At the onset of the pandemic Harold was frustrated with his parents for not following COVID-19 safety guidelines. He returns to the show for a moving conversation with Juleyka about how this turbulent year impacted his relationship with his family. He also shares some good news that keeps him moving forward.
If you loved this episode, listen to Harold's original episode, Parents’ Reason for Ignoring COVID-19 Restrictions: “We gotta live.”
We’d love to hear your stories of triumph and frustration so send us a detailed voice memo to virginia@lwcstudios.com. You might be on a future episode! Let’s connect on Twitter and Instagram at @TalkToMamiPapi and email us at hello@talktomamipapi.com. And follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi everybody. This week we're continuing with our OG check-ins. Today I'm checking in with OG Harold. Harold's episode aired on August 3rd, 2020. Here's a clip.
Clip: It all came to a head a couple weeks ago when I called him and we were doing FaceTime. Then Mom told me, "Oh yeah, your cousin came to visit and he stayed over with his wife and his kid." And I said "Mom, but you think that's okay, that's safe?" And I've been trying to think about this, how to have this conversation because this has been building up for a while now. So I've been planning it out in my head, how to tell them, maybe you guys shouldn't be doing this. And then she tells me "Oh, but they had COVID already and they're negative. And they got tested two weeks ago." And I'm just thinking to myself, but, you know they can get it again, right? And at that point, "Yeah, I saw that on the news, but we have to live."
Lantigua: Harold and I spoke during the summer of 2020. Back then he was incredibly worried for the safety of his parents. And he was also really upset with them for not following COVID safety guidelines. Over the past year, there have been so many changes for all of us: lockdowns, reopenings, new variants, and finally the arrival of vaccines. So for this OG check-in I wanted to know how Herald and his family had endured the uncertainties of the coronavirus pandemic over this past year. Let's get into it.
Harold: All right. So my name is Harold Martinez. And if you heard the first time I was on this podcast, I was really angry. My mom and dad were not taking the pandemic seriously. The way my wife and I lived through the pandemic was really intense. She's an ER doctor. She saw a lot of people suffer and die. And I work in the news and I was reporting on this every day. Just the fact that my mom and dad didn't want to take measures, use a mask, stop having people over, really made me upset and angry. It ended up being an argument with my dad, that set off a sequence of events where we no longer talk to each other and I'm no longer part of the family.
Lantigua: Okay. A lot must have happened. So let's start right at the episode. When the episode hit and you heard yourself talk about that part of what was going on during the pandemic, did it resonate with you? Had things changed in the few weeks between when we talked and when it published? What had transpired?
Harold: Well I just... I heard the first minute and I was like, okay, I'm really angry.
Lantigua: So you never heard it?
Harold: Not until today.
Lantigua: So how was that?
Harold: Well….I'm much better today, I'll tell you that much. I've been seeing a therapist all long. So that was good for me. We Dominicans, we just take it all in and then sweep it under the rug and just don't talk about it until something blows up and then everything comes out.
I know you and I don't know each other, but I'm very low key. I'm not in the business of telling people what to do unless it's something really bad. But then seeing how they were behaving and how my brothers were behaving, I figure I should just say something. And then little did I know. I discovered so many things from my brothers and my mom and dad like their political leanings, their….news sources they were paying attention to, how they saw me because I worked in the mainstream media. How they saw my wife because she was a doctor. They thought for the most part that the whole thing was a hoax because they were told that. They didn't believe in masks. It really didn't hit me how serious the whole thing was up until October came and it was my son's birthday, his first birthday. And they didn't call.
Lantigua: No one?
Harold: Nobody called. I was like, okay, I get it. You guys really think I'm the enemy here. My mom showed up a couple days later, I guess to show face. But nobody called that day. Nobody called. And okay, fine, you're mad at me. But it's your grandson, it's your nephew, and you guys don't care? Okay.
So from then on I just started bracing for Mom and Dad to get sick and die. I was afraid that something will happen and they will not tell me. You know? And a lot of things happened, but I never knew about them. Until months later. One of my brothers got COVID.
Lantigua: Oh, one of the police officers?
Harold: Yes. My two brothers are police officers and the two of them are out on the street. And they don't believe in masks. And one of them got COVID ... Real sick. My mom texted me. "Hey, your brother is sick. He's got COVID." I'm like, "Okay. Did he get a shot?" "Oh no, he didn't take the vaccine." Okay. So a week goes by. "Oh, your brother now is in the ER." So then my mom is texting me, telling me, "Hey, so they gave him all this medication. Can you ask your wife..."
Lantigua: Can you ask your wife?
Harold: “Can you ask your wife, if this is the same stuff that Trump got when he got sick?” This is the baseline they're going for.
Lantigua: Right.
Harold: Should we move to a different hospital because we hear that some hospitals have better funding for COVID and stuff. They text me the list and then I show it to my wife and she's like, "Yeah, that's the cocktail. That's all they're going to get." He got on a ventilator.
Lantigua: Oh my God.
Harold: They did this crazy thing called ECMO, E-C-M-O, which takes your blood out of your body and oxygenates it because your lungs are not doing that anymore. Then he got better. My mom and dad are not calling me. They're not telling me. I'm finding this out on my own. I got a text when he left the hospital, from my mom. "Hey, your brother left the hospital. He's in his home now."
I feel that if he hadn't gotten on the ventilator, I wouldn't have known. If he had been in the hospital for a couple days like most people, I wouldn't have known. So it was only when he got worse that they wanted to get information from my wife, that they reached out. I don't really know what to say other than it really sucks. I really wish my mom and dad were involved with my son's life. I really wish my brothers were around for him because he looks just like them. And I see my dad and him. I see my mom in him. I see my two brothers in him. And this is the one thing that I'm going to tell them one day, because I'm hoping that we talk one day. It's like "Guys, you missed this. The first two years of his life. He was nuts!"
Lantigua: Well first I have to say, as a fellow Dominican, all of this is frightfully familiar for me. I greatly empathize with you about that. But on the flip side, I want to congratulate you on getting to the point where you recognize that there are limits to what you can do. And that more importantly, there are limits to what you can care about right now. So tell me about what it was like for you to have those moments of recognition and then to turn that recognition into action, into behavioral changes.
Harold: I mean, I have a two year old. So anybody who has a two year old knows that you don't have much time to think.
Lantigua: Thank God for that sometimes.
Harold: I mean, I'm reacting. I get up in the morning, he's up. I got to be with him. And then I go to work and then when I'm working I don't have much time to think because it's been so busy. The few times that I have to realize how bad it's been is when I'm in therapy, or when I talk to my wife. I break down every now and then, and then I cry. When my brother was sick I was crying every other day. Especially after seeing it a whole year, my wife coming here destroyed, "Oh yeah, I lost this person. I thought he was going to get better." Or, "I lost this coworker." So to see people just out there living and having a great time and just ... I just don't know how to do it.
To go back to your question, I'm just reacting to things. And then every now and then it hits me. When I look at my son, he makes the same face my dad does when he's mad. And he smiles like my little brother. He has the same dimple. It's crazy I'm telling you.
Lantigua: I'm sorry, Harold. Thank you for hanging in there. This is hard. This is really hard.
Harold: I mean, I'm not mad anymore. I used to be mad. I'm just disappointed. I feel I was doing the right thing, you know? Okay, I get it. People who watch certain channels, they get what they want to hear. I work in the news and it just so happens that where I work we try to say what's happening. And it's been bad.
And I have this guilt. Did we not do a good job? Did we not cover it? Should we have shown people die so people got scared and took it seriously? Of course we can't do it because of HIPAA.
But it's like people forgot. Italy, all those caskets lined up right at the beginning. China: I knew it was going to be bad when they built a hospital in three days. People were wondering, "Oh my God, the Chinese, their infrastructure, they're great. They build buildings in a day or two.” No guys, they're freaking out! So I'm just disappointed at myself. Should I have said to people at work, "Hey, yo, we're missing stuff." Could we have saved more lives by just doing it the right way? I don't know, be more transparent with how bad it is when you get COVID? I have no idea. I'm going to have to live with that now. So I'm just...I’m trying to learn how to make peace with my situation. At the same token. I know who my family is now and what they can do, which is turn their backs on me altogether, and my son.
Harold: It's broken, it's severed. I thought my mom was going to teach my son Spanish. It's not going to happen. He's going to have to learn from me, I mean, whatever I have left, which is not great. I don't know how we can come back from this. It’s just been hard. You know?
Lantigua: I do. But I want to ask you if you recognize that within what's possible for you, in terms of helping your family understand, you did everything you could. You warned them, you shared information, you modeled the behavior, you had a medical expert who could give you accurate, up to the minute information. And you shared that. And, the fact that they came back and asked you for advice from your wife is also an acknowledgement that, okay, so they know stuff. They know things that are important to know. We can trust them that they're going to give us good information.
Harold: I mean, I could look at it that way. But then when he got sick, we told them, "Hey, there's a thing called ECMO. Maybe try to get him on that." I mean, two minutes later she sent me a link. "Oh, somebody sent me that from my WhatsApp group." So I'm only a voice. All of us have our groups and we share links. And we have our, our echo chamber of things that we want to hear, we want to be into. I'm only a voice. And probably they still see me like a little kid. I mean, I know my wife's family, sometimes they don't trust her, even though she's a medical expert. So they go online. That's what we do now, we go online. They came to me in a moment of desperation. And that was that.
Lantigua: So I mean, there is so much disinformation, especially since the pandemic, that is rampant among Latinos and other minority groups. And so not to dismiss it, but your family just fell into that web of disinformation. And it has literally caused people's lives because they trust what somebody in a WhatsApp group shared with them more than a medical expert, even in their own family, like your wife.
Harold: Yep.
Lantigua: So let's just ... Last question is, how do you move forward? Do you just wake up every day and focus on your son, your wife, and you?
Harold: Well, my wife is pregnant. Yeah.
Lantigua: Congratulations. Oh my God.
Harold: She's due next month. Up until recently, it was just my son, my wife, and me. And now, the last three months, it's just like, oh, it's happening.
Lantigua: Yeah.
Harold: Now I see the little clothes. The crib is coming today. So it's just ... It's great. I'm not going to lie, when I think about that, I get so happy. I just try to focus on that. Every hour, a couple minutes a day, my family goes through my mind, how is so and so doing? I'm just slowly learning to make peace with it. I'm hoping that at some point things get better, but it is what it is. I'm going to have two kids. Our son is two and he has no idea what's going to happen.
Lantigua: His world is about to change.
Harold: He's going to be a great brother, though.
Lantigua: It's going to be amazing.
Harold: So yeah.
Lantigua: Harold, thank you so much for coming back to the show. I am so grateful that you came and shared your story.
Harold: You got it.
Lantigua: Harold's original episode is called Parent's Reason for Ignoring COVID-19 Restrictions: We Gotta Live. You can find it in our feed and on our website. And we've also linked to it in the episode notes.
Thank you for listening and for sharing us. How to Talk to Mami and Papi About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our social media editor. I'm the creator Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram. We're at talktomamipapi. Please follow us and read us on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Bye everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “OG Check-in: He Paid Dearly for Trying to Protect His Skeptic Family from COVID.”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., December 13, 2021. TalkToMamiPapi.com.