It's been over five years since COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S.

The virus killed more than a million Americans and reshaped our entire society.

Tonight we begin a new series with reflections from people in their own words who lived and worked through the pandemic.

I am Dr. Colling Bridger. I'm the former assistant city manager for the

city of San Antonio who oversaw public health during the pandemic. None of us expected the pandemic to

last as long as it did. And so we didn't treat it like a marathon. We treated it like a sprint.

And then we just kept doing sprint after sprint,

after sprint after sprint and never resting.

There was no way to balance work in life

during the pandemic if you were a public health responder.

You were just a public health responder. And so, you know, I have two adult children. My first

grandchild was born during the pandemic, a husband of now 35 years. All of them got zero attention

from me. My marriage struggled as a result. My relationship with my kids struggled as a result. And I ended up

retiring because in a way I said I was going to be a consultant because that was a good cover.

I wasn't retiring. I was moving on to something else. But really, I just needed a break. I just needed to

not do this anymore. But it took me longer to get over the pandemic than I thought it would.

And the thought of doing it all over again still puts a pit in my stomach. Looking back,

five years later, I feel like public health did

an amazing job, given everything that we were dealing with, both at the local, state and national

level. It was extremely challenging, though, to be the person who was one of many public faces when it came to talking about the pandemic, talking about COVID-19.

And it was probably three years before I stopped waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning in this kind of cold sweat,

wondering what I had forgotten or done wrong or not thought of.

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