It took 4 years, but covid-19 finally got to me

I’d begun to think I was a true outlier, that I’d been born with a rare zig or zag in my DNA that gave me immunity to covid-19.

Four years into the pandemic — or I guess I should say, a year or two years into the post-pandemic — my wife, Liz, and I were the only people I knew who’d never had the coronavirus. A lot of our friends, even the careful ones, have gotten it two or three times.

Well, you can check me off that special-DNA-protection list. So far Liz still is virus free.

But I’m on Day Seven of the bug, which suddenly showed up unannounced and uninvited. I’m still testing positive, even though I feel 95% recovered. According to the protocols, I should continue masking a few more days, to protect Liz and others.

The first couple of days I felt pretty punk. I was coughing and weak. Couldn’t stay awake, and couldn’t sleep because of the worst sinus congestion I’ve ever experienced. No air could pass through my clogged nostrils. I’d doze off, then jolt upright, hacking and gasping for breath.

Given that I’m over 65, overweight, diabetic and hypertensive — a perfect storm for complications — I asked for the antiviral Paxlovid. By Day Three or Four my symptoms had eased off. By Day Five they were negligible.

I isolated those first five days from everybody, including my wife, which is perhaps why she hasn’t come down sick so far, unless she really does have a magic gene.

Here’s something I learned: sitting for five solid 24-hour days in a room by yourself — in this case a room with no TV! — gives you lots of time to think. Part of that time I didn’t even feel up to reading a book or playing mahjong on my laptop.

For long stretches I just sat in a recliner and stared. Mostly what I thought about, as it turned out, was covid-19.

I speculated about how it finally found my door. I thought about the people we lost early in the pandemic, and about what the sick suffered in those days before vaccines and antivirals. They died alone and terrified, on ventilators. I wondered how many of the dead could’ve lived if we hadn’t politicized a stupid virus as we now seem to politicize absolutely anything … including, currently, if you can believe it, dog training. (See: tinyurl.com/2jmtkt7r)

Yes, friends, in the latest culture wars dustup, the manner in which you train your precious Fifi or Fideaux reveals everything your neighbors need to know about you. If you rely on positive reinforcement, you’re clearly an un American commie creampuff, while if you use coercion or discipline, you’re a rightwing patriarchal colonialist.

Sad to say, my fellow travelers, I’m not making this up.

Oh that I were.

The coronavirus killed my all-time favorite singer-songwriter-poet, John Prine, whose music had comforted, delighted and instructed me since I was in high school. I never met the man, but I grieved when he died as if I’d lost a brother. The world has seemed off-center ever since.

I lost a former brother-inlaw, who was my age. Steve was one of the more decent, and funnier, guys I knew.

He’d been married several times, but remained close to his children, grandchildren, stepchildren and step-grandchildren. As I prepared his eulogy, one of his stepdaughters, smiling and crying at the same time, told me, “He might divorce the women, but he never divorced us kids.”

I wish he were here to coach a few more little league baseball teams.

I still don’t understand why polemicists turned covid-19 into a culture wars Armageddon. It was unconscionable. Thousands died while gasbags sold people’s lives for TV ratings and political capital.

Certainly, the public health community made mistakes, but that’s inevitable when you’re racing to get in front of a deadly disease the world’s never seen before. Overall, the medical community performed heroically.

The bulk of the advice they gave and the medicines they developed made basic sense to me. Wear a good mask, just as surgeons do every day in every operating room in the world. Avoid crowds (advice I’d already lived by for six decades, being an introvert). Get vaccinated, because if the vaccine doesn’t keep you from catching the virus, it’ll lessen the consequences. As your vaccine wears off, get a booster, like you do with your annual flu shot.

Sitting in my isolation room last week, I thought about how well that advice served me.

Yeah, I finally got the coronavirus. But thanks to the luck of not getting it in 2020, say, and thanks to the hard work of public health officials, and thanks to vaccines and antivirals, I knew I wasn’t likely to end up on a ventilator or in a coffin, even though I’m an at-risk patient.

I felt confident that, as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to say, if the good Lord was willing and the creeks didn’t rise, I’d be fine in a week or two. In 2020, that would have been way iffier. Most people bounced back from covid-19 even then, but I’m not sure I would’ve been one of them.

And so, as I waited in that room, studying the walls, I was mainly just grateful for those who did their best to help us all rather than divide us.