This week’s episode is all about masks -- the many varied reasons we have for wearing them, the uncertainty many of us felt around them in the early days of the pandemic, and most of all, the very real and intense emotion that often surrounds them.

Part 1: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sean Wellington is reluctant to wear a mask at first — until he discovers an unconventional reason to.

Sean Wellington lives in Chapel Hill, NC but is at heart a New Yorker, where he grew up. He has been teaching in classrooms and performing on stages for more than two decades (on five different continents!) Last year he founded GRIT: True Stories that Matter, which produces weekly events, ongoing workshops and a weekly podcast by the same name. When he is not immersed in story, he enjoys Cuban salsa dancing and tries to finally learn the damned piano.

Part 2: Dealing with mask-resistant patients prompts pediatrician Ken Haller to reflect on his experience with a past pandemic, and how it has shaped his approach.

Ken Haller, MD, is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center. He is Past President of the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and he has served on the board of the Missouri Foundation for Health. He currently serves on the Arts and Education Council of Greater St. Louis where he helped to create the new Arts and Healing Initiative to fund arts and medical organizations that utilize the arts to promote health and healing. He is also a writer, actor, and cabaret artist who has performed in cities including New York, San Francisco, Denver, and Chicago, and Ken has twice been named Best St. Louis Cabaret Artist by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He appears regularly in local and national media to advocate for child health, LGBTQ health issues, and the arts, and his special interests include expanding health care for marginalized communities, ameliorating toxic stress in children, and educating the medical community and the general public about cultural competency, health literacy, vaccine hesitancy, the relationship of medicine to the arts, the effects of media on children, and the special health needs of LGBTQ youth.

Story Transcripts

Part 1: Sean Wellington

It's late March in North Carolina where I live and COVID is here. It's total chaos and uncertainty and nobody knows what the hell to do. So when I get an email from a local nonprofit asking for volunteers to bring food to some older folks, I think that's something I can do to help. I'm pretty young, I'm healthy, I can do this.

So I show up Thursday at 12:30, just like the emails said. I sign in and I see that I'm matched with a woman named Doris Clark and I am feeling so good about this. I can help Doris.

I see that everybody here who's working at the nonprofit is wearing a mask, and the email didn't say anything about wearing a mask. They're also wearing name tags.

One of the guys, Larry James, he asks me why I'm not wearing a mask. But it's not really a question. And I want to say, “Hey, Larry, I'm volunteering here, man. I'm doing my part. I don't want to wear a mask. It's uncomfortable. I just want to help out and bring Doris her box of food. Isn't that enough?”

Larry's shaking his head, takes this box of food and walks with me to my car and then he tells me to wait.

Larry is a big dude. He's like a gentle, jolly, giant type of guy. He's in his 60s got this big smile. He's not really the kind of guy you want shaking his head at you.

He comes back with a mask he says, “Here. Wear this. You got to protect Doris.”

I want to say, “Larry, yeah, this flimsy paper mask is going to help Doris? No. Listen. What's going to help Doris is me bringing this big box of food so she can eat. So she doesn't die from not eating food. Let's get on with it, man. I'm ready.”

He puts the box of food in my trunk. He says, “And your kids. You got to protect your kids.”

And I want to say, “Hey, Larry, I don't have kids.”

But I don't say that either. I nod, “For Doris. For the kids.”

And then Larry asks me a question, and it's one of those questions that once you hear it, you can never, ever unhear it. “You got grandkids?”

Everything is in slow motion. It's like I just got popped hard in the side of my head. I'm seeing like stars. I think he's talking about one of his grandkids. I can't really talk. I just nod.

“Okay, Larry. I promise.”

I take the box of food to Doris's home and she's lovely. Welcomes me into her home. She's got pictures everywhere of her family, big family. Kids and their kids.

She thanks me and I feel really good about this. But you know, the whole time on my drive to Doris's home and then on my way back to my home, and now that I'm home I think of one word. That word isn't kids. It's grandkids.

Now, here's the thing. I know we're all getting older and I know there are some people my age who have grandkids. It's possible, biologically possible I could have grandkids. I've got friends that are not that far away. And I know that a lot of people love it. Love it. Like you're a grandfather with grandkids with this big happy family and these beautiful children and these dinners and these get-togethers and holidays. And I imagine that's exactly what Doris and Larry have.

But I'm not that guy. Things didn't work out that way for me. I don't have that kind of family, and it's okay. It really is. I never really thought about having that kind of family, big or small. But if I'm not that guy who has that kind of family of his own, with grandkids, then I don't want to look like that guy.

I leave my house for a second time that day. I've got to get some stuff at Walgreens. I park my car. I'm looking in the rearview mirror and I'm doing my best to try to see me as other people see me, how Larry James sees me. I know what they see isn't exactly what I see. I know that. But if you were to see Larry, man, that dude he's got like lines all over his face. He looks like a person who has grandkids. I don't look that way.

Now, there's a lot of people around me and some of them are not wearing a mask, but I promised.

Okay. So I grabbed my new mask from my passenger seat. I really don't want to wear it. It's uncomfortable. But I do and I get my stuff from Walgreens. I'm waiting in line six feet from two other people, both of them are wearing masks and I'm wondering, “Does he have grandkids? Hmm. Does she have grandkids?”

And it's kind of hard to tell with the mask on and now it's my turn. And the woman behind the counter, she could be my daughter. She asked me for my I'd.

“I'm sorry. What?”

“I need to see a license or ID with your date of birth.” She's ringing up this red wine, this cheap merlot that I put in my basket.

“You need to see my ID because you're not sure if I'm 21? Like you're thinking maybe I'm a teenager, like one of these local college kids. Well, of course. Of course. Yeah, take my license. Of course.”

Then she's ringing up my stuff and I'm thinking, “She gets it. She totally gets it.”

She sees me the way I want everyone else to see me, the way they should see me. Fuck Larry. She gets it. And she gives me my receipt and she's talking with a colleague behind the counter.

I say, “Excuse me.” I say I know I'm wearing a mask but do I look underage, like a teenager?”

She shakes her head and says, “No, no. It's policy.”

“Yeah, no I get that. Right. Policy. But I mean there are people that come into the store, you know. Like let's say the kind of people who look like they might have grandkids. Those kinds of people. I mean you're not going to ID them, right?

She nods.

“So I can't pass for a teenager or a college kid but do I look like I could have grandkids? I mean, I know it's possible…” and she cuts me off.

“You have grandkids?”

I share with her what Larry said so I say, “No, no. I don't have grandkids.”

But it's hard to have a conversation with the damn mask on. I'm not used to it. It's uncomfortable. Mostly what I need is for her to tell me that Larry, this gentle, jolly giant of a man who volunteers at a nonprofit and who gave me a mask, I needed her to tell me that he is wrong. Without the mask on my entire face just like Larry saw.

And so I break my promise. I take the mask off and I ask again, “Do I look like I could?”

And there's a few moments. I think she knows it's not really a question. She shakes her head, “No. No, no, no.” And we both have a little laugh.

I leave and I'm back in my car and I'm looking in that rearview mirror again and I'm thinking, “Maybe this mask can buy me a little more time.”

I drive home. I pour a big glass of that cheap merlot and I realize how absurd all of this is. This morning I was a grandfather. This afternoon I was a teenager. And I know it's not too far away that time when it's probably too late to have a family of my own, and that's okay. But I am going to look like that guy, if I don't already. And wearing a mask makes no difference.

I also know that next Thursday at 12:30 sharp I'm going to show up and I hope to see Larry. I want to answer his question. “No, Larry, I don't have grandkids. But you do and Doris does. So maybe I can help more than just bringing a box of food once a week. Maybe I can buy all of you a little more time too. So, yeah. Yeah, Larry. I'll wear the damn mask.”

Part 2: Ken Haller

 “Can you absolutely, positively guarantee me that if I wear this thing my family and I won't get the coronavirus?” The father was sitting across from me in the exam room holding up a cloth mask, his two-and-a-half year old son Jordan at his side playing with his own mask.

At this point, six months into the pandemic, I was frankly getting a little tired of this question. I know I may sound overly dramatic but whenever people ask me that, I feel like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen screaming as Katharine Hepburn salts leeches off of him, knowing he'll soon have to get back in the water and drag the damn boat further through the marsh.

I was also frankly surprised that I was even getting this question. Look, I'm a pediatrician. People love us. We're almost always in a good mood because we take care of kids all day. So people trust us and, for the most part, we're all on the same page when it comes to kids and health. But we all know that mask-wearing has become a thing and, sadly, like something I've seen before.

I began my medical career as a resident at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in the early 1980s. New York City was one of the first places where a mysterious disease that targeted gay men, among others, was becoming a terrifying reality. As a doctor who was also a gay man, I was an early convert to the need to use condoms to prevent spread of what would come to be called acquired immune deficiency syndrome or AIDS.

However, as much of the gay community finally came together to fight this disease over the coming years, it took time. I went to a lot of bars and clubs and community meetings where guys were telling me that this was a government conspiracy, a plot by pharmaceutical companies, a bio weapon gone wrong, a method of genocide or a hoax. It took the bitter experience of personal loss for many of us to be convinced.

By 1987, I was practicing pediatrics in East St. Louis, Illinois and serving as the chair for the St. Clair County task force on AIDS. By that point I figured that everyone knew how you got AIDS and how you didn't.

Then I heard about an eight-year-old boy in nearby Belleville, Illinois who had contracted AIDS as a result of a blood factor transfusion for his hemophilia. He was facing a lot of opposition to returning to school led by parents concerned their kids might get AIDS from him. Now this, of course, had no basis in science. I am a doctor. I do believe in science. It's what I do and who I am.

One evening, I was invited to be on a panel at Belleville High School along with the head of the St. Claire County Health Department and the director of the east side health district which served East St. Louis. We sat at a long folding table on folding chairs in the gymnasium facing the bleachers. Those bleachers have been pulled all the way out and were completely packed with parents and kids. Pretty much every parent looked angry.

My fellow panelists and I went through an explanation of how AIDS is caused by the virus HIV and how that virus is transmitted only by very intimate contact like sexual intercourse or through blood. That's it.

After we finished, we asked the audience for questions. Pretty much every hand shot up.

“What if a mosquito bites someone with AIDS and then bites you? Can they get AIDS that way?”

“Well, doctors have considered that. But when they question people who had contracted AIDS, they found that every one of them had engaged in one of those activities we already talked about.”

“What about if a kid drinks out of a water fountain and then my kid drinks out of that same water fountain? Can my kid get AIDS that way?”

“Well, there are a lot of things you can get from a water fountain but AIDS is not one of them.”

“Well, what if that kid bites my kid? Can he get AIDS that way?”

“Good question. The question of whether you can get AIDS through a human bite is being investigated. But so far, no case of AIDS has been transmitted by a human bite that we've been able to identify. And of course this kid is not a biter.”

“All right,” one father said as he stood up and pointed directly at me. “If my kid is in the same class with that kid, can you absolutely, positively guarantee me that my kid won't get AIDS from him?”

Have these people even been listening? “Look,” I said, “there's a huge body of evidence that shows that you cannot get AIDS from sitting in the same desk with someone, shaking hands with someone, breathing the same air as someone. However, if you are asking can I absolutely, positively guarantee that someone will not get AIDS in this manner, I cannot. There is no way to prove a negative.

Still, the chance of your child getting AIDS from sitting in the same room as another kid who has AIDS is about as astronomically small as the chance of a meteorite falling out of the sky and smashing into this gymnasium in the next five seconds and killing every single one of us. That is how vanishingly small the chances are of something like that happening.”

Well, the town hall was pretty much over at this point and I doubted that anyone had been convinced. As I walked slowly to my car in the crisp, spring night I looked up at the stars. I saw Orion, my favorite constellation. I always thought it was kind of hot. I thought of how long he'd been there and how he would continue to be there long after I was gone and I took some comfort in that constancy.

As I fumbled for my keys, I noticed people going to their vehicles. One was that father, that ‘absolutely, positively’ guy. He was walking with a woman and a couple of kids who looked to be about seven or eight years old. They stopped at a pickup truck. The guy got on the driver's side. The woman in the passenger side. The kids, you guessed it, they climbed into the back of the pickup.

I listened to the fading sounds of those two kids laughing and squealing, rolling around on the bed of that pickup as they drove off into the night and I was furious. “You idiot,” I thought. “You're wondering if your kid can get AIDS by being in the same classroom with another kid and you're driving in the dark with your kids in the back of a pickup truck. Are you crazy? I hope these kids wouldn't end up in the ER where I worked, hurt or maimed or killed, something much more likely to happen than catching HIV in 10,000 years of sitting in a classroom next to some kid with AIDS.”

But as I sat in my car, I heard my mom's voice, as I tend to at times like this. “Kenny, now put yourself in that man's shoes.”

“Okay.”

“I've driven this road a thousand times with those kids in the back. We've never had a problem before. But that other kid, he's going to die. I feel really bad about that. And I love my kids. And if they get sick and I could have stopped it, I would never forgive myself.”

As I drove home, I felt something small shift inside. I could still see Orion. Constant as he is, though, I also knew that his stars were slowly drifting into other configurations.

That night in 1987, I gave that frightened father statistics rather than compassion. I failed. And 33 years later, I was facing another father who was asking the same question.

“How are you doing with all this?” I asked Jordan's father, pointing to the mask in his hand.

“I haven't worked in four months,” he said, looking at the floor. “His mom's still working so we're kind of scraping by but, you know.”

“I'm really sorry to hear that. I can't imagine how stressful that must be for you.”

“Yeah,” he said, looking up at me, “it really is.”

“Look,” I said, pointing to the mask on my face, “I hate this thing. I find it hard to smile. It makes it hard to talk clearly and I have to smell whatever I had for lunch for the rest of the day. You know, right now I can't guarantee you anything. I do know that I'm scared. I'm 66. My blood pressure's a little high and I weigh more than I wish I did.

What I'm really scared of is that I could pass this on to someone and make them sick, someone I love or someone I take care of, like your son. I know you love him. He's a great kid and you're a great dad. I know that you would do anything for him and, right now, this is the best we've got to try to protect him.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay.”

And like Bogart, once again descending into the marsh, this father put on his mask. Jordan looked up at him, laughed and he put on his own Spiderman mask. His dad looked back at him and, despite the masks, I could see that both of them were smiling.

Last month they came back for Jordan's three-year checkup. This time, dad was wearing a St. Louis Blues mask and his son a Batman mask. He told me that that he had gotten some work, not quite what he wanted but work, and he was grateful for it. He was also grateful that after everything he was reading and seeing on TV, he was mostly able to work from home.

I thought back to my time in New York nearly 40 years ago at the beginning of another pandemic and of all the men I knew and loved who were no longer with us. I thought of that eight‑year‑old boy who wanted to go to school and was eventually able to, until he got too sick to continue.

I thought of another family driving off into the night in a pickup truck and, based on no evidence at all, I was absolutely, positively sure that they had made it home safe.