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My Husband Died of Covid-19 — And the President Allowed It to Happen
A loving doctor, husband, father, and grandfather was lost. I won’t let his death be in vain.
Two hundred thousand is an unfathomable number — a numbing number — but there is real human pain behind it.
I was married to Jay Galst for 47 years and 10 months until he died needlessly this spring. Until mid-March, he was still working at his Manhattan ophthalmology practice, seeing his patients whom he cared deeply about. As he examined them, they’d discuss their growing families (including children he may have operated on years ago who were now grown with children of their own), music, history, coins, golf, and travel. The coronavirus had only recently appeared stateside. Jay’s work as an ophthalmologist required touching his patients, and the phrase “social distancing” was still new to our daily vocabulary. Thanks to a course he was required to take under Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mandate for doctors on handwashing — yes, handwashing, a procedure I suspect he knew how to do even before completing the course — he would wash his hands carefully before and after seeing every patient.
His last day of work at his office was Wednesday, March 18. On March 20, Cuomo issued an executive order mandating sweeping restrictions on business and social life across New York state to try to curb the exponential spread of the coronavirus. We were told it was not necessary to wear a mask, as it wasn’t thought to protect us, anyway.
On March 26, my husband got sick: some diarrhea, a mild fever, and extreme tiredness. He told me his cognition felt a little fuzzy. A call to his doctor resulted in instructions to bring the fever down with Tylenol, use Kaopectate to ease the diarrhea (not something that was known to be a symptom of Covid-19 at the time), and let him sleep. Don’t go to the hospital, because the ERs were already overrun and overwhelmed with cases of the virus. Too dangerous to be there.
On March 30, Jay was sleeping in our bedroom while I was working in the living room. When I walked into the bedroom to check on him, something was very, very wrong. He was either…
