Pre-existing Conditions
Dr. Angela Tarango tweets against medical -isms
Photo: mkhmarketing
“It only severely affects people with pre-existing conditions, and the elderly.”
This is what the news media initially insisted about the current pandemic caused by COVID-19. The implication was that only the “old and sick” had to worry about the new, novel disease sweeping the globe. With that implication came the sense that those lives were disposable and did not matter. On social media, I watched fear explode among friends with children who have Down Syndrome, friends with autoimmune diseases, friends who are currently fighting cancer, and friends who are medical doctors, who are going into work to fight this virus, and who know that their own pre-existing conditions make them vulnerable.
As someone who is working on an ethnography among a Latinx congregation that skews elderly, I wait in terror, hoping and praying that somehow this virus doesn’t harm the congregants who have become beloved friends to me. It was the Lieutenant Governor of Texas’s statement that “grandparents should be willing to sacrifice for the economy” that finally sent me over the edge.
The thought that elder lives--so full of wisdom, knowledge, and kindness, were worth sacrificing to the economy--and that my own life, as a person with a serious chronic medical condition, aren’t worth anything to certain people pushed me to write a Twitter thread about my diagnosis with rheumatoid arthritis.
“Short version of the long story, I kept racking up symptoms.”
