COVID Blogging

Been meaning to write this tweet since I was sitting in the parking lot mid-morning on Sunday. When out of the doors walked a nurse in full-on Andromeda Strain/Outbreak/x-files contamination gear.  I would have taken a picture of the strange juxtaposition, but I was on hold with the people inside….looks like I've already extended myself past the threshold of a tweet, oh well, blog it is. 

But I will never forget that feeling, of having to tell myself, to remind myself this is reality. This is Lincoln, Nebraska, the town I grew up in, only a few blocks from where I used to get overpriced wings and play trivia. A woman in a yellow space suit was walking towards a car in the parking lot like she was one of those waitresses on rollerskates in the 50s. 

Soon it was my turn, the masks I brought, that my job provided me seemed stupid since the test invovled having what seemed like a tiny q-tip on a flimsy peice of plastic shoved to the back of both my nasal cavities. 

A lot sooner than I thought, it was all over and I was headed home. 

I had awoken in the middle of the night with fever, chills, body aches, a headache, my productive wet cough and accompanying wheeze had turned dry, unproductive and unfamiliar.

I took my temp; a slight fever, but all I cared about was how I couldn’t get warm.

I managed to get back to sleep after a round of Tylenol, but my temp had crept up since then.

I called my Asthma doctor in the morning, the same one I’ve seen since I was five years old. He was on call and I talked to him on speakerphone. He wanted to do a respiratory viral panel, but because of the world, as it is now, no one would do one without a COVID screen first.

That’s how I ended up in the parking lot staring at a nurse who looked like an alien stepping out of a spaceship. A glaring visual, I must be hallucinating against the backdrop of an otherwise beautiful spring day.

I’ve been working from home since approximately mid-March, but since the test on Sunday, I haven’t left my room except late at night and once while everyone else was asleep.

I told my wife where all I had been, what I had touched.

I laid here and binge-watched Westworld and finished Post Mortal both of which I wouldn’t recommend to anyone in today's circumstances.

I forced myself to discover Comedy Bang Bang which is good, but I’m not in the mood for it, like a child pushing away nasty tasting medicine. I know it’s what I need, but I don’t want it.

It’s amazing what comes back to me in times like this.

I’ve never had mono, but I think I might know what it’s like. I remember how I felt in high school when my pneumonia got bad enough I had to stay in the hospital.

Thanks to my increased steroid use and my, what I presume to be, pneumonia I am reminded of what it feels like to have eyelids heavy, but a body that wants to move so bad, and then to have the opposite. Eyelids that can’t close, but a body that can only lay in a weird flat position along the bottom of my bed staring at the ceiling and smelling my own BO.

I’m not painting a pretty picture here, but at least I’m painting.

Paintings can be beautiful, even if they are during someone's ‘blue’ period. Even if they depict a toddler being talked out of his dad's room despite his father's desire to embrace him; the child crying because he misses his dad. These are heavy times my fellow breathers and even under an ocean of Prozac. I cried about that painting yesterday. Tears and all.

My canvas is a smartphone, my brush an ergonomic keyboard I have positioned diagonally off my hip as I lay on my side.

About a week ago, I wrote a blog I thought would help people in these times, and I stand by those words. I’ll be surprised if the test comes back positive, but either way, I’m exhausted and wanted to send this out to the endless black void that is the internet... At some point, I’ll have to get up and email into work again. Even though work is really just at the end of the bed, I lack the energy to do anything more than this, and even this is taxing. It took everything I had to write the email that excused me from work today, to just sit and type.

Last Updated: 4/7/2020 7:24 PM