungry to connect and express their love and appreciation. As an introvert, I sometimes had to hide in my room to restore, then brace myself for more as I headed back out. It was beautiful, humbling, sometimes daunting, and the exact opposite of social distancing!
Adding to the hugs, was stress. I did the largest, most terrifying training of my life the day before the Summit began. I had stressed about it for months. I could feel my body’s defenses breaking down. To cope, I would sneak off to smoke, share a cocktail with friends, and eat whatever would comfort me. I kept praying to stay healthy until after my presentation was over, “Just let me get through this….then I can rest.”
Hours after the big presentation, my brain felt weird. I couldn’t think straight. My vision was off. I got an intense headache, chills, and a very high fever. A weird dry cough emerged. I began spending big chunks of time in my hotel room. The downward spiral began. Many of you know the rest of that story.
While I was in the ICU, the doctors frantically tried to figure out what I had. Infectious disease specialists looked at all of my fluids under microscopes. They tried to grow things in petri dishes. As antibiotics failed to work, my family reached out to all of the attendees of the Summit. A little over a fourth of them had gotten sick. We were diagnosed with different things, but most of the symptoms were similar. Mostly respiratory. Some pneumonia, flu, whooping cough, bronchitis. You get the picture. Not sure if they were all viral. Mine surely was.
I don’t know if I was “patient zero” of that event, if it was in the air, or if one of those enthusiastic huggers was infected as they hugged more than their fair share. What I do know is that it was frighteningly similar to this CoronaVirus. No antibiotics would touch it. I spent time on a ventilator, experienced “full respiratory arrest”, had two fully occluded lungs, was kept under coma-like sedation for 6 days, and when I came home 17 days later, I was connected to an oxygen concentrator for a month.
I’ve done a lot of work to heal the trauma from that experience. Covid-19 has given me a chance to work on releasing more of it. Yet I have to say, when our president says things like, “Let’s not make the cure worse than the disease”, I need to work through it all over again as his words carry massive weight with so many who are eager to get back to work, back to school, hang out, and touch everything.
No one knew I was heading for what I went through when we hugged. No one knew something contagious was moving through that loving crowd. This time, however, WE DO KNOW. We know. We know physical distancing helps flatten the curve. We know.
My partner’s mom who lives next door is high risk – 90 years old, asthmatic, sleeps with oxygen. I’m high risk from my pneumonia experience paired with asthma. People you will never meet, but who shop in the same aisle at the grocery store as you are high risk. Many of our beloveds are high risk.
Please. Let’s be patient and do our part to plank the curve. Please. Stay home as much as possible. Please. Wash your hands. Please. Help others who have less than you get through these tough times. Please. Let’s take care of one another.
Thank you!
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