I had taken an early morning flight from Sydney to Melbourne and while I don’t really like orange juice I was bored. So I peeled back the silver foil and drank from the plastic cup on my tray. Later that day a radio announcer caught my attention with a public health announcement that “all travelers on flight #xxx from Sydney to Melbourne who drank any of the orange juice offered on the airplane should call a doctor immediately.”  That was three decades ago. But this COVID-19 pandemic reminds me of the feelings I felt that day. At first I was in denial. I don’t trust panic, and I don’t trust people who tell me to panic. (Now I can see it was prudence not panic.) I did not call a doctor and adopted a wait and see attitude. Then, when I couldn’t concentrate on my work I got angry. Poor me, I was minding my own business but NO…people who made mistakes (or worse) had impacted my life and now I faced the burden of going to see a doctor. It was the next stage, bargaining, when I finally did call a doctor. The second the doctor insisted on coming straight to my apartment to give me a shot, I moved on to depression. All this time I was treating this danger as if it were a made up tragedy. But dammit, it was real. To this date I don’t know what was in that orange juice. I do know that even with the doctor’s injection I spent two days in a special hell of barfing and diarrhea. The emotions I felt in that one day are very similar to my journey of acceptance regarding COVID-19.  I share this story, because I think my experience may have led me to acceptance just a bit faster.  Every minute, every hour, we spend in denial, anger, bargaining, or depression puts people we love at risk.  If you are still stuck in one of these stages…I highly recommend acceptance. Stay home. Stop bargaining to give yourself permission to attend one more gathering.  It took me six hours to call a doctor.  If I’d reached acceptance earlier, I might have saved myself some pain. I think the same goes for COVID-19.