Discussion

The book “October Birds” by Jessica Smartt Gullion published in 2014 is a fictional book that describes the possible scenarios in a pandemic. In its 143 pages, Gullion describes a town in Texas that tries to maintain control during a pandemic. The author has an experience as an epidemiologist and puts her knowledge into what she thinks the challenges for the health system would be during a pandemic. Even though the book is fictional, it is pretty close to what we encountered when we just started the global pandemic.

The viruses share a lot of similarities. That’s one of the reasons that H7N1 and COVID-19 don’t differ much from each other. Especially in the way, the book describes the first one. While reading the book, the reader can’t really differentiate one from the other. Memorial Hospital represents every hospital in the world as well as the bureaucracy that they have to deal with.

The city of Dalton represents the whole world dealing with emergency management and the healthcare system. The whole city struggles to control the outbreak of infected people as same as happened when COVID-19 started around the world. The book scarily reflects how the world reacted during the pandemic and the problems they had as well.

The shortage of health workers, medicine, and food as well as the struggles that the companies and businesses were exactly how the book described them. The only difference that I don’t think was the same was the vaccination requirements since kids weren’t the first ones to get vaccinated and also another difference was the explosion of the bomb outside the vaccination center. I think that situation is more an analogy of the protests that the antivaccination people did around the world and how this segment of the population reacted to the mask requirements.

I thought this book was just telling the reality of the pandemic. It’s incredible that the book was written before the pandemic and that almost if not all of it is exactly what we all encountered when the global pandemic happened. For weeks, Covid-19 was spreading quickly, people were afraid of the uncertainty. Hospitals and Institutions were full in their capacity with not so many supplies and equipment, shortage of healthcare personnel, and the stress and circumstances under which the healthcare workers were working. The most important as well as the hard part was the decision of who was treated and who wasn’t.

Dr. Cromwell considered this. He nodded and wished that he had thought of it.

“Save the ventilators for the healthy patients. Patients who are the most likely to survive the H7N1.” Dr. Kiriarti said.

“I am not comfortable with this.” a young pulmonologist at the table spoke up, “Denying treatment? What is this, the Memorial eugenics program?

“We have to deny treatment, one way or another,” Cromwell said. “No one likes it. No one is happy about it. But what choice do we have?” (Gullion, 64). This probably was one of the hardest parts for healthcare professionals as well for people who didn’t have the economic means.

The author succeeds in making the characters of the book close to reality. The struggles and the huge emotional rollercoaster that these characters faced in the book are probably the same as people did and felt during Covid-19.

One of the main characters, Dr. Eliza Gordon made me think of the situations that most women that have families and careers deal with in everyday life. She represents every single mom that is a nurse, a doctor, a teacher, a driver, etc. In the book, she is trying to make things work the way she wants them so it can be more effective but the bureaucracy that she faces in the healthcare system and in the city makes her rethink her choices. She is a mom, a mom that wants to spend time with her kid but because of her busy carrier at Memorial Hospital and also because of H7N1, she barely sees her kid or husband. She decides to quit her job and dedicate more time to her family. Julia Campos, Lucy, Valarie, Cassandra, and a lot of women in the book are trying to survive the epidemic, and deal with bureaucracy, along with the fact that most of them have families. The idea of kids running at the Memorial Hospital because the schools and daycares are closed, makes me have a better appreciation for women that are mothers and trying to compete with men in the professional world either if they’re bus drives or doctors.

I definitely think that COVID-19 prepared us a little bit more. Institutions and people are adjusting to a new way of working and functioning. A lot of people are working from home and most of them are not planning to go back to an office. People that have to be physically at work are also trying to make changes after the pandemic. Even with all of these changes after COVID-19, I don’t think we will be completely prepared for another pandemic. We have so much division between us. The bureaucracy, sadly, is not changing for the better. The healthcare system still doesn't have the capacity to deal with pandemics. They don’t have enough supplies and equipment but they also don’t have enough healthcare workers. We’re also more divided as a community, if we don’t learn how to change our individualistic mentality for a more community-oriented mentality we’re never going to be prepared for the next or more global pandemics.

“Cassandra? Do you know the difference between terror and horror?” He fingered the black beads of the rosary in his hand.

She assumed that he asked rhetorically, and didn’t answer.

“They are not the same thing. When a person feels terror, the response is to run. In the movie with the chainsaw character in the room, everyone flees. It is fear of immediate bodily harm. Horror is different. When you see horror, you can’t leave. You are glued to the spot, your mouth hanging open in shock, your blood cold, filled with dread. You can’t help but look, even though you want to turn away. It's worse for parents. They don't worry as much about their own safety. It’s the kids that get them. Tell a parent of a gruesome crime against a child, they’ll dwell on it for days. Sometimes they never really get it out of their head. This, Cassandra, “ He held his arms out wide, the rosary dangling between his fingers, “this is horror.” (Gullion, 120)