COVID - It's not something to joke about

Jack Deatherage

(1/2022) Tuesday before Thanksgiving I felt a niggling tickle at the back of my throat- the alarm to start my cold prevention regime. By turkey day I knew the cold had gotten by my effort to head it off. That's happened one other time in four years. My concern changed to possibly having bronchitis, which was going around. Come sometime Saturday the laughing gods dropped the bomb.

A friend messaged me, "Hey. We tested positive for COVID."

Having sat close enough to touch each other I knew it wasn't a cold that had gotten by my defenses. Irritated, but not frightened, I contacted my southern clan to see what they had done to weather this man made contagion when it swept through them in August and September. It wasn't long before I was overwhelmed with advice, vitamins and supplements I can't pronounce the names of. There's a tube of dewormer I never got to as I was swallowing gagging amounts of pills, capsules and tablets of stuff I did understand the usefulness of in fighting off colds and generally boosting one's immune system. It sometimes pays to have had older relatives that were into that type of medicine.

The earliest I can remember being sick was age three. Living in Florida, I come down the hall, eyes swollen shut from an allergic reaction to mown grass that had probably been sprayed with DDT, gasping as I struggled to breathe during the first of many childhood asthma attacks. Mom said I scared the hell out of her as I was blue skinned from lack of oxygen. Probably caused enough brain damage to explain much of my thinking afterward.

Sometime while in high school I missed two or three weeks as I lay abed, leg swollen and oozing infection while my fever held at 105 F for several days in spite of Doc Cadle stopping by to inject me with penicillin several times and demanding my parents get me into a hospital. (I had a hammer at hand and swore I'd kill anyone who tried to take me out of my bed.) I remember passing out from pain several times as I dragged my inflamed leg ten, maybe fifteen feet from the bed to the toilet. Bed pans were for the dying. I wasn't there, yet.

I've lost count of the summer colds that morphed into bronchitis bouts that laid me low for weeks without seeing a doctor or taking more than aspirin to fend off the worst of the fevers and aches while I waited to get better, or mercifully die. But my favorite was the cold, wet, deary day I staggered the half mile from the factory to the house, barely managing to get my boots off before crawling into bed, fully clothed- coat and hat as well -to shiver for three days. I remember the DW and the offspring checking on me- usually when I got up to piss brown and swallow a mouthful of water before collapsing again.

Oh the expression on Doc's face when I walked to her office on the fourth day for some meds and she demanded I be hospitalized. "But Doc. I'm much betterer now."

Doc's appeal to the DW actually got a chuckle out of me. I ended up going home with antibiotics to treat a severe sinus infection. (I think the DW has forgiven me for missing a few days of work that week, but who knows with DWs?)

The grotesqueries of a food poisoning that nearly had me begging for death are merely a footnote in my ability to stupidly hurt myself and survive without medical care. COVID? Here. Hold my nonalcoholic drink.

Fever dreams, perhaps.

A week into it I knew the gods had gathered to mock and kick me. To rub my nose, and every other aching part of me in my miserable excuse of a lifetime of doing stupid, immoral and just bad behaviors. My anguish wasn't physical as much as it was mental. My sins simply would not stop marching through my fevered head. Each stepped up to slap me, to demand my attention, to ridicule me, to withhold forgiveness- not that I wanted forgiveness. I own my life. I wanted a cession of the constant review of all I'd done wrong.

A time came during my weak, shallow breaths, when I realized all I had to do was not breathe in again and all the physical torment and the mental anguish would stop. The dog whined at the bedroom door. I drew a breath and got up to take care of his needs. (One of the problems with having a familiar- they know where your head is even if you don't.)

There's a story of a man who died and stood before the gate of his religion's paradise. He was deemed so banal as to have not earned a place among the good. Seek a place in hell, he was told. Standing before the keeper of the wicked and sinful, he was denounced as an embarrassment and denied hell. He ended up back among the living- a weak excuse for a man neither the sainted or the vile wanted any part of. Had the fellow been a Roman Catholic he most likely would have ended up in purgatory, a most unpleasant place from what I was told as a child being raised in that religion, but one where hope of being cleansed of one's transgressions, and eventual admittance to heaven existed.

I was in a purgatory, though being a pagan I understood that I had other options- a summer land, if I could pull myself together and work toward that. (The idea of singing praises to some god for all of eternity never did appeal to me. Better to build next season's garden and pass some knowledge, and a tasty tomato's seeds on to the next generation.)

As the aches, cough and fever dreams recede, and my senses of smell and taste mercifully return, I'm left shaken and weak. I've lost ten pounds from not eating and barely drinking. Physically, I've been through much worse. Mentally? I'm not looking forward to a rerun. People I know have died with COVID. Others continued their daily routines with barely a sniffle. One has lingered on oxygen in a hospital as I staggered through my worst days at home. Less than half my friends, family, extended family that have contracted this unnecessary disease were vaccinated against it. Some of the jabbed got hit as hard as the DW and I. Others shrugged it off quickly.

I've stopped watching my news sources because of the constant harangue to either get vaccinated or rebel against the governments and the drug companies that have made excellent use of this crisis. I'm tired. Too tired to work up a heartfelt curse to hurl at those who created this nightmare.

I heard an "expert" say, early on, COVID is now with us and everyone will eventually succumb to it.

My advice- decide now how to deal with this. Either follow the government's recommendation to get repeatedly vaccinated, or start using the "unapproved" alternatives. Waiting for COVID's arrival isn't even an idiot's plan.