Chapter 30

COVID

March arrived without asking permission.

At first, it felt like an extension of February. The television stayed on in the background while work continued. Conference calls still happened. Calendars were still full. The pace hadn't changed yet, even as the language on the screen began to harden.

COVID-19 stopped being something you read about and became something you watched.

The anchors no longer smiled between segments. Graphics replaced nuance. Red circles spread across maps. Numbers climbed in real time.

Countries shut down in sequence.

Italy first. The footage didn't look real—empty piazzas, police cars echoing through streets that should have been filled with tourists. Then Spain. France. The United Kingdom. Borders clos-ing. Flights canceled. Entire nations telling their citizens to stay inside.

China remained under strict lockdown. The images from

Wuhan felt like a warning from the future: sealed apartment towers, empty highways.

I called one of my former assistants who was from China. "How are things—really?"

Her parents were in Wuhan. They weren't allowed to leave their apartment. Not for food. Not for air. They waited for permission to move.

Barbara came down from New York for her birthday.

At first it still felt like a visit—plans loosely held, conversations unfolding the way they always had. But as the news worsened, the tone shifted. Flights were being canceled. Borders were closing. Timelines shortened.

Airports emptied in real time. Grounded planes lined runways. Departure boards filled with a word no one had planned for: CANCELLED.

Barbara started worrying she wouldn't be able to get back to her apartment.

She left early.

I watched it all from my living room in Florida, the ceiling fan turning slowly above me. The world was stopping, but the work hadn't yet caught up.

Then Gary emailed.

Sorry I wasn't able to get right back to you but I've got this virus.

My fever's broken a bit so I can talk now.

We spoke that afternoon. He couldn't stop coughing. The conversation broke repeatedly—not from technology, but from breath. We told him to rest. Really rest. There was nothing urgent enough to override that.

The next day, the Governor of Florida announced the beaches were closing.

I drove to Juno Beach. There was no one there.

I took off my sneakers and jeans and walked straight into the water. The ocean was calm. The horizon uninterrupted.

I hadn't heard from Gary. I called his office.

He had died.

The information arrived without buildup. No context. Just absence.

The work didn't stop. It couldn't. But something shifted.

The people I had been talking to—planning with—were suddenly gone. Not slowly. Not ceremonially. Just absent.

Institutions froze.

Decisions stalled. Guidance changed daily. No one knew what to do.

There was nothing I could do to stop the chaos unfolding across the world.

So I did what I could do.

I worked with Don. We kept the projects moving. Not quickly.

Not heroically. Just forward—wherever forward was still possible.

The Holding Pattern

The symptoms arrived quietly.

Don and I both got sick. Marion didn't.

She had worked at Bellevue Hospital for decades. Years of expo-sure. Years of flu seasons and outbreaks that never made the news.

Looking back, Barbara's visit was the most likely point of expo-sure. At the time, there was no way to know.

Don and I were put on hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics. It was early. Protocols shifted daily.

Marion and Don took turns calling me.

If it was Marion, she asked practical questions. Was I drinking enough water. Was I sleeping. Had I eaten.

If it was Don, the calls were mostly coughing.

Neither of us said much. There wasn't much to say. We listened to each other breathe.

Don already had lung problems. That stayed present in every conversation—unspoken but understood—especially after Gary. He had been on the phone coughing too. And then he was gone.

I had planned to move in May. There was nowhere to move to.

Closings stacked on top of closings. Contractors disappeared.

Deliveries stopped.

Between naps, I packed.

I packed up the house slowly. Files. Documents. What needed to be preserved. I worked in short stretches and stopped when my body insisted.

By May, the house was nearly empty.

A bed. Beach chairs in the living room. A few boxes turned side-ways to serve as tables. The flat-screen television, still mounted.

Everything else was gone.

I lost my sense of smell and taste. Not gradually. Completely.

One afternoon, I put something in the oven and lay down to rest. I fell asleep.

I didn't smell anything burning.

The fire department arrived before I understood what had happened.

They stood in the doorway, masked, professional, careful. After they left, I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time. After that, I stopped using the oven.

Applied Research

In July 2020, we signed the agreement with Touro.

There was real optimism. The conference calls had gone well. Alan understood what we were trying to build—an applied research center that could bridge academic work and commercialization. Don's portfolio would anchor it.

Press followed. Announcements. Interviews. For a while, it looked like it would work.

Then the problems started. Not dramatically. Gradually.

At first, it felt like normal friction. New initiatives take time. Systems need to adjust. But the friction didn't resolve. It accu-mulated.

Meetings were rescheduled. Conversations deferred. The enthu-

siasm that existed at the leadership level never translated into opera-tional support. Departments didn't allocate staff. Reimbursements that had been promised stalled.

On paper, everything aligned. In practice, nothing moved.

The only paperwork I received from the university was a bill from their legal counsel requesting payment.

I kept going anyway.

I was told it was a temporary bottleneck—delays between departments. To keep things moving, I covered the hard expenses. Paid outside counsel to maintain continuity. Advanced costs that should have been institutional responsibilities.

Alan offered to secure outside funding. We said no. We didn't want to put him in a position where he had to ask externally. We believed we could work within the system.

That was the mistake.

Without outside funding, there was no leverage. The work expanded. The support contracted.

COVID may have accelerated it—resources were stretched, priorities shifted—but the pattern was older than the pandemic.

The institution wanted the outcome.

It couldn't commit to the work required to get there.

By spring 2021, Don came over to go through everything. I had been having a few bad days. Tired.

"This isn't going to work, is it?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

Don looked at me.

"But it's Alan," I said. "When I was president and you were chairman, I couldn't make it work. Is Alan going to be able to?"

Don was quiet for a moment.

"The issue isn't Alan," he said. "It's the people who work for him. They already have their jobs. They have their salaries. To them, this is extra work."

He paused.

"And even with a budget in the hundreds of millions, it's all allo-cated. There's no room to move."

The silence held.

"You can't make an institution want what it says it wants," I said. Don nodded.

I didn't need to convince him. He had been there the first time too.

In April 2021, I stepped away from Touro quietly. No announcement. No formal exit.

I stopped funding projects that weren't reimbursed. Stopped paying counsel to maintain relationships that weren't producing work. Stopped carrying infrastructure that didn't exist.

The work continued.

Just not through institutions. On terms I controlled.

With people who had already said yes.

THE VACCINE

Spring 2021

If I was going to travel, even if Marion and I wanted to go to a concert, I was going to have to get the vaccine and carry around the little card to prove it. I made my appointment for my first of two shots.

The next morning, I woke up feeling like I'd been punched in the nose.

Not sharp pain—pressure. Tender. Wrong. I reached up and touched my face and winced. My nose hurt. My cheeks felt sore. I sat up and went into the bathroom.

When I looked in the mirror, I stopped.

I looked like I had been punched in the nose.

Dark bruising spread beneath both eyes. Not perfectly symmetri-cal, but close enough to be unsettling. My face was swollen, the skin tight and discolored—deep purple and blue in places that shouldn't have been touched.

"What the heck," I said out loud.

I leaned closer to the mirror, checking for something I had

missed. I looked at my arms. My shoulders. My neck. I lifted my shirt, turned slightly, scanning for any other marks that might explain it.

There were none.

Then I felt something warm.

I wiped the underside of my nose with the back of my hand and saw blood.

Not a trickle. Not a spot. Blood.

I grabbed a tissue and pressed it to my nose. It kept coming—steady, uninterested in stopping. I tilted my head forward and waited. When that didn't work, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited some more.

It took twenty minutes before it slowed. By afternoon, it happened again.

Then again that night.

I didn't panic. But I wanted answers.

I had already been dealing with fatigue for months—told it might not resolve, told there might not be an explanation. Now this. My body was adding symptoms faster than anyone could account for them.

I called my doctor. He didn't hesitate.

"You need to go to the emergency room. Now." So I did.

They put me in a separate room—not isolation exactly, but apart. The lights were bright. The room quiet. I sat on the edge of the bed with tissue pressed to my nose and waited.

It started bleeding again.

A nurse came in and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm.

"Are you on a blood thinner?" "No."

She wrote something down and left.

Fifteen minutes later, another nurse came in. "Are you on warfarin?"

"No."

I wanted someone to tell me why. I had already adjusted to being tired. I hadn't adjusted to bleeding without explanation.

They took blood. Monitored me. Watched. No answers.

They treated symptoms, not cause. Hypersensitivity, they said.

An immune response. Sometimes the body reacts.

I went home without resolution.

The bruising faded slowly. The swelling went down. The nose-bleeds didn't stop.

Every day.

Sometimes twice. Sometimes four times.

I learned the warning signs—a pressure, a warmth—and moved toward a bathroom before it started. I kept tissues everywhere. In my bag. On my desk. In the car. On the nightstand.

Before this, I had been told the fatigue might not resolve. I was told there might not be answers.

So I adjusted.

I worked when I could. Rested when I had to. I stopped waiting for explanations and focused on accommodation. This wasn't some-thing to push through. It was something to live alongside.

It wasn't dramatic. It was persistent.

It wasn't fear that stayed with me. It was information. My body was no longer a reliable sensor.

That changed how I moved through the days.

I planned around what I couldn't predict. I kept tissues within reach. I paid attention differently—not with alarm, but with acceptance.

Adjustment isn't recovery.

It's learning how much of yourself you're willing to work around.

The Cycle

The illness didn't arrive once and leave. It cycled.

After the first COVID infection in 2020, I thought I had recov-

ered. Then came the vaccine in Spring 2021. The bruising faded. The nosebleeds became routine. But the exhaustion didn't lift.

I would work—sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks—until my body reached a threshold I couldn't see coming. Then I would crash. Not gradually. Suddenly. One day I was functional. The next, I couldn't get out of bed.

The first time, I thought it was temporary. A bad week. Some-thing I could push through.

Six weeks later, I was still in bed.

When I finally started to feel better—not recovered, just less depleted—I would get up. Work again. Then crash.

The cycle repeated for years.

To my friends, it seemed like I was always working. What they didn't know was how often I had to stop. Why everything took so long.

Daily life contracted to what was manageable. I fed the cat. That was nonnegotiable.

Everything else became optional.

When I had energy, I worked. On the laptop, propped on pillows. In short bursts. Taking calls when I could follow the thread of a conversation, stopping when I couldn't.

Sometimes I would forget things mid-conversation. Ask the same question twice. Lose track of which project someone was referenc-ing. I wasn't sharp. I was functional enough to keep moving, but not enough to hold everything at once.

Don called regularly. He checked in. Asked how I was. Listened when I said I was tired without demanding I explain how tired or why.

"You need to pace yourself," he said. "You need to stop working," he said. "You need to hire someone to help you."

"Lisa, you are going to make yourself sick."

And when that didn't work, he tried a different approach.

"You know I'm semi-retired. I cannot be doing so much," he said. "Otherwise I'll get sick and we'll both be out."

I didn't argue with him. I just didn't stop.

There were times he took meetings I couldn't follow up on. Times he carried threads I had dropped because I couldn't hold them all. He could.

Marion called too. She asked practical questions. Had I eaten.

Was I drinking water. When was the last time I went outside. "Come sit on the patio," she said.

On good days, she and Don would get me outside. Not far. Just enough to prove the world was still there.

Pneumonia was always a concern.

Every time I got sick, the question was how long it would last. It was never a 48-hour flu. It was weeks. Sometimes longer.

A friend noticed I wasn't going out. That I wasn't returning calls.

She asked if I was depressed.

I wasn't in despair. Despair requires clarity. I was in a haze.

The days blurred. Weeks passed without edges. Work happened in pockets. Sleep stretched across afternoons. Time stopped behaving the way it used to.

I couldn't wait for my body to cooperate. I had to build around it.

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