Starting my senior year I had not even a thought in my mind about some disease ending the year early, but neither did anyone else. I remember when this all started because one of my friends from home was studying abroad in Italy this semester. He kept writing in the group increasing concerning things from the situation, it was making the whole thing seem like a movie. “There’s no way that happens here”, I thought as it started to get worse and spread to other countries. All of this was bottling up a fear in me that I was dreading facing head-on, the cancellation of the first actual lacrosse season I was about to have at the university. We had only played one game and we’re a week out from the next when the athletic director came to our practice to share the news. At first, everyone thought he was kidding, nobody could believe that they would shut down an entire university for the rest of the semester. This was probably the tipping point for me, as well as for about eight to ten thousand other students on campus. From there for the next week, it was utter chaos, people buying and stealing every roll of toilet paper they could see, store shelves emptying before the store can even be open for an hour, and worst of all people for some reason became hostile as if the other humans around them were zombies trying to infect them and turn them on their friends. With this frenzy leading to panic and that leading to shelter in place, it has been recently hard to catch a glimpse of how other people outside my house are taking to this situation. I have resorted to making a bigger two-week long grocery list so as to not leave the house, that list I made is only on paper so I’m not touching my phone all over while in the store, along with other minute changes that have made this entire situation an experience of its own. One experience that I get to share during this that helps me to gain some insight into the situation is through my mother. My mom is a nurse at a large hospital in Boston, so I have been able to converse with her about the situation as it relates to her hospital and how that translates to the larger situation. I would say the largest benefit to someone work in the hospital is being able to be ahead of the curve. By this, I mean that my mom informed me of a possible surge in the next few weeks, which is why I transitioned to a two-week grocery shop rather than one. Although her being in the hospital is somewhat helpful information-wise, it is also stressful and anxiety-inducing hearing the daily situation as it escalates on the front line. From transferring my mom from a chemotherapy floor into an ICU unit specifically for the COVID-19 virus to new procedures on how to clean up and wrap the deceased people who were positive for the virus. From an outside perspective, it doesn’t seem that bad, some nurses moving around doing different things from normal, should be fine right? But the thing that people aren’t; thinking of when making these plans is that nurses are actually trained and are concentrated on a certain type of care (i.e. a regular nurse can’t be in an operating room and a nurse that deals with children wouldn’t deal with adults). For example, during the course of the day, my mom gives some chemotherapy to some patients who are receiving transplants for bone marrow, but with the current situation she is now in an ICU unit taking care of COVID-19 patients and that leaves them to move a nurse who has never practiced or done chemotherapy to do it on a daily regular patients who are in danger of dying already. Overall I think the scariest part of this disease is the unknown, and the misinformation that is coming along with it, how long will it last? How do I know if I’m sick? The more questions we are able to come up with, the fewer answers we can give to those questions, the longer this will last and the worse it will get.