Triage

Before we had kids, my understanding of “triage” was limited to the war movies I had watched with Hubby back when we were dating and I was doing my best to impress him. (Yeah. Not my favourite genre.)

In my mind, “triage” was what army medics and nurses did as they surveyed battle-wounded soldiers, deciding who was either a) urgently in need of care and likely to live; b) salvageable but not critical, so could be pushed down the list; or c) beyond even trying.

After we had kids, my definition, my understanding and my appreciation for triage expanded with each midnight visit to the emergency room with our asthmatic son…

• Wheezing, some difficulty breathing, but oxygen levels good? Give him several puffs of his puffer and go wait in the waiting room.
• Wheezing, straining to breathe, oxygen levels bad? Straight into a room with a nebulizer.

…culminating with the worst night of my life with our as-yet-to-be-diagnosed diabetic daughter…

• Increased thirst, frequent urination, extreme hunger and unintentional weight loss, leading to fatigue, listlessness, lethargy, nausea and vomiting due to critically high blood sugar levels and diabetic ketoacidosis, putting her ever so briefly (and excruciatingly) into a non-responsive state where she not only had every doctor and nurse on the floor jotting down vitals, hooking her up and handing off supplies, but had us signing off on consent forms on her stomach as she lay on the stretcher and they rushed her to imaging to see if her brain was swelling and there was irreparable brain damage.

Yep. Good thing the triage nurse at the door grabbed us and propelled us to the front of the line that night.

All that to say, triage comes in many forms. Including which files to decrypt first when you are (amazingly, remarkably, astoundingly) given the password to bypass the hackers (who have locked every file in every folder on every device in your home) and their demands (Bitcoin — lots of it) and regain all that you thought you’d lost.

I can’t explain how Hubby happened to be in the right chat room at the right time.

I can’t express the trepidation of choosing to trust the guy who posted the post who said he could help.

I can’t explain the leap of faith (“We have to at least try”) and the depth of despair (“We’ve already lost it all. What more do we have to lose?”)

I can’t believe the luck of being just one user, along with only 50 others (amongst thousands of people affected) who were able to make contact and get the password before the hackers caught on and changed the code so that no one else could evade their demands.

But I can explain the relief. The gratitude.

And the responsibility.

And so I spend a bit of time each day doing triage. First my writing. Then my photos. Then my videos. Then my work. It will take weeks, probably months, to get through it all, decrypting each and every file, one at a time.

The universe gave me a message: “Get off your ass and get writing again.”

But she also gave me a pass: “Here are your files: your videos, your photos, your work, your words. You can have them back. But you’ll have to work for it. And then? Just do something with them.”

So here I am.