What the Animal Crossing: New Horizons soundtrack means to me
The Animal Crossing: New Horizons soundtrack is finally available to pre-order! This 7 CD soundtrack is special to me, and if you want to know why, read below. If you just want the link to pre-order the soundtrack, it’s here.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released March 20th, 2020. And it helped me get through one of the toughest times in my life.
My real job is a physician practicing in New York City. I’m not the type of physician that saves people’s lives; I just make patients’ lives better or happier. I am mostly based in the office instead of the hospital. A couple of times a month I do minor surgeries, the type of procedures where people go home the same day. Bottom line, I am not used to treating severe health conditions, and I’m not used to taking care of people in the hospital.
A year ago, all of our lives changed because of COVID-19. For me, the shutdown meant that all of the non-emergency healthcare I was providing was put on hold. The news that I got through the media and the internal hospital communications seemed increasingly dire, so I volunteered to help out at the hospital. To be honest, I didn’t want to, because I was scared, and I also didn’t feel like I could help significantly. But I volunteered anyway, figuring any little bit might help, and if it were my family in the hospital I’d want as much help around as possible. I was placed on a two-week night-shift rotation taking care of COVID-19 patients during the first two weeks of April.
The first two weeks of April 2020 represent that peak on the left side of the chart above. The largest number of hospitalizations in New York was on April 12th, 2020, almost exactly a year ago. The environment I was working in back then could not have been further from my normal job. At that time, the hospital was almost entirely patients with COVID-19. As I walked into the hospital, I walked by multiple refrigerated trailer trucks serving as morgues. During those weeks, I was supervising residents (physicians-in-training) who are used to taking care of medically ill patients. In case I was unsure of anything, I had more senior physicians I could call upon for help. Ultimately, I think the only service I really provided was using my years of experience as a physician to monitor the patients for a few hours while the experts in critical care got a few hours of rest overnight.
What I saw in the hospital during those two weeks makes me sad to this day. A memory that keeps coming back to me is seeing a wife say goodbye to her husband who didn’t want to be intubated. This final interaction, between two people who had spent decades of their lives together, was over FaceTime, because guests weren’t allowed in the hospital. The wife asked us to make sure that a priest came to do Last Rites for her husband, since he was a choir boy growing up and it was important to him. He wasn’t able to ask this himself, or reply to her, because he was struggling so hard to breath.
Those nights in the hospital in early April were stressful, but I only helped out at the very peak of hospitalizations. After those two weeks, the hospital didn’t need my help, so my practice slowly got back to normal. During my brief time in the hospital, I gained a new respect for hospital based physicians. I don’t know how the critical care doctors deal with life and death situations on a routine basis without bringing that sadness home. All I know is that they are infinitely stronger than I will ever be. Working in the hospital also made be appreciate how fortunate I am to not have lost a family member this past year. While I appreciate my good fortune, it doesn’t dull the sadness I felt at seeing so many patients in the hospital who were so critically ill.
As silly as it sounds, Animal Crossing: New Horizons helped me get through those tough times. During those the weeks I was at the hospital, and then 10 days afterwards, I was staying in a dorm room at the hospital in order to not bring COVID-19 home to the family. After these 12 hour shifts of seeing people in dire condition, I would come “home” to an empty room. I didn’t always feel alone though, because I could connect with family through the Switch and experience the calm environment of Animal Crossing.
My sister and two of my nieces also picked up the game, so we would all meet up on FaceTime and in Animal Crossing and trade fruit, chat with everyone’s neighbors, and see what clothes were available on each other’s shops. I myself focused on creating rows of fruit trees so I could to make fruit harvesting efficient. If nobody else was online to play, the mindless repetition of shaking trees, pocketing fruit, and selling it was intrinsically relaxing. While I enjoyed it, Isabelle was not a fan of my island full of fruit trees.
All of these activities, whether they were with family or solitary, were set to the soothing tunes of Kazumi Totaka. The different songs for different times of the day added variety, but always provided a sense of joy and calm. I’ve always had a strong connection with the music in games, hence this website, and the music in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is no exception. When I hear these tunes, I think of how this game kept me connected to family when I was physically alone. I associate these songs with the calm in the eye of a hurricane. In between 12 hour shifts of seeing a world of uncertainty and sadness, I got to experience the calm and joy of connecting with family in an idyllic virtual environment.
I could not be more thankful for the serendipitous timing of the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was exactly what I needed at that time, and the music will always hold a special place in my heart. I could not be more excited for the release of this soundtrack.