Thoughts on a Little Novel Virus

It’s allergy season again. For me, this means sneezing and wheezing as the weather chills and the leaf mold rejoices. Happens every year in varying degrees. I take my allergy medications and use my inhaler and after a few weeks, I am back to normal.

This year is not normal.

Why? Let’s go back a bit, like seven months back, to the other time of year where my allergies do their little histamine dance. Ah, the spring, when everything blooms and my sinuses scream, my lungs curl into a fetal position, and my eyes resemble Tyler Durden’s after a bad fight.

On a Saturday, (March 14th to be exact) my asthma bothered me, figured it was a bad allergy year. Wednesday, had a fever, Friday went to the ER where they had no COVID tests, but since the flu and strep swabs came back negative, and my lung images were consistent with COVID, I most likely had it.

Take some Tylenol and have a nice day. Hope you feel better.

Great.

I was tested two days later to confirm I did, indeed have the virus. My husband had it as well.

Just peachy.

There were no new treatments, no Remdesivir, no polyclonal cocktail, nothing. Simply go home, isolate, wait it out, and hope you don’t get worse

I traced every contact, let anyone I thought I might have interacted with, that I had this virus. My hope was that no one caught it from me, and as far as I know, my husband is the only one with whom I shared this crappy gift. Sickness and health, sweetheart, sickness and health. (And for the record ManCOVID is exponentially worse than a Mancold.)

I didn’t go for joy rides. Unless you count a trip to get tested or two trips to the ER (one for me, one for my husband).

And that is what makes me incandescently mad at how our President is behaving. After denying how bad this epidemic was, after putting countless people at risk, after refusing to wear a mask, Karma finally got busy and he tested positive.

I do not wish him ill. However, I do wish he was a man capable of learning a lesson.

He is not.

What makes me saddest is the millions of people who will listen to him downplay this virus- because now he is an expert. They will watch him rip away his mask as he returns to the White House, and go on denying the evidence, refuting healthcare professionals, and put themselves and their loved ones at risk.

Because this virus is like Russian Roulette. You never know who will just have a mild case (like mine, and we will return to that in a minute), or who will end up on a ventilator. We just don’t know. That’s what happens with a NOVEL virus. It’s a learning curve.

Yes, I realize my indignation, disgust, and anger mean nothing in the wider world.

And also yes, I know that I felt pretty good up until day 5 of the virus- not great, but kind of- oh, this isn’t so bad. Then it handed me its beer.

Mr. President, I hope your steroid high and cocktail of fancy antibodies do their job, I honestly do. But there is a part of me that is waiting for this bug to hand you a frosty, Oktoberfest-sized mug of humble lager.

Because my asthma is back and with it, is the realization that nothing is the same. My asthma before was an annoyance, now it scares me. Something changed and it changed because of this virus. It took me months after my mild case of COVID to be able to breathe deeply. I worked at it.

When I woke up and felt that unwelcome pressure, I panicked. My asthma isn’t just a tightness in my upper chest, now it’s dug deeper in both my lungs and my psyche, bringing back the memory of shallow breaths and a debilitating cough, of not having enough air to speak. Of drowning in dry air.

I am not looking for sympathy.

I am lucky.

I am alive, when so many ended up and are still ending up on ventilators, or surviving with worse symptoms than mine.

I am fortunate. And I appreciate that good fortune.

I only wish our leaders could learn the same.

Listen to the scientists, not blustering politicians.

Be considerate to others.

Wear the damn mask.

AND VOTE.