Well, Covid got me again. I’m recovering from a second bout after having had it in April 2020. That feels like a different era of fear and confusion—testing was nonexistent, we were running out of toilet paper and Tylenol, and the general guidance was to isolate but go to the emergency room if you were really sick but to call ahead and wear a mask and also if you were sick but not sick sick you should call your doctor (and you better know the difference between sick sick and sick and you better have a pulse oximeter at home, what do you mean you don’t have a pulse oximeter at home?), and we were banging on pots and pans at 7 pm every night to thank healthcare workers instead of giving them basic personal protective equipment or hazard pay.
Anyway, this time the symptoms were less severe and felt more like a mild to moderate flu (which was still pretty intense and knocked me out for a full week). I did lose most of my sense of taste and smell and consequently had very little appetite. On the plus side, I was able to eat vindaloo takeout, which ordinarily would probably be too spicy. That was the most delicious thing I ate while I was sick.
Also, when I was able to go outside after isolation, I started a new routine of taking daily walks along parts of the Gowanus canal, which to anyone with full scent-detecting abilities has a, shall we say, UNIQUE odor (it is our friendly neighborhood EPA Superfund site and significant efforts to dredge and clean it have been underway for years but it’s not the kind of thing that happens overnight). It is surprisingly pretty along some parts of it, when you are blessed with impaired olfaction.
Another silver lining during my acute illness was that it’s difficult to think about anything else other than being sick when you’re sick, so a lot of the chatter in my brain that usually hums in the background was oddly quiet. Actually, it was not unlike being hung over, which is a horrible feeling and because I’m a wimp I always feel like I’m going to die even though rationally I know I’m going to be fine, because for better or worse, I just can’t think about anything else. Of course it was miserable being sick; I just didn’t hate the part of being sick that meant I wasn’t obligated to think or worry about anything else other than resting and getting better.
When I was in the phase of recovery where I was still symptomatic but on the up and up, I was in a constant haze of napping and watching television and reading books and doing jigsaw puzzles. (My partner was also sick and tested positive before I did, so for 3 days we isolated from each other and watched movies together apart on our separate devices, which was cute and sad.) I watched old episodes of ER and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both of which were popular in the late 90s/early 00s when I was a teenager, which made me feel nostalgic).
Isolating felt harder this time around because in 2020, everyone was isolating, but this time, most people were just living the normal version of their lives. When I was sick in 2020, I think my family and friends thought I was going to die. This time, I got a lot of “That sucks! Hope you feel better soon” types of messages. I guess it’s a positive turn that in general things feel less dire (to say nothing of the systems that were tenuous to begin with and have been depleted and are running on fumes and for the segments of our society that are and have been the most vulnerable to these problems).