Our Year of Living Dangerously | Gorgens

When It Started in Atlanta 

By Sophia Gorgens M20
Gorgens is an alumna of the Emory School of Medicine 

It’s not like we were unprepared—we’d heard 
how things were in China and Italy and from New York and Seattle. 
They called us every week to tell us what to expect: chaos 
and all the elder volunteers in the hospital lobby suddenly gone. 
Then they disappeared from the streets and stores, gone, 
and handguns sold out right after toilet paper, chlorine, and yeast. 
There wasn’t a mask mandate and then there was and then 
it really depended where you were. Wear it under your chin. 
We practiced our screams. The club downtown didn’t close 
until curfew was called. The National Guard. Really, curfew
was called 
only because of the protests. The whole city couldn’t breathe. 
At the hospital, we looked at bodies and counted these victims 
in one part, COVID in the other, until we realized they were
the same. 
How many names, we said as we resuscitated and took the pulse 
of our strangled city, can you give death? 
Ventilators rasped, surgical masks slashed our mouths blue,
a patient coded, 
and a doctor was found on the tiled bathroom floor, 
fast asleep. Outside, signs for Heroes suffered from the
summer rains. 
Someone suggested a roll call, but halfway through night had fallen 
and we gave up.