COVID-versary

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Me: I’ve been thinking a lot about where we were this week last year

Co-worker: Were we in WA? Where your whole life changed and you were so sick??

Me: That’s the place! I was about to be escorted off campus. But it was a great first two days!

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It’s the one-year anniversary of my first (and so far, only) COVID infection and I’m spending it much the same way as I spent the week in 2022. Dizzy, queasy, exhausted, and trusting that work can get on without me. 

And bored. So very bored.

There are a few key differences. The bed, though equally comfortable, is in my very own house this time around instead of on the 2nd floor of a threadbare hotel on the other side of the continent. And the dog, bless her heart, is right by my side. 

The biggest difference is a more realistic understanding of what lies ahead. A year ago, I really believed a week or two of feeling miserable would be the worst of it. I figured I would bounce back like everyone around me, like I had from every flu and cold and bronchial infection that had gotten me before. Long COVID, after all, was something that happened to the unlucky (unhealthy, unwise) few. 

Given relaxing COVID restrictions, the imagined future for 2022-me was, well, not so different from what it had been before. Work, raising a teen, dancing, biking. Hikes in beautiful places with my partner. Road trips and volunteering. Church and friends. Writing, game nights, bar trivia, museums. Life unspooling in all the beautiful, challenging ways.

Now the future is all fog and precarity.

By July of 2022, much of the world was viewing COVID through the rearview mirror. So despite my devotion to masking, I picked up the virus somewhere between Vermont and Washington State. On day two of a summer institute at Evergreen State University, the slight cough that had trailed me across the country worsened. The organizers, kind but unequivocal, asked me to leave. With the help of the one colleague on the Hertz contract, I dragged my dizzy ass half an hour away to a hotel a short distance from the State House. My three team-mates stuck it out at the campus participating in a week of professional seminars. By some miracle they all avoided the dread virus despite sharing a dorm with me for our first 48 hours together. 

For the rest of that week, I convalesced alone. Trying to take in lungfuls of fresh air from windows that cranked only halfway open. Sweating in bleached white sheets. Choking down Gatoride and listening to podcasts between naps jangled by fever dreams. 

My colleagues popped by once to drop takeout pho outside my door then serenade me from the parking lot. The rest of the time was just me, riding it out in the luxury of faraway-ness. Kid, dog, chores, all on the other side of the continent. I brushed off my mother’s urgent telephone plea that I get to a doctor and ask about Paxlovid. “I’m fine,” I promised. “It’s not that bad.” Honestly, though, the idea of navigating health care in a city where I had no friends, no doctor, no car, and no lung capacity made my head spin. “What good would it do?” I told her. “I just need to ride it out.”

Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only good for wallowing in.”

– Katherine Mansfield

(Please indulge me. This is a wallow though it won’t last long. I promise.)

As I lay here a year later feeling awful all over again, I want just one thing: To go back to that room with 2022-me and climb into that second king bed. Stay there in the quiet, match my breathing to her ragged rhythm.  

Then grab a bottle of cold Pellegrino from the mini-fridge, yank open the curtains and give her a serious, no-bullshit talking-to.

Cool your jets, sweet cheeks. You’re not some kind of invincible high-octane demigoddess who can power her way through an inflammatory illness and come out unscathed. 

Fitness isn’t the magic formula that will create a bubble of protection around you. It turns out that your lifelong commitment to exertion as panacea might actually cause more harm than you can even begin to imagine. Your unwavering faith that grit and a little sweat on the brow are the best way to get to the other side of just about any obstacle is not only ableist, it’s going to be your undoing.

You’re not special and you are certainly not immune. Like every other person who gets infected, you need to keep your butt in this bed and rest. 

2022-me either can’t hear or chooses not to. She gets up, pushes right on past the lightheadedness. Sunscreen, sneakers, two masks and a sun visor. Out the back entrance of the hotel she wobbles. Down the long hill. Along the river to the lake, past the hordes of locals enjoying a summer carnival complete with tilt-a-whirl and funnel cake.

Every day in that anonymous hotel waiting for the symptoms to ebb, she heads out. Walks and walks. She logs miles in the heat taking those deep breaths. So drenched and fatigued when she returns to the hotel each afternoon, she can barely stand.

Everything she thinks she knows about illness and well-being is based on the mythology of her people, carried down the generational line. “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” “Sweat out the sickness.” “If your heart isn’t racing, you’re not pushing hard enough.” 

Yo, G.I. Jane, I call after her. You’ve got nothing more to prove. Just get some rest. 

If only. If only I could steer her back to the room. The cool sheets. Netflix and a couple of soda crackers. 

Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.

– Steve Toltz

Some people say they only regret the things they didn’t do. Maybe some future me will emerge from my wallow and be thankful for those days of fevered walking. For stumbling upon the lush garden of local plants outside the State House, for circumnavigating Capitol Lake. After all, 2022-me couldn’t have known that the summer institute at Evergreen would be one of the final travel experiences I would be able to manage. That Long COVID was not only going to come in and squat right in the middle of my life, it was going to bring its crew of degenerates and take over every room.

As for right now, it’s all one big heaving mass of regret for what I did do: For going outside. For not staying in the safe, healing comfort of that hotel room.

There’s no card or cake for a COVID-versary so I’m just here listening as best I can for the voice of future me. It’s hard to make out through all the self-pity but I think she’s here. Reminding me that this cool, comforting home is a fine place to spend a day or three. That today’s queasy-dizzy-weary boredom could be (yet another) relapse with many worse weeks or months ahead. Or it could just be one bad day. 

The biggest differences between that July week and this one? This time around, there will be no walking in the heat. Pushing, it turns out, does not equal virtue. And also, the shivery knowledge that health is a soap bubble. It carries the whole spectrum but holds no guarantees.

And because regret is first cousin to gratitude, I am also counting blessings. The tiny ones today, much bigger than I ever knew. For my bed covered in soft sheets. For work that can manage without me for a minute. For this cold can of bubbly water. For a stretch of boredom free from urgency.

And of course the dog. By my side and so happy for it, no matter what shape either of us is in. Sweet old girl. Reminding me that right here, quiet and resting, is the way. 

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Image: Mandala by me! January 2023