Alas, good things weren’t meant to last forever. The idea of being invulnerable is a foolish errand that lives inside all of us, and yet something will take us down at some point. In the modern age of COVID-19, it’s been abundantly clear that this wasn’t a fad that would go away quickly. As much as I put on the greatest defense imaginable, wore a mask, and got three vaccinations as of this writing, there was no guarantee that I’d be ready for the fight when it approached. I couldn’t swat it away when the germs started heading my way, landing wherever they did and consuming my body whole. The fear I’ve had for two years was no match for an act so mundane, so innocuous that my only silver lining is that I didn’t get it sooner.
For those who are long-time readers, I think it’s clear how much not getting COVID-19 meant to me. From those moments in December 2019 when it was first announced, I longed to stay safe. The year 2020 was hell in part because I was scared to be around anybody, often cooped up in my home and distanced six feet apart from everybody if I chose to go anywhere. I had no safe place outside of my home, where I could escape to a movie theater and relieve some of the tension. It was an awful year socially, if just because I personally believed that COVID-19 vaccinations would be like H.I.V. and AIDS and take many years. To fill time, I watched Southern California hospitals get 0% capacity, nurses and doctors have emotional breakdowns, and millions die while another thousand in Orange County complained that the Fuddruckers wasn’t open. It was madness on top of an election and a fire season that once again consumed the skyline, making the air mesquite flavored. By the time I knew someone who got COVID-19 in December 2020, I was prepared to enter severe depression that lasted months and didn’t begin healing until I got my first dose of Moderna.
I do believe the virus is still running rampant and impacting so many lives. While it hasn’t become as prevalent of a problem, I do fear Monkeypox as well. I don’t think I’ll fully “chill out” until the number is closer to 0% transmission rate. For now, I do what I always do and mind my distance. After all, even if people don’t always die from COVID-19 I know some long haulers whose health has declined significantly. The idea of carelessly letting that happen to me is something I don’t want to even joke about. I sympathize with long haulers, especially those in positions of work that forced them into dangerous positions. Nobody deserved this virus and it’s disturbing that many aren’t taking it seriously anymore just because vaccinations come across as a failsafe precaution.
I honestly believe that I got the virus in one of two forms. Given that I have recently returned to university, there is a strong chance that I got it from close contact with another student. Given that e-mails were sent out that someone in said class tested positive on the first day, there’s some reason to be cautious. However, I noticed quickly that I was possibly the only one absent when I took to Zoom the following week to pull together some sort of lecture. The only other culprit could likely be my niece, herself returning to school relatively recent. Having been homesick for a few days, I had to babysit her in my free time which meant I was in close contact. I love her and want the best for her, but hand-mouth coordination around sneezing is sometimes abysmal and thus, that’s how I met the virus.
Because in the initial round, it was only the two of us who tested positive. Somehow even with all the intermingling of family, there was only her and me showing up sick. As far as I can tell, she is doing fine. She had congestion and fatigue but is back to being happy and healthy from all exterior signs. As for me, the journey was only getting started when I left babysitting her that Friday and returned home. After all, I couldn’t test for close contact from Tuesday until three days later when “signs” would show. The irony of it all is that I once feared getting COVID-19 because I felt my only function in 2020 was to be an available babysitter since everyone else had major commitments. If that’s what ended up taking me down, then that’s some Old Testament-level humor right there.
I suppose right off the bat the one major relief is that this didn’t happen sooner. Had it happened in 2020, I know that I would be more dreading the worst. My death would be imminent as my throat closed up and my body rejected itself on the floor of my bedroom. If the pain didn’t take me then the psychological anguish would. There was no relief. Not in a time where the president was telling me to inject bleach and assaulting innocent protesters. There was nothing really optimistic about being contagious in 2020. Maybe after the first or second vaccination the following year my mood would’ve shifted, but even then I am relieved to have gotten infected now in 2022 during a time where health codes have provided some confidence that those who are vaccinated have less fatal side effects, where for some it’s only a minor inconvenience. I still wish I never caught it, but if I had to I’m glad it was after I took precautions and the world felt a little more certain about where things could go.
Which isn’t to say that the initial moments of discovery weren’t jam-packed with absolute paranoia. While the home test suggests waiting 15 minutes, I’m sure many will recognize that the fate often reveals itself a lot quicker than that. As the liquid carries itself across the stick, those lines appear almost immediately, a tragic little bar that seeks to upthrow all of your plans. I would miss the second week of school. That Friday was a casual get-together with someone I hadn’t seen in years to see Poe the Passenger in Hollywood, CA. Even Cinema Day where everything was $3 would’ve been thrilling, but alas… I now had to convince these sticks that I wasn’t worthy of that bar.
So much goes through your mind when it first happens. Am I going to die? Will this have a permanent impact on my respiratory faculties? Will I drop 20 pounds from some other intestinal disagreement? Will I have fatigue, a fever so bad that I sweat out and hallucinate, or even insomnia? What about the pesky erectile dysfunction and memory problems? What were the limits of this virus going to be for me? I had felt “fine” every day up until that grand reveal, but again… you had to wait days to see symptoms. Maybe I would have to wait a little longer to get the worst of it.
My one piece of advice to anyone getting COVID-19 is that if you do, try and not when you have a broken washer. If you must inhabit a house with someone and ping-pong for safety, there is a need to dress modestly. However, because I didn’t feel appropriate leaving the house until I got that coveted negative test, I had to work with what I got. Having just done laundry the day before, I was grateful to have at best two weeks' worth of white shirts and underwear. While it meant I couldn’t style up without fear of an overflowing clothes hamper, it meant I could survive. I haven’t been this self-conscious of how much I’ve worn since I went to Sundance in 2014, which even then the one major plus, five stars on Yelp would recommend, aspect of COVID-19 that I liked was going 12 whole days without wearing shoes.
Everything else was the exact opposite. While I will fully confess that my symptoms were manageable and I never felt as apocalyptic as my dramatic interpretation had promised, they still were annoying. Outside of duration, I will confess that I’ve had physically worse experiences with viruses, notably intestinal bugs that made eating especially difficult. This just meant I was frequently tired and had to keep a napkin at the ready for my nose and throat.
This meant that Sunday was the most annoying day of the entire experience. I had to call everyone I interacted with in the days prior to inform them of my condition. I also contacted my school to let them know that I tested positive and thus would be absent for a full week (though they said I could be cleared by Thursday *if* things were looking better). I then called the local medical board for any COVID-19 advice, though the signal was so bad with the nurse that its only function was to put my number into the county’s statistics. All I had to do was take Robotusin, nasal spray, and mucus antiviral until it all went away. Given that I don’t like talking on the phone, it meant that I was a different kind of anxious before 11 AM even rolled around, zapping all of my plans save for watching The Aces play The Storm in The WNBA Semifinals. It was one of those times where I wish I was a gamer if just so I could play something like Stray for five hours to null the oncoming boredom.
There was the ping-ponging, the need to talk to people from the other side of the room, wearing masks in close proximity, and keeping every window and backdoor open so that air could circulate. Most of all there was distance between everyone which meant that I spent a lot of time feeling isolated. Given that fatigue was at its worse that day, I didn’t have much motivation outside of staying hydrated and making sure I didn’t fall into a stupor. By the early afternoon the soreness kicked in and the fatigue was very bad. To sit in my room perusing the internet was difficult because at a certain point I gave up, throwing my glasses onto a makeshift surface where they wouldn’t break, and fell asleep in a position that The 2 Live Crew would call face down ass up. It wasn’t even a position that looked comfortable. I just needed to pass out for two hours.
There are a handful of ways that one could take COVID-19 approaching their second week of university. One could simply ghost the entire campus and not let them know what’s up, take the hit and have two absences on your record, and pray that the syllabus gives you enough information to skid by. Then there’s the much more complicated, which involves contacting teachers and hoping there’s any way to be informed. Given that my classes also featured Discords, I was able to piece together notes there as well. Luckily I got a cobbled version of the classes I’d miss, whether they be year-old recorded Zoom’s or a specially curated Zoom where the audio cut in and out. As much as I appreciate everything those teachers did, it was a struggle to feel like I was “with it" when this was the first week of a regular type of lecture. I had yet to find any groove and as a result, almost missed some key points.
Sunday and Monday were the worst of my fatigue. Somehow that was the first to go. Once I began to get my sea legs back, I began to do menial chores and see how long my stamina would last. I probably could’ve gone further, but I took it slow. I’d watch movies in the middle of the day, trying to see if I can get my concentration back. I caught up on old TV shows that I was behind on (turns out Peacemaker is still not my favorite). Even then, my subconscious was critical of me because I have an issue with seeing myself as lazy during the day. I needed to do something, but it was still difficult because of how fatigue convinced me to just sit around and daydream.
Anyone who has been stuck in a home for a few weeks mostly alone will know the feeling that comes with quarantining. I’m not talking about any of the symptoms like being cold enough for a blanket but feverish enough that it makes you sweat. I’m talking about those endless hours where you long for stimulating contact with the outside world, where you run out of things to do and yet don’t feel comfortable going anywhere that risks seeing someone. It’s also the fear that sitting around makes you weak in a different way, like maybe the muscles will lose their physique and you lose endurance not because of COVID-19 but because you sat daydreaming most of the day. There’s also the existential crisis of feeling like you need to achieve something to be worthwhile, that you are wasting your life because this virus took you prisoner. The isolation leads to doubt and some type of depression, but the trick is not to become consumed by it.
The congestion was the worst of every COVID-19 symptom I had. Whereas fatigue largely faded by midweek, I was still coughing and hacking consistently. It turns into a dry cough so gradually that it becomes obnoxious. There is no certainty that you’d ever escape it. Of course by then, the respiratory struggles I had at the start of the week were more muted, so it felt like a regular cold. All I had to do was take that mucus antiviral and wait for everything to clear up.
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To partake a tangent briefly, I want to discuss something that happened early in 2019. Through various discussions, people I trust have suggested that what I had was a prototype for COVID-19. It was an idea that never sat right with me but, having never been diagnosed, I just took them at their word. Next to the intestinal bug that I mentioned earlier, this is maybe the worst I’ve been sick in my adult life so far.
I choose to think that I was sick because of my niece’s birthday party. We had a big backyard get-together and had snacks lined on tables. There was a water cooler full of punch that I liked. Not thinking twice about it sitting out overnight and well into the next day, I decided to have a cup. It’s safe to say that was quickly thrown out, but the correlation between drinking that rancid punch and what happened next was so coincidental that I have to think it’s what did the trick.
To date, I haven’t had anyone give me a proper name for this particular disease. There was the fatigue that made staying awake very difficult. I remember at one point I was taking in things from outside due to oncoming rain. Because I was sluggish, I wasn’t fully paying attention to my motions and fell from the second step of a pathway. I was okay, but it was a sign of how inattentive this was making me. My whole body felt submerged in a tank of some sort, like I could still hear everything but it was through a layer of water. On bright days, the sun looked like it had black lace thrown over it, with spots blocking 10% of my vision. The act of concentrating was immensely difficult but I did it because it was my final semester and an Associate’s meant the world to me at the time.
I want to say it lasted a few months. I had difficulty eating during this time as everything felt like it would just fill me up. My sister once treated me to dim-sum and I struggled to even take a bite despite being very curious about what it tasted like. I could walk without any long-windedness. I don’t believe that I was coughing excessively. All I had was this submerged feeling and vision impairment that made it difficult to fully know just what was going on. Again, paranoia sets in and you think that you’re going deaf and blind. Is this the way that things play out? Am I really spending my time wisely?
More than with COVID-19, I just couldn’t get invested in any of my old joys. I struggled to listen to podcasts especially because I would just get sleepy. I had enough of a work ethic that I was able to work around the rest, but I still was dying to be free of this madness. Eventually, it was like all sicknesses and passed around the family, as if a hacky sack that we were free of once we kicked it.
My main point of bringing this up is that somebody suggested that it was an early form of COVID-19. I wasn’t the only one to have been sick from an odd disease around early 2019, so there was some reason for speculation.
However, having survived COVID-19, my ultimate revelation is that either this was a very primitive form of it to the point that it had no lasting impact on me, or it’s something else entirely. I choose to think it was just some bad reaction to drinking punch that I shouldn’t have. Maybe I had overworked myself getting ready for the party and this was severe exhaustion. Maybe somebody else contracted it to me during conversation. I do believe I got it at that party, but I still can’t explain what any of it meant.
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Anyway, the pesky tests are annoying until they’re not. Every day you try to find the motivation to stay on top of homework and even get ahead. Sadly, that was very difficult for me outside of doing what I could to stay on pace. This was not how I wanted to start the semester, and I feel like I let myself down. I did take the time to do some outlining for my next novel, but being sick is an odd phenomenon where you want to be productive but also need to be serene and heal yourself. Looking at a test that was positive, no matter how faint the coloring, felt like a prison sentence at a point. Suddenly Poe the Passenger was out. Suddenly Cinema Day was not in the cards. Even if I was coughing just a little bit day by day, nothing was freeing me from this.
Now I recognize that because I was growing milder by the day and that I was feeling competent, I could’ve taken precautions and gone places. However, I am a paranoid person. I don’t like putting others at risk nor do I like being that. I will happily stay distant until I absolutely need to change course. Being stuck at home for 12 days was at times unbearable, but I never regretted the decision. I needed to respectfully get better without fear of making someone else’s life worse. I take precautions seriously. It’s why I argue my experience is largely mild.
By Day 12, you recognize those freedoms. Seeing a home test say you’re negative is such an amazing moment when you’re running low on resources. Suddenly the world is open up to you again, and the potential is vast. Optimism rushes in. Kaloo kallay, oh frabjuous day. I’ve survived.
I wanted to hold off writing this for a few days because I wanted to see what the immediate response was to this freedom. I would be walking more and interacting with the public in ways that I think would suggest whether or not I had any “damage” as it were. The good news is that almost everything seems to be fine. Outside of trying to rebuild motivation, I am happy to report that many of the minor symptoms have faded. Coughing may still happen occasionally, but it’s been reduced to daily instead of hourly.
If there are any things that I’m still concerned about, it’s the endurance. When returning to school, I do feel like I don’t have the same respiratory strength when it comes to walking. While I’m capable of getting to where I need, there is still the sense that I’m much more tired than I used to be. As it stands, I’ve had to leave earlier because I feel on average it’s taking me two more minutes to get to class. Speaking as recovery time is about the same, I do think it’s something else going on, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Similarly, I have been able to make it through the week in one piece, but I did wake up to a sense of exhaustion after 10 hours of sleep. I don’t know if it’s a side effect of returning to school (which even then isn’t the most laborious physical exertion), but I just had no energy and the soreness returned after days of being largely dormant. I don’t know if any of this is a concern or not.
I say this because as much as I want to just diagnose myself and call it a day, I did get COVID-19 during one of the absolute worst times. Along with unbearable fire seasons, California is currently experiencing one of the more historic heat waves. It was in the 100⁰ range over the weekend and I’ve rarely felt the need to call something muggy as I did that day. Walking out felt like you were coated in something. Even driving places, I could feel my whole body sweat since my car doesn’t have air conditioning. At night it was often in the mid-80⁰, which made that difficult on top of waking up without feeling like your body had just been absolved of all senses.
I joked that I had a fever that made me sweat at the start of the week and by the end I just had heat that made me sweat. I can’t escape it. There is something uncomfortable about all of it and I’m recognizing its impact on my sensory needs. I don’t like being a shiny, wet thing. I need mild temperatures. I need to not be paranoid that I’m not drinking enough when I think I am always shoving a glass in my face. How does anyone survive this heat? It’s ridiculous.
I write this to give insight into my experience with COVID-19 for no other reason than I was hoping that the day would never come. Because it’s here, I had to do my best to have a swift recovery. I am thankful to those who helped me during this time and it’s helped keep me sane and optimistic. I am grateful that I didn’t have to go to the hospital once and I appreciate the scientists who made the vaccine accessible and effective. To those I saw on the news suggesting another shot, I hope to be there getting injected in a timely manner. As much as I believe that this is inevitable due to how busy-body we all are, I do believe that taking precautions is ultimately for the best. We need to take care of each other and I’m not happy about those who don’t. Quit making things worse. You’re heartless and foolish and I hope you can change your ways for the betterment of everyone else.
For now, I am safe and happy. I am thankful to have been one of the more mild cases and that my experience, as far as I can tell, hasn’t had any permanent damage. All that I have left is to work towards readjusting to society and hope that I can continue to live a happy, healthy life. To everyone out there, please stay safe and if you haven’t gotten vaccinated. I can only imagine how much worse it would’ve been if I didn’t take that precaution. Because of everything, I stand to be in decent condition after all of this. Take care and I wish you the best in navigating your day to day. It’s difficult and still scary, but hopefully, there’s enough compassion out there to make up for it.
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