One month ago, I was struggling to finish my contemporary Western romance. The demands and pressure of my full time job as a midwife, taking care of the house, the pets, troubleshooting issues with my teenage and young adult children, my husband and my elderly mother are a lot to juggle. I’m overwhelmed by just reading the last sentence.

Creative writing has always been my outlet and I love escaping into my characters’ world. In the last week of normalcy, I  had a research paper to edit and finalize, and that was certainly not an escape.

The novel should have been finished by now. I make most of my deadlines, but sometimes they impose themselves on me.

One month ago, the theoretical threat of COVID-19 became real overnight. I woke up hearing that there was a cluster in New Rochelle, which is very close to New York City. The Metro North…

The world has lost its innocence as we rediscover what past humans endured and survived.

But we are more able now than any time in history to study and fight this virus. The human species survived many such disasters in the past. Smallpox. The Black Death. Typhoid. Yellow fever. Cholera. Polio. The Spanish Flu of 1918.

At no other point in history has science been advanced enough to help with a virus. When the 1918 flu was raging, microscopes were not accurate enough to even see a virus. Compare that to this current pandemic, where the virus was not only identified, but gene sequenced within weeks.

Survive as a human race we shall. Changed without doubt – no longer confident in our invulnerability – but survive we will. But what aspects survive? The courage of medical staff, the endurance of grocery workers, the behind the scenes IT people building info…