PANACEA 2020

During my grandfather’s three years in the navy he went from ordinary seaman, to
midshipman and finally to sub-lieutenant. He served most of his time on the HMAS
Shropshire, an 820-man heavy cruiser equipped with 38 gun towers and eight torpedo tubes.
During their service in the pacific, the crew of the Shropshire supported 15 landings and
carried out 56 bombardments. They received battle honours five times between 1941 and 1945. I
cannot imagine how it must have felt to go from studying to save lives, to operating a gun
tower in the midst of an ocean battle. Unlike six of his crew members who died on active
service, my grandfather returned home in 1945 and finished his medical training. He went on
to become one of Australia’s pioneering specialists in drug and alcohol addiction, receiving
an OBE in 1981 for his services to the medical field. Although Dr John Moon died before I was
born, he continues to be a source of inspiration to me as I go through my medical training.
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis people have tweeted and posted about how our
grandparents survived so much worse; about how they lived through wars when all we have
to do is stay at home and endure lockdown. This is supposed to be easy compared to what
they lived through. Yet every day the news tells us that more people have died in the United
Kingdom from COVID-19 than died during the Blitz, while deaths in the United States have
well surpassed the total number of American soldiers killed in the First World War, Korean
War and Vietnam War combined. During a brief return to work in the hospital I saw an
elderly man struggling to breathe with suspected COVID-19 and thought ‘this fight is not
easy.’ In war, deaths are gruesome and vivid; out in the open. In a pandemic, the deaths are
behind closed doors; in empty hospital rooms or hushed intensive care units. No matter how
they come about, they are still deaths. Families still grieve. The world still reels, failing to
comprehend the sheer volume of people suffering and dying. Even those whom Covid has not
personally visited suffer at home, their mental health declining as they are denied access to
their family and friends. Here in Victoria as I write this, we are enduring another hard
lockdown while the rest of the country reopens. All of this considered I think that we
should hesitate to label any of this as easy, because it is not easy. It is hard. Maybe objectively
our grandparents did live through worse; I know that I would rather be enduring lockdown
in my comfortable home than manning a gun in the Pacific Ocean, but their suffering does
not negate our own.
Like the war, this crisis will eventually end. Like my grandfather, I will eventually return to
my medical studies and hopefully become at least a fraction of the doctor that he was. Until
then, it is okay for this to be hard. Until then, we need to continue to support each other as
much as we can and together, we will come out the other side.
Serena Moon
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