They’ve started in Britain. By “they” I mean both the NHS, which is vaccinating live human beings against COVID-19, and the conspiracy theorists, who are spreading their ideas as quickly as they can.
They’ve also started here, and by “here” I mean my county, which has been one of the hottest zones for coronavirus transmission in the United States since the beginning. I got COVID in a restaurant here in March, and conditions are far worse now than they were then. The vaccine is a big topic of conversation at my work, where over a quarter of the staff have PhDs and where we have been under mandatory work-from-home orders for nine months. We’re futurists and we’re FOR IT! What I’m trying to figure out is how to bridge the gap between my science-minded colleagues and my... regular friends. Obviously I’m in love with the vaccine mission. I’ll get it as soon as I’m able. I don’t care, stick it in both my arms at once. I just don’t know how to translate my enthusiasm to other women. Why are women so vaccine-hesitant? Probably because doctors never listen to us? Things are going to happen. There are ten million people in my county, and this vaccine, like many others, is going to need a booster. Assuming every single vial is administered to someone, that’s twenty million vaccine vials just for us. Unfortunately, things can happen in the supply chain, just like they do with everything from potato chips to donor organs. It’s unlikely that every single precious little vial is going to make it from manufacturer to person’s immune system with nothing getting dropped, delayed, lost on a shipping dock, or whatever. What I’m worried about most of all is how bad things are in our local hospitals. The same people we are going to need to administer our vaccines are the ones on the front lines, treating COVID deniers who disbelieve what is happening to them literally upon their dying breaths. How are they even going to have time in the day to give out shots by spring of next year? Are they even going to still be with us? From what I’ve read, the first groups of people to receive the vaccine have already been more or less decided. Obviously health care providers have to come first. No question there. Then it looks like nursing home staff and residents - which is only fair because about 40% of the deaths from COVID have arisen from the shockingly poor, shabby, desperately tragic job we have done protecting our seniors. Please, if nothing else, can’t that misery be stopped. There has been interesting speculation on who gets dibs after that. Diabetics? Teachers? Prisons - staff and residents? Someone I know thinks young people should get it first. This person also recently recovered from COVID after an ill-advised multi-family trip in which every single person contracted full-blown COVID-19. This person may have a point. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why certain people - like you, my dear readers - are careful to follow health directives, and why others - Those People - are not so careful. It’s got to be the messaging. Something about the way that people like me communicate with people like... Them... is setting them off and making them defiant. Or skeptical at the very least. Let me state here that I am a contrarian by nature, not preference or attitude. It just seems to be that things I think are very clear rational choices, such as not owning a car, are outrageous and annoying to others. I try my best to keep the really big ones to myself, recognizing that many of my baseline opinions are unintentionally inflammatory. I don’t want to argue; I just want to continue to live my life without other people being shocked and horrified by the many non-standard elements of my lifestyle. Another way to say this is, I’m not isolating because I’m a conformist. I’m isolating because I had direct personal experience with COVID, and it was one of the very worst things to ever happen to me, and it ruined my life. Because of this, I find myself regularly defying other people’s requests to socialize. I’m also astounded by the many justifications, defenses, and rationalizations I hear from people I had never realized would behave in those ways. It has made me far more skeptical about other people’s motives and basic value structures, how they calculate risk and how they make strategic decisions. Especially those that affect me and especially when they are actual matters of life and death. I guess whether you are a skeptic or a contrarian or a nonconformist or not depends on who’s asking. I get my shots, including my annual flu shot, for the same type of reason that I save so aggressively for retirement. The smartest people I know are doing it, and they can demonstrate that their strategy has worked for them. On the other hand, the people I have talked to who are still traveling and socializing and defying local public health mandates? Are not getting such great results. The person I’ve talked with most recently, the one who thinks that young people should get priority for the COVID-19 vaccine, had been traveling quite a bit in the previous months. That family wasn’t slowed down by travel restrictions whatsoever. And then they all got sick. In my mind that’s a straightforward QED. It would be different if the coronavirus were more like chicken pox, in that getting sick actually made you immune. Instead it seems pretty clear that there will never be herd immunity through “natural” means, only through vaccination. As a side note, whenever I hear “natural” now I think, “Nature’s way? You mean where the ill and infirm are shredded and eaten alive by top-tier predators? Or they crawl into the bushes and slowly die of starvation, alone and in pain?” Yay, nature. I’m heading into the future, the proper Space Age, where immunization records will become as standard as passports and driver’s licenses. That’s a-okay with me. As far as I’m concerned, it can’t get here quick enough. Now, what remains is to figure out how to communicate the appeal of this world to those who are more wary of it, for whatever reasons matter to them the most. Time for fresh new COVID-19 updates, the most important of which is:
ANYONE CAN GET COVID-19 AT LEAST TWICE This means the only way to get that “herd immunity” that everyone keeps talking about is for the majority of us to get vaccinated. Alas, the same confused souls who were running around infecting each other for fun and profit are the same people who are going to refuse to get their shots. I have no idea what to do about this, or what to suggest, other than that we simply shun people who refuse their shots and 100% refuse to socialize with them. Family included. (Gives side-eye; You Know Who You Are...) But this obviously isn’t going to work because even the threat of imminent death won’t keep us apart from each other. Bunny suits it is... All right, what do we know about COVID-19 that we didn’t know when I had it back in April 2020? Reinfection is possible. This sucks. What sucks even more is that it may be more severe - or fatal - the second go-round. There’s something else I’ve been thinking about, though I haven’t really seen any reporting that makes the same connection I am making. Even back in March and April of 2020, when the first confirmed case of COVID entering the United States was January 21, a lot of people were claiming that they must have already had it. This was seriously problematic, because it meant a lot of people might have shrugged and assumed they were immune, when we now know they couldn’t be. Problematic for two reasons: because they might spread the sickness to their friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors, but also because of their own health risk. Now it’s starting to look like community spread in the US and other countries started earlier than authorities were aware. Maybe a few of those people who thought they had COVID before January 21, 2020 were right. (Theoretically it might be possible to confirm that hypothesis by testing these claimants for antibodies, but it looks like not everyone has the same immune response, so the results might be inconclusive). Okay, we now have four problems:
The first three types are in more danger than they realize. That third situation may already have been happening more than we knew. We should probably try harder to convince the fourth type that it matters what happens to other people. Something like 80% of the spread of the coronavirus is driven by about 20% of infected people. One asymptomatic person was documented to be shedding infectious COVID-19 particles for over two months. People don’t seem to find it very convincing that this virus has killed a million and a half people in under a year. That’s why I think we should start focusing on the other effects. For instance, I know a couple of people who were exposed at work and had to quarantine. Fortunately, they didn’t get sick. Their companies are still in business, they’re still employed, and they got paid. On the other hand: Have you been in this situation yet? Where someone really important to your team has to quarantine? How much is it costing the company? How much is that going to impact whether they can afford to stay in business? Personally I think it’s a very strange idea that employers have to cover health insurance. It’s far too expensive for them, and it’s also dangerous for anyone who gets laid off and then has no coverage. How does it make sense *cough* anyway. Back to what happens when COVID doesn’t kill someone. It can make your teeth fall out months later, so that’s new. Normal, healthy teeth. It can also make your hair fall out. Skin problems, too, including my adorable case of chest acne that is still with me six months later. A friend of mine had a mild case of COVID. Splitting, never-ending headache for seven days. Any of you fellow migraine sufferers, I hope you are convinced by that. My personal record is four days and that was plenty. There have been cases of COVID causing hearing loss, seizures, amputations, coma, and miscarriage. Is it weird to say that any of these things might give someone more pause than the knowledge that it could also kill them? My work buddy who had COVID in February was chatting with me today. We were talking about how close we are now to getting a vaccine. What about the people who are going to get sick and die the week before the vaccine is available? Going to the afterlife and talking to the other ghosts: “What did you die of?” “Irony” We’re in the home stretch now, and it’s more dangerous than ever. People seem to have shrugged themselves into complete nihilism. Maybe they think, if they’re going to get it and die anyway, might as well go on one last trip through a major international airport and try as hard as possible to take out their entire family as they go. Ask yourself, ask your family, are you Team Virus or are you Team Humans? There is no immunity, not without the vaccine. The only thing that can happen from running around socializing with no mask and no distancing is that more people get sick. Tell everyone you know that you can get COVID twice. I realized, when I clocked out today, that nothing went up on my blog this morning.
What had been a fairly successful workday suddenly turned into a sense of crushing defeat. Not only did I have no blog, I hadn’t sorted the laundry, I hadn’t sent an important personal email, and I had also missed a social check-in I had been looking forward to for literally months. This may have been the first time in my life when my work life was the only thing that seemed to be going well. Something else is on my mind. COVID. A key person in our division traveled for Thanksgiving week, and got the coronavirus, and has been quite ill, and as a consequence nobody has been able to cover their work. Apparently 9 people on our staff tested positive in the last week, even though we have all been strictly working from home. Do you remember I mentioned someone I know whose parents were planning an “open door” Thanksgiving? The good news is, they called that off. The bad news is, the dad lied about getting tested for COVID and instead had his own elderly father over to visit. In that time, he convinced him that “it’s just the flu” and everything is fine. (Like “the flu” is all right for a man in his seventies...) Either he has a very high level of confidence, high tolerance for risk, or high hopes for an inheritance... Like most people, we’re hanging out at home with little else to do. Outdoor dining has finally been closed in our area. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do other than wander around outside, hoping not to get within breath zone of any of the wandering mask refusers who populate our town. Try to think of them as NPCs (non-player characters) A year ago, I was all like, Hey, I’m going to write a book! Then the world changed and the premise of my book sort of blew away in a puff of vapor. ...and then my life partner came home and our living room became a conference room. Currently our posture is mandatory WFH until at least 3/31/21. After that it all hangs on a “widely available vaccine.” I think we aren’t going back in until, as individuals, we can document that we have that precious inoculation. So that’s it. For now, my most obvious and best option is to keep working at my tiny little desk in my tiny little corner of our smallish living room in our itty-bitty apartment. While the rest of the world outside spirals into pandemic hell. I had another idea to distract myself, which was to go back to grad school and get my PhD. I have no idea how I could actually make that happen. When would I study?? Right now I am having enough trouble maintaining a reasonable sleep schedule, much less my personal priorities. It feels like a choice point. I can either: Crush it at my job and probably promote upward within the next couple of years Go back to school and get a PhD Quit and write a (different) book OR Be well-rested and rebuild my physical stamina. CHOOSE ONE I realize that over a million people around the world lost that option because they died of COVID-19 this year. Seven billion people don’t have the array of choices that I do. The way I look at that is, it does not serve anyone if someone passes up an opportunity. If you (or I) get a promotion, there is an opportunity to influence projects and company culture that was not available before. What if we were the good guys, what if not every boss had to drive people to stress and burnout? If you (or I) get an advanced education or write a book, there are opportunities to influence and teach others, others who may be hungry for that information. Who does it serve if I ever finally rebuild my physical strength and stamina? Well, me, of course! And thus my ability to contribute at... whatever it is. Same with you. This is why it’s such a disaster that so many people seem to be shrugging their way into a case of COVID. They think “if I get it I get it” in the same way that they might think “if my house burns to the ground” or “if I get t-boned in my car and become paralyzed.” Yet for whatever reason there is no real sense of freak-out. Yes, these things could happen, and don’t we not want them to? I was right when I decided that getting a job would make the time pass quickly during the pandemic. It really has done what I wanted it to, which was to give me a way to keep busy instead of climbing the walls with dread and anxiety. What I didn’t realize was that it would do more than fill a standard workday. It’s essentially swallowing everything, including my ability to hit pause and eat a sandwich. What I thought I wanted was a simple, no-brainer job that would give me a bit of a social outlet. It may be that I have passed the point where I can disguise myself as a Petite Lebowski. Fortunately, it is now December, which is traditionally my month to think about goals and resolutions and ambitions and visions and all that sort of thing. Time to revisit what a typical week looks like and where the heck I think the world will look like over the next 1-5 years. I just heard this story, and it is really giving me pause. I’m sharing it now because this is my last chance to reach anyone who may still be waffling on whether to pretend to have a “normal” Thanksgiving.
A young friend of ours went off on a five-day camping trip in a party of ten. They all got tested first, all ten of them. They all tested negative, all ten of them. Toward the end of the trip, guess what? One of them started feeling sick. They went home and he tested positive for COVID-19. But - how did that happen??? This is what seems to be happening. If someone is exposed to coronavirus and then gets a test very shortly afterward, it won’t show up on the test quite yet. The other problem is accuracy. Even a test that is 99% accurate would still miss one out of a hundred people, right? That’s an A+ grade - it’s just that the consequences of most tests aren’t as high as this one. What were the consequences? All ten of the people on the camping trip, the ten who tested responsibly and spent time together out of doors, all ten of them had to quarantine from work for two weeks. Fortunately, none of the other people on the trip seem to have been infected, which is the best possible result. Did the false-negative guy infect other people, like at the gas station or the grocery store? Nobody will ever know. Just like I don’t know if I got anyone sick the time I went to the grocery store while unaware that I already had the coronavirus. This is a real problem that everyone is obviously quite tired of talking about, and yet I really want to make some points here. First: The worst feelings I have ever had in my life were thinking I got my husband sick, and having to call two friends to say I might have exposed them. The guilt is absolutely crushing and nauseating. How much worse would it have been if any of them caught it and died? Or... all of them? Second: I got COVID-19 in a restaurant, in a small group with only six other people. We were extravagantly careful to follow all known rules at the time, including not shaking hands, not hugging, and using hand sanitizer, and we even took megadoses of vitamin C at the table. (On the way there, my friend asked me, “Do you think we should cancel?” I said, “Nah, it’s a small group, we’ll be fine.”) Third: It is now well-documented that it’s possible to get COVID-19 twice, even a couple months apart. Fourth: This “let’s all get tested first and then it will be okay” scenario has been proposed to me by three distinct groups of people. I’m not even all that popular! It’s not that I think so many people want to hang out with me, specifically, especially since I’ve become so morbid. I think people keep inviting me to “socially distanced” hangouts because I’m the naysayer. I’m the cautious one. I’m the bear in the world of bulls. If Jessica says she’s cool with it, then we’re all immortal, right? Will you hang out with us if we all sit six feet apart? NO! I got COVID from ten feet away in a small group, so why would I want to sit six feet apart in a large group? Will you hang out with us if we all get tested first? Sorry, no. What if you got infected literally on the way to the testing station? Also, no offense and please don’t take this personally, but I don’t even trust the Pope to tell the truth about the last time he got tested. That’s assuming the tests themselves are 100% reliable, which they obviously can’t be. What if we all wear masks? Can we game this out? Do you really think it’s better to sit in a room together in person if we have to wear masks and we can’t hug? What are we going to do when we eat, slink off to various corners of the yard like dogs because we have to take our masks off? Isn’t it more normal to see each other’s faces close up on Zoom? I’m comfortable saying NO to people over and over again, family, friends, colleagues, our landlord, or whoever. I have never really had an issue with telling people if something won’t work for me, because why should I just blindly obey someone? If they won’t change anything for my convenience, then why should I be the one to change for theirs? This time, though, it’s life or death. I am actually stunned and shocked that people who know I almost died this year have come to me and petitioned me to come socialize in person. It’s like they were just waiting until I was done talking and they didn’t hear one of the most significant things that ever happened in my life. People who aren’t over their battle with their car insurance over how a fender-bender was adjudicated. People who aren’t over their grudge with their coworker or their upstairs neighbor. People who know what it’s like to still be stuck on relatively minor grievances are surprised that I’m not over a mortal illness six months later, when I still have a few lingering symptoms. That’s what COVID is like. You get it and maybe, in some ways, you always have it. It’s like at Hogwarts when not everyone can see the hippogriffs. I know someone whose Boomer parents are having a *cough* no, I am not making this up, they are having an “open door” Thanksgiving. It’s similar to a progressive dinner party, where each neighbor hosts a course and they all troop up and down the street together. They’re literally inviting their entire neighborhood to come inside their house to eat. Is this a problem during the coronavirus pandemic? Clearly yes. Is it a problem that the dad has had a high fever that won’t break for the past several days? That he refuses to get tested because he thinks COVID-19 is a hoax? I guess we’re all going to find out. Okay, let’s go over this one more time. I am staying inside my tiny apartment and eating dinner with one other person, my husband. I am not waving at other people, or walking by their house and calling to them from their yard, or driving by to drop off plates or pick up slices of pie. I am not sitting or standing outdoors to socialize with anyone. I am physically not going near any of the 7.8 billion people on Earth, with the single exception of the one wearing my ring on his hand. Six feet? Too close! Masks? Yes, but not enough. Airports? Heck no! Rapid testing? Only if you get in a big plastic bubble for three weeks first. Just this one time? No. Wait until next year. But this might be the last time we see each other! You’re right. And I don’t want that on my conscience. We all have so much to be grateful for, if we think about it. We have the information we need to protect each other. Back in the Eighties, we used a timer for long-distance calls, and now we can video call for free and talk as long as we like. We can get through this together. We’re almost out of the woods, so let’s keep holding the line and being strong for one another. We can do this. We can even do this over a slice of pie. I started a new habit of watching a documentary immediately after work on my working Fridays. It helps me make the mental transition away from my desk, which I can reach out and touch from the couch, to a sort of semi-weekend rest state. This time, we watched “Totally Under Control,” the COVID-19 documentary.
This may not have been one of my better ideas. As a COVID survivor, it sort of gave me PTSD. I don’t want to talk about politics - I actually want to talk about the business world. I’ve made my position on “debating” “politics” abundantly clear: no. I am not here for that. Also, I can’t understand why it is under dispute that viruses can jump from animals to humans and create deadly infectious diseases. The question is not: Is COVID-19 real or a hoax? The question, for me, is: Are there diseases? Is there anything that someone can spread to someone else by coughing or sneezing? If yes, then put a dang mask on! We knew this a century ago! Actually, whether there is such a thing as a respiratory illness is a small sub-set of the problem that I think is actually posed by “Totally Under Control.” That is, how does a group of business professionals handle a problem? The tail end of the documentary makes this point quite clearly. Sometimes it’s a pandemic, sometimes it’s a hurricane, sometimes it’s a wildfire. What did the people of Pompeii do when they found out there was a volcano erupting? Not quite 2000 years ago, the people living in the vicinity of Mt. Vesuvius ... did not know that it was a volcano. Just like the people of San Francisco circa 1918 did not know what a virus was when H1N1 hit. The poor Pompeiians had 11 hours before the final ash cloud would drop on the town, but they didn’t know that. Most of them crouched and hid and became human statues, monuments to disaster. Only a few managed to evacuate, just as a few left when the earthquakes started several years earlier. Pompeii did not have any kind of emergency management system that we are aware of. None of this is in the “Totally Under Control” documentary, by the way. Just me making connections with history. There will probably always be a new kind of disaster ready to strike us humans here on Earth. Right now, we know what volcanos and tornadoes and earthquakes and gas leaks are. We know what plane crashes and terrorist attacks are. By this point in the timeline, we also know what pandemics are. We had plenty of information and plenty of time to act on it, and this is where I will make the point I wanted to make about the business world. This documentary was hard to watch for professional reasons. It is just blisteringly painful to watch as hard-working and well-meaning people, who are trying to do their jobs and save lives, are unable to make headway no matter how hard they try. When the pandemic began, I was serving in a volunteer position in Toastmasters. I was called to an emergency steering committee meeting shortly before our international leadership made its formal policy. We all dropped everything, got on Zoom, and decided to move our activities online. It took about 90 minutes to meet and another few hours for the announcement to go out. Not long after, the international org came down and said, No in-person meetings until we say otherwise. Everyone nodded and... it was done. Same thing with our work. We have offices all around the country. The corporation came out almost immediately with a multi-phase policy and sent everyone home. We continue to have some of the strictest standards in our industry. We get weekly updates, and there have been a few thank-you videos and virtual all hands meetings to remind us how it works. I suppose I should say that the company moved first, and I had that information to share when my steering committee meeting happened a week or so later. Anyone who is good at their job can say, we could have done more and we could have done it sooner. Anyone who knows anything at all about WWII history knows, we could have done more and we could have done it sooner. Anyone who has been conscious for even a few weeks of 2020 knows, we are still not doing as good of a job as we could be, and lives are on the line. This is going to be a very... instructive time of history to look back on. Maybe people won’t be talking about it two millennia later, like Vesuvius, but I’m certain they will a century from now. At that point, whatever format they use to watch it, “Totally Under Control” is going to be a core piece of primary source material. I just realized that it’s been roughly six months since I recovered from COVID-19. It’s hard to say, because all this time later I’m still having issues.
What’s it like? My case was weird. Unlike a lot of people, I know what day I was exposed, and I know who I got it from. If the numbers are to be believed, I was one of the first 400 cases in California. My friends and I were exposed the morning of the day that our governor announced that bars and restaurants would be shut down. If only we’d known that! I could have avoided the whole thing! Because we caught it early in the cycle, our experiences with the coronavirus were different than what would happen today. A lot of our collective symptoms were not officially recognized. Tests were very hard to get, and only if you could prove you had traveled to a COVID-affected area. Contact tracing was not being done. There were no known treatments. At the time we were sick, if you wound up in a hospital, you had about a 50/50 chance of never coming home again. Everything about how to survive COVID-19 was guesswork. My doctor didn’t believe I was sick at first, but even if he did, there wouldn’t have been much he could have done for me. Not a single one of the drugs that the FDA has approved for treatment were even on the radar back in April 2020. I didn’t start feeling ill until more than two weeks after my exposure. My first symptoms, sneezing and extremely itchy eyes, were not on the list. I didn’t have any of the “official” symptoms: no fever, no cough, no body aches, no gastrointestinal issues. These are problems. I didn’t know I was ill. I never had a fever, so temperature checks wouldn’t have caught me. I felt fine for two weeks, and I had been isolating at home quite strictly. Based on my experience, a two-week quarantine is not long enough, temperature checks are pointless, and six feet is not far enough to distance. I was quite ill for four weeks. The entire second week, I felt certain I would die any day. The third week, I cleared the virus but picked up an opportunistic viral infection in my lungs. I had a chest x-ray and got a prescription for antibiotics. This was the second distinct time period when I felt like my body was in the process of actively, rapidly dying. I couldn’t really say I was “better” for six weeks. Two months later, I got bacterial pneumonia. Happy birthday. Had to treat that with antibiotics, an inhaler, and prescription cough medicine. I did not feel like I was going to die, but I did feel like I fell down the stairs and that someone was kicking me in the chest and back with steel-toed boots. Two months after that, I started having gut pain that woke me every night for a week. When I finally went online to look at an anatomical chart, I discerned that the pulsing, burning pain I was having was in my duodenum. A bacterial infection there can turn into an ulcer. Fortunately, I was able to quickly reverse that with mass quantities of probiotics. A few symptoms lingered for months, and others have never really gone away. While I was ill with COVID-19, I lost my sense of taste and smell for three weeks. I couldn’t even smell bleach. I couldn’t taste chocolate, mouthwash, taco sauce, or other foods with very strong flavors. I experienced, according to what I wrote at the time, “weakness, fatigue, malaise, tremors, dizziness, vertigo, headache, chills, the rigors (look it up), stomach pain, feeling faint, ears ringing, lost my voice, complete loss of sense of taste and smell for three weeks, memory problems, confusion, shortness of breath, heart palpitations” - the two scariest of these were the shortness of breath and the tachycardia. I’m still having both of those six months later, just not as bad or as often. The hand tremors lasted for several months but seem to have finally cleared up. I’m also still having constant problems regulating my body temperature. I have a work partner who had COVID back in February, and both of us appear in meetings bundled up in blankets. I am always, always cold. When I get cold enough, I start shaking all over, and it takes hours to warm up again. The threshold temperature for this is 68 F. I’m also chronically tired. My energy level, on a scale of 1-5, is generally between a 2 and a 3. Sometimes I just go to bed the minute I clock out at work, and sometimes I don’t even make it that far. I just get up from my desk, pivot slightly, and face plant on the couch. I feel like I’ve aged ten years. There are a few other weird problems. My night terrors came back. That’s a “me” thing - obviously most adults don’t have night terrors - but it’s been super annoying and unfair to my husband. It also affects my work productivity the next day. I’ve gotten migraine a couple of times, another thing that I had problems with prior to COVID but that I had gotten rid of for several years. I still have issues with concentration and word loss. For me the difference is very noticeable. Sometimes I just run out of steam mid-sentence and stop before I ever remember the basic noun I was reaching for. I have a persistent skin issue, acne on my chest, which is unusual for a 45-year-old. I tried half a dozen treatments and it still hasn’t cleared up. I read up a bit and it turns out that it’s not regular acne, but a yeast overgrowth called “fungal acne” that can result from taking antibiotics. Since I had three courses of antibiotics in December and two more in 2020, this makes sense. Now I am trying an OTC ointment and hoping I will be able to wear v-neck tops again one day. Yes, this is gross, my point being: COVID-19 is not sexy, cute, or fun. Even a relatively mild case. I gained 15 pounds and, with intense focus and effort, I have been able to drop four. I’ve been trying to start up an exercise schedule again. It would be nice to be able to walk around our neighborhood, but we live in a dense area filled with young mask deniers. I also struggle with shortness of breath when I walk uphill with my mask on. Another issue is that when I work out on my elliptical, I have a strange side effect. About a half hour after I get out of the shower, I start having sneezing fits for 2-3 hours. Then I will have symptoms of the common cold for several days. I did some reading on this, and it corresponds with something called ‘exercise-induced rhinitis.’ I ordered yet another box of OTC meds that other athletes claim are helpful, and we’ll see how that goes. What I worry about most, six months after my case of COVID-19, is the stroke risk. This is why I’m so persistent in trying to get into a regular exercise routine again, despite all the setbacks. All I do is sit or lie down about 22 hours a day. I used to feel a decade younger than my chronological age, and now I feel a decade older. I don’t want to keep slipping into lethargy. I don’t want to live my life as a sort of invalid, although many days I feel like I am. I’ve been very lucky in all of this. I lived, and my husband lived, and my family is still here. We have insurance, we have money, we have food, we have a roof over our heads. This is part of why I’ve been so vocal in sharing my experience - because I want to encourage others to take this virus seriously and do everything they can to avoid it. Please, don’t be like me. Don’t go out expecting to have a fun social outing and share a casual meal with friends, and then come home permanently messed up from coronavirus. I hope that you and yours make it through 2020 together and that we all stay safe through 2021. Even if I hadn’t already seen it in the news, I would have known that there is a strong prospect for a coronavirus vaccine because it came up at work. Our company has a plan built around this benchmark, and it goes like this:
We will return to work when there is a widely available vaccine for COVID-19. What’s going to happen after that? My guess is that they’re going to try to work the supply chain and get someone to come to our various campuses, just like they do with the flu shot. As employees, we will probably be able to get the vaccine faster from work than we would if we waited in line elsewhere. I have another speculation, which is that many large companies will do the same. It’s likely this would include family and housemates, because it makes more sense to protect the entire household and thus avoid having to quarantine anyone on staff. Right now, nobody is allowed on site at our work without prior authorization. You have to explain why you want to be there. A few months ago it was why you needed to be there. Now, most people are staying home regardless, so those who just find it easier to get things done at the office are commuting in. There are guidelines about how many people can be in a room at the same time, and there’s a scheduling tool to make sure. What might happen, at our company and probably at others, is that getting the vaccine would give someone more access than if they didn’t get it for some reason. At a certain percentage of staff, it wouldn’t matter if a few people could not or would not get their shots. In the beginning, though, while the logistics are still being worked out, the lucky few would be safer, and that is a privilege. I’ve gamed this out, because COVID-19 scares the living hell out of me. I think if I get it a second time, I would probably die. I sometimes imagine the beautiful day when I roll up my sleeve for my injection, and tears come to my eyes. The vaccine means I’ll be able to fly home and spend time with my family. It means I’ll be able to travel the world again. It means I can quit feeling haunted by COVID. I’m going to have a party on that day. I’m going to go home and eat a slice of cake. In the meantime, though, I think it will be a bit of a wait. It would be a bit of a wait even if the vaccine was already approved for mass distribution today. There are still roughly 328 million Americans, and 39 million of us live here in California. (Did you ever realize that - that one out of every 8 or 9 Americans lives here in the Golden State??) My county alone has 10 million people. How long is it going to take to get 10 million vials of a coronavirus vaccine? I can tell you one thing, it was very challenging for me to get a COVID-19 test. Both times, I had to make an appointment after arguing with my doctor. How is the packaging, shipping, and distribution of individual portions of the vaccine going to compare to individual test swabs? There’s a ranking system that is going to have to come into play. The medical field revolves around the concept of triage, that those who are most in need are tended to first, and everyone else has to wait. That’s why my hubby and I had to sit in the ER overnight when he had a severe eye injury - because so many other people were so much worse off. We wait our turn, and while we wait, we focus on how glad we are that we’re not on the short list. First is going to have to be first responders. It’s literally the only thing that makes sense. Next would probably be anyone over a certain age, people with certain pre-existing conditions, and caregivers. My hubby and I don’t fall into any of those categories. We’re just average adults. That’s why I think our best chance to call dibs would be if we can get the shot through work. If the Pfizer vaccine turns out to be viable, there is the slight complication that it might take two doses like 3 weeks apart. The reason all of this matters is that I think exciting news can cause people to get a little happy and sloppy, and that can sometimes lead to crushing disappointments. Like my own. My poor sad heart - I haven’t been with my family in 11 months and there may still be another year to go. As I talk about this, I’m working it out for myself, so that I can set my expectations reasonably. Say, even if the vaccine was already available? And I got my first dose tomorrow? I would still have to wait three weeks to get the second dose. That obviously means that Thanksgiving is... wait for it... off the table. I’m fine with that, and I wish everyone else was too. I wish we could all solemnly nod our heads and agree that we love our families too much to risk everything on one stupid, unnecessary meal. Just do it next year and make it bigger and better! Yeesh! Instead we’re looking at the highest case counts ever, both worldwide and in the US alone. It’s getting much worse. We’re also finding that asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19 for longer than we might have guessed. This is a terrible time for false optimism. What I’d like to see everyone doing at Thanksgiving is staying physically away from one another. We can call and wave to each other on video. We can say our gratitude about the chance of an effective vaccine, and we can also be grateful that so many of our family members are still alive. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, and let’s keep it that way until next year, shall we? Let’s try to have as many of us as possible live for that day when we roll up our sleeves for our vaccines and then go have some cake. IT’S HAPPENING!
It looks like there’s a vaccine!!! Or might be, in a while! Okay, we have no idea when, but this is a really, really big deal. If we can get a vaccine that’s over 90% effective, it means two things. One? The eventual end of the COVID-19 pandemic! Two? and I haven’t heard anyone else talking about this yet? But it could also mean... the end of the common cold! Which is bananas! But it might happen! My hubby just pointed out the other day that he hasn’t really had anything all year. We were fortunate enough that I didn’t give him coronavirus, so he got to skip that. We both got the flu from spending the night in the ER back in January. Other than that, isn’t it remarkable the way that wearing a mask everywhere also stops the spread of other airborne respiratory illnesses? I am hopeful about a lot of things as a result of this fantastic news.
But that’s all big-picture stuff. I tend to think in the 15-year range. Right now it’s probably more useful to plan over the next... say... 15 months. I’ve been saying for months now that I personally plan on isolating and being home until 2023. By that I have generally meant January of that year, meaning I’m ruling out 2021 and 2022. It’s easier on me emotionally to not get my hopes up. Where do I get my numbers? Spanish Flu epidemic a century ago, plus fastest-known development of a vaccine, which previously was four years. If I’m pleasantly surprised by one of the many benefits of living in the 21st century, then great! I’ll put on my dancing socks. All that being said, I am someone who really likes the anticipation factor of planning a few years ahead. I generally set my goals in the three-year range. Now I have the great fun of starting to shape out plans for post-COVID, and also what sorts of things I’d like to get done while we’re still all stuck at home. There are certain advantages to this current iteration of the world. The most obvious one is that my hubby and I, like a lot of people, don’t have to commute right now. We’re probably sleeping 90 minutes later each morning than we would if we had to drive in (and wear proper professional clothes). We’re probably also eating dinner earlier than we would if we had to commute. Might as well make the most out of it. There is a strong chance that we’ll both be able to continue to work from home the majority of the time. My hubby would probably go in to work in the lab on occasion, maybe once a week, or maybe for days at a stretch but only during certain phases of a project. I would be more likely to go in for events like a quarterly meeting. Other than that, personally I would prefer to work from home in my socks. (Regular or dancing variety? That is for me to know and you to find out). If not, though, I have to calculate that I currently have about two more hours at my disposal each workday than I would post-COVID. What am I going to do with it? Anything? One of my work-related plans, post-COVID, is to rebuild a work wardrobe. I haven’t had to wear office clothes in over ten years. I’d make a day of it: a real haircut! A shopping trip! If I have at least a year to save for it, I could make this a montage-worthy sequence and walk out with bags of outfits, coordinated from stem to stern. Something else that would happen post-COVID is that we’d have a reason to use some of our reservoir of vacation days. My hubby and I have been collecting reward points for quite a while, and they will have built up even more by then. We won’t be the only people with that idea, so we might have to book pretty far in advance, which is another way of saying we would plan quite far ahead and have that much longer to fantasize about our trip. Part of our post-COVID plans, then, will be about where we would want to go, what season, and how long we would want to stay there. When would I see my family? Uh, immediately?? Like, I would book my ticket the day I got my second shot? It’s easy to think about all these things from the luxurious position that we are currently in, with two incomes and nowhere to spend them. It might seem unfair for those who are financially hurting - and it is! - and yet, there is worth in the fantasy of how the economy will pick up after the pandemic ends. How many jobs will be created, how much pent-up consumer demand will be unleashed. We’ve been here before, historically. They still call it the Roaring Twenties. Part of it was the end of World War I, but part of it was certainly the end of the terrifyingly lethal H1N1 pandemic. That thing was so bad, some people bled out of their eyes. Someone would be perfectly fine in the morning, suddenly start coughing, and be dead by the end of the day. Whole families gone over the weekend. When it was finally over, those who survived were almost delirious with delight and the urge to party. Isn’t it interesting that we’re in the Twenties again, and we’re going to live through the end of a pandemic? Doesn’t it seem likely that the economy will rebound in the same way? And then what? What will we do to make it special, having come away with a bit of wisdom and insight? We have time to plan, so let’s plan well. It’s already starting. The families are making demands, and it isn’t going well.
My friend’s mom asked her to “come home” for Thanksgiving. This is one of my friends who had a particularly rough time with COVID-19. My friend, sensibly, said she would make the drive if two conditions were met.
Everyone in the family said no. Like many of the people in our extended friend group, they think these requests are insane. We’re being paranoid, controlling, and unfair. We’re the ones with the problem. Indulging us is simply a bad idea. This year, my friend isn’t going home. Her parents, her sister, and her brother-in-law will be eating without her because the four of them aren’t willing to pod together for two weeks or get a test. Ultimatums are usually a bad idea, unless there is a toxic situation involved and a permanent, thick line needs to be drawn. When both sides are tossing out ultimatums, it’s likely that the relationship will be different from that point on. The family says, Come home and do it our way. The end. You say, I don’t want any of us to wind up in the hospital. I’ll come home under these conditions. The end. That is a showdown. In family law - not the kind that involves the courthouse or actual legal code - the only rule is loyalty. Call on any other authority, and you’ve said, or they’ve heard, “I choose a greater authority than you.” Science? Fiscal responsibility? The needs of your own children? A temporary situation that puts your partner’s family first? It tends to go downhill from there. Whoever had the first conversation where the line was drawn will then call others and repeat their version of what they heard. Then the other family members will text or call and tell you off. This should be no surprise. There are very few things that humans enjoy more deeply and sincerely than telling someone off. Lecturing, chastising, rebuking. Oh, what fun. What we’ve forgotten how to do in our society is to stand down. We’ve forgotten, if we ever knew, how to reach toward one another, how to compromise, how to admit we’ve been wrong, how to give an honest apology, how to forgive. We do not have light hearts. We are instinctively suspicious and easily wounded. We read into conversations opinions and words that were never there. This scenario of the skipped Thanksgiving could easily turn into a point of You Always Do This. This Is Just Exactly Like You. There You Go Again. What my friend did is what we call Yes, And. Yes, I will come and be with you, And I will do it under these conditions. When people know how to play Yes, And, everything can be positive and fun. For instance, one person can say, Let’s do Thanksgiving this year, and the other can say, Yes, and let’s all get tests and quarantine so we can actually do it with no masks on! Maybe that even turns into, Yes, and, I can work from home so maybe I’ll stay through the New Year. The first refusal shuts down the options that might have followed. When two people are able to collaborate and cooperate, everything from that point forward becomes easier. Trust is established. Tastes and preferences are put forth. Something new comes out of the interaction that maybe nobody thought of before. When the third or fourth person joins the interaction, there is already a basis for that cooperation. The unstated rules of the game have been laid out. If each additional person gets it, and keeps the game of Yes, And going, there is then a positive upward spiral. For instance, my ex-in-laws figured out their own Thanksgiving rules in this way. One of the five kids went vegetarian, and then another went vegan, and then the dad got put on a special diet by his heart doctor. The mom shrugged and said, “Potluck?” And everyone said, “Tacos!” Thereby the great Thanksgiving Taco Buffet was born. Everyone lined up and served themselves from a dozen bowls of ingredients, and everyone was satisfied, and nobody complained, and all the leftovers got eaten. (If a turkey had climbed through the dog door and gotten in line, it might have gotten its own plate). Negotiation sounds shifty to a lot of people. Crafty, devious. What it really means is that there are a hundred thousand opportunities for everyone in a situation to be satisfied and have fun. Everyone can walk away happy. The only situation where everyone loses is when at least one person stalls out and refuses to consider any other possibilities. This is the COVID Thanksgiving scenario under which nobody can win: I demand that you come to my house and pretend there is not a pandemic. There are a million variations of this, where everyone can feel loved and connected and well-fed. One involves everyone getting tested. Another involves everyone bundling up and sitting outside. Another involves everyone agreeing to meet in person “when all this is over.” My own family is going to get on Zoom and wave to each other and compare meals and play games. I live a thousand miles away, so it’ll be more or less like the 350 days of previous years when we just... live where we live. Personally I think family relations work better when we treat each other more like professional colleagues. That means we respect each other’s time and budgets. It also means that we speak to each other with basic civility. The more we set policy with each other, the more time we can spend talking and laughing and enjoying each other’s company. The alternatives? Are not that many and not that interesting. When we’re caught up in family power struggles, sometimes it’s all we can do to avoid making things worse. Focus on what is true: I love you, I want to be with you, I understand how you feel, I know everything is crazy right now. Another thing that is true is that I want us all to be here this time next year. I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk. I will always be here for you. Just maybe not in person right now. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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