COVID-19 Chronicles: Sleepless

This time I made it until 5:45 am before I woke up, something going on in the back of my throat

They call it a “tickle” but it’s more like a crawling, contaminated feeling, like the floor of a movie theater or the bottom of a duck pond

I feel fortunate that it doesn’t make me cough most of the time but also I know how a garbage disposal feels at the end of the day

Got back to sleep for a few hours, interrupted sleep is just a fact of life with COVID

Up again, counting the minutes until I could take my pills, you can feel them wearing off which is why I chose 10 pm / 10 am, so they don’t wear off until after breakfast

Lungs feeling like I sucked the tailpipe of a Greyhound bus

But then I took my third dose of azithromycin

Never thought a little orange bottle would become my most valued possession, the one thing I would save from a fire

Started to feel better

A few hours later, realized I was breathing deeper, air tasted sweet

It’s working!

Had a little interlude where I had to go lie down for a while, heart palpitations again

But definitely feeling like I am on the upswing, two more days of antibiotics, then soon after, the test results, do I or don’t I??

Next steps, no idea

In the meantime let’s tackle some more rumors

People seem to think it makes sense that coronavirus came out of a lab

This boggles my mind

I spend a lot of time reminding myself to be grateful that I am not a medieval peasant dying of plague in a thatched hut, feel a kinship with them

They did not blame the Black Death on... alchemists as far as I’m aware

Although they did blame the Jews, popular historical fallacy that never stops being stupid and deadly

It does seem hard for people to believe that viruses just mutate in various natural reservoirs, that they are not living creatures and that they have no agenda other than to propagate

Every now and then a large bird of prey steals someone’s pet, nobody ever calls that a conspiracy, it’s just nature’s way, if something is effective for an organism then it keeps happening

Viruses are good at what they do, better than we are, I could never dream of the level of competence of a virus

Like ants, they never sleep, each individual is equivalent to a synapse, one colony is like one human brain, except they have zero distractions, no breaks, no vacations, all they do is ant

All viruses do is virus

Meanwhile we like to blame each other, blame other things, brainstorm, draw pictures, speculate, talk for hours, in other words, we human

While the virus just viruses

That’s why they keep winning, why bubonic plague and leprosy and Ebola and H1N1 are still here in their own ways

There’s this idea that coronavirus will go away when the weather gets warm, we know better than that here because it never gets cold where we live, all the beach communities have it, Cali, Florida, Australia, what we also have is a hang loose attitude

I keep reading arguments in my neighborhood Nextdoor, overwhelming attitudes are “stop tattling on people,” “stop being judgmental,” “stop being paranoid,” “open the beaches”

Though you should know, they mean just for locals, people here genuinely believe that not everyone is entitled to go to the beach, just only people who can afford to pay 4x for beach real estate

People truly seem to think their position (refuse social distancing) is okay ethically because it is their personal risk to negotiate

Would they be okay with me taking a walk tomorrow, on the premise that I might have a pulmonary embolism, but that’s my risk to take? Never mind that I might give coronavirus to dozens of people who would not know for two weeks

Is this confusion, like they really don’t know what ‘contagious’ means?

Or is it a moral blindness, just unable to care about any other person, even their own family or possibly pet cat

Or is it denial, probably denial

“I am young and healthy, therefore I will not get sick”

HAHAHAHA hubris, I might have thought that too

In fact I almost made it, if I hadn’t gone on that run I might have fought it off and not realized I was ever sick

Which is where I want to make a very brief mention of something very awkward and painful

I keep seeing personal stories of people younger than me, one lives, one died

“I don’t understand, they were young and healthy, no underlying conditions”

Meanwhile clearly obese or severely obese

It’s a risk factor

There is no time for me but there is for the rest of you, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but the rest of you do, you know more than I did

You might have months, you might have a year or two, to prepare a little

If you’re big, if you’re carrying a little extra

Please take a moment and think it over

I don’t blame you at all for how you might feel about body image issues, but those are human concerns

Virus doesn’t care

Virus doesn’t care that I planned to start training for an ultramarathon this year

Virus didn’t care that I didn’t want my husband to get sick, it just jumped him

Virus doesn’t care about our thoughts or opinions

Virus certainly doesn’t care about the economy or our haircuts or our mortgages

Can’t bribe it, insult it, threaten it

Although we can certainly try to ignore it

Wish I could