Page 66 - FDCC Pandemic Book

Living in a Pandemic: A Collection of Stories on Coping, Resilience & Hope
As press coverage of infection spread with time, my gut reaction in the earliest days was guided by experience and I was typically skeptical. After all, we had been warned of imminent disaster time and time again: Y2K, Ebola, SARS, bird flu, swine flu, and the impending ice age. In fact, when teaching at the FDCC Litigation Management College at Emory University in 2014, literally across the street from the Center for Disease Control, we shared our facility with infectious disease doctors from Africa who had traveled to the U.S. to learn more about Ebola. Yet we all survived, and with little effort.
Even by the time we traveled to Scottsdale for the 2020 Winter meeting, the risk of COVID-19 seemed remote and isolated to overseas. My focus was distracted, with trial looming in a wrongful death case the third Monday of March in San Francisco County---with a four-year old plaintiff. It seemed odd that conventions at the two neighboring properties to the Camelback Inn had cancelled their events during the same week, something we learned because our daughter Ashley had moved to Scottsdale a few years earlier to work in the destination management field with the Bell’s daughter Rachel. Little could we have known that Scottsdale would be the last chance for us to gather as an organization and to share the fellowship with friends for over a year, and at this rate maybe two.
Two days after the Scottsdale meeting ended, I was on my last business flight of the year, to Birmingham, Alabama for one final deposition for my upcoming trial. It would also be my final inside-dining experience--with my local Alabama counsel and good friend, Kile Turner. I flew home, mask-less and ready, only to have the world
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