Help! My daughter the doctor is drowning

She is risking her life at the centre of the epicentre, Leila Basen writes.

There’s an old joke. A Jewish mother is with her son at the beach, a son of whom she is very proud as he recently graduated medical school. Within minutes of entering the sea for a swim, he gets pulled under by a huge wave.

Trying to get someone to come to his assistance, she screams, “HELP! HELP! My son the doctor is drowning!”

That’s me. I’m the Jewish mother. Except the beach is the COVID -19 ICU in New York City. And the son is my 31-year-old daughter, a cardiology fellow. But the drowning part, the huge wave pulling her under, that part is no joke.

Now, I don’t want you to think I’m one of those mothers, the kind that manages to work into the first minute of any conversation that my daughter is a doctor. OK, sometimes, if the dialogue is naturally heading in that direction, I might drop the information in so seamlessly that the listener is barely aware.

I suppose it’s natural to be proud when your daughter grows up to become a doctor.

But I’m not one of those obnoxious braggarts who lives vicariously through my children’s accomplishments. My daughter did not become a doctor because I was a pushy mother. In fact, I was so self-absorbed during her childhood with my show business career as a screenwriter that I barely noticed. Why was she taking all those science and math courses? Who cries when they only get 95 per cent on a Grade 10 biology exam? And what was with all the extracurriculars?

I started paying a bit more attention when my daughter, who grew up in Montreal, moved to the United States after medical school.

America is an OK place. The shopping is good, the gas is cheaper.

But you contrast that with the open-carry permittees, or the folks who put foreign families in cages, and I can survive without the artisanal cheese from Vermont. Still, my daughter wanted to live in the centre of the universe. So she took her medical degree and off she went.

And now look what happened.

My daughter the doctor is risking her life at the centre of the epicentre.

And the people in charge — the ones who didn’t have the 3.98 grade point average like my daughter did, whose parents bought their way into the Ivy League, the same people who say that New York hospitals don’t need all those ventilators, except they are so ignorant that in the press briefing they call them generators — those people don’t have the wherewithal to provide my daughter with a damn mask.

But I’ll leave it to those other mothers to throw things at the screen and jump up and down.

Being stereotypical is not a good look for a woman of my age.

Nor is the puffiness from all the crying on the nights when I get the texts that say, “Mommy I’m scared.”

Maybe I can go back to those self-absorbed days when I barely noticed what my daughter was doing. Back to when it was all about me and not about the front-line medical staff who could die because all the PPE in the world can’t prevent them from getting a huge viral load — the days when being able to hug my baby girl didn’t seem like a matter of life and death.

I really wish I could do that. I mean, look at me now. My face is all red. My fists are clenched.

And I’m screaming, “HELP! HELP! My daughter the doctor is drowning!” Here’s the thing.

All the doctors, in all the hospitals have mothers.

All of them screaming. You don’t have to be Jewish.

And it’s no joke.

And the people in charge ... don’t have the wherewithal to provide my daughter with a damn mask.