Happy Covidaversary To Me - Nov. 15, 2021

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
A Year of Hell 😷
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Profiting From Pollution 🏭

Happy Covidaversary to me. On this day one year ago, I had a Q-tip shoved up my nose to confirm what I already knew. Wifey Poo’s sister had been diagnosed with it. Wifey Poo’s mother had been diagnosed with it. Wifey Poo’s father, just out of open heart surgery, had been diagnosed with it. Wifey Poo had been diagnosed with it. And the night before, every single last speck of energy had left my body. So bad was it that Wifey Poo had to drive me to get my nose assaulted.

I don’t even remember the day I got the call to confirm I was part of the growing ranks of Covid-afflicted. Aside from one really scary night during my two-week quarantine, Covid proper didn’t do a lot to me. I was dead tired, but I had no respiratory issues. No high fever. I was just achy and tired.

For a few weeks after my quarantine, I felt a bit better. And then I didn’t. And then I really didn’t. I couldn’t make it through a day of work. I needed naps. A lot of naps. I couldn’t think anymore. I’d try to do something like fasten my belt and couldn’t remember how to do it. I’d attempt to say something like “I left it in the garage” and it would come out as “I left it in the glasses.” And that was when something came out at all. Often times, I would trail off in the middle of sentences, unable to remember what should come next.

I would climb a flight of stairs and feel like I’d run a 5K. I’d be sitting on the couch and my heart would just start racing like I’d charged around the bases on an inside-the-park home run. I randomly would start to sweat for an hour… two hours.

Wifey Poo, Boy The Younger and I had been reading the Harry Potter series out loud to help pass pandemic time. Prior to my diagnosis, I’d become the main reader, the guy with the funny voices for Mad Eye Moody and Luna Lovegood (though I could never touch Wifey Poo’s Dobby).

Suddenly, I couldn’t read a paragraph without running out of breath or mental capacity to understand the words on the page. I had to hand the book to Wifey Poo. She finished the last few books.

I had my first doctor’s appointment on New Year’s Eve. Determined, I was, to get answers in 2021. Doctor’s appointments turned into tests and tests turned into more doctor’s appointments. I went to a Longhauler clinic run by Washington University and, by the time I had to walk from the parking lot to the waiting room and then fill out their paperwork, I couldn’t even tell the doctor why I was there. All I did was cry. Doctors had exactly no answers for me. Tests revealed a few hints but nothing to hang a diagnosis upon other than, “Yup, it’s Longhaul Covid, and we don’t know much about it.”

Yada yada yada.

Life is better now, mostly. I’m working on an article about exactly how I am kicking Longhaul Covid’s ass. I’ve been writing it for about two months now, but I’m hesitant. I learned the hard way that thinking I am “better” was a surefire way to have a relapse. And I do have relapses. They’re just not as bad and I’ve gotten a lot better at managing them. It took awhile, but I learned that Longhaul Covid is not something one can just push through with manly toughness. I tried. And I literally nearly died, passing out in the bedroom on our hardwood floors.

I haven’t gone one day in more than a year now without a horrible, rancid taste in my mouth and a goopy feeling on the back of my teeth that no doctor, dentist or ENT can actually see. I’m told it’s probably some damage to the nerve that sends signals to the brain or damage to the brain about how it interprets the signals from the tongue. As far as how to treat that, your guess is as good as theirs and mine.

When this taste is particularly bad and I’m in my car or somewhere that I can’t brush my teeth or use some mouthwash or have a Tic-Tac — not that any of those truly help for any great length of time — I sometimes wonder if this is how it’s going to be for the rest of my life. I’m grateful my sense of smell is undamaged and that my sense of taste was largely untouched, though water has started to take on a bit of an iffy tinge. If it is how every single goddamn day is going to be until I have the pleasure of dying, how am I going to do that?

The same way I did every day with Longhaul Covid, I guess. I didn’t have a choice, so I did it. And when things really sucked, I went to sleep and tried again the next day.

Fuck you, Covid. Fuck you, China. Fuck you, Trump and your Missourah lackey Parsons. Fuck you to everyone whose stupidity and idiotic faith in a demagogue allowed this thing to rampage through our country, kill people I cared about and fuck up my life. I know I’m not supposed to be bitter, that I’m supposed to “let that shit go.” But you try to let that shit go after the trip around the sun I’m just completing. I’m alive. I’m grateful for that. But I’m changed. And I don’t know that I’ll ever get rid of this thing.

So perhaps you’ll give me a little grace and allow me to spew my venom from time to time.

When Your World Withers Away

Hi. My name is John, and I’m a COVID Longhauler. Looking back, it’s clear when this little trend started. It was back in January, which, not surprisingly, is when it first hit me that no one knew what the fuck they were talking about with my Longhaul symptoms. It’s also when my father-in-law died. And…

Happy Covidaversary To Me — Nov. 15, 2021

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