The Riverside Press-Enterprise
So, I got, and beat back, COVID for the first time
Day after day, all these terrible news stories appear. Then our fluffy cat died just shy of his 13th birthday. And we got COVID-19. My life is one pick-up truck away from a country song.
After dodging droplets for the past two and a half years, The Wife and I both fell victim to COVID, although which variant we know not. Omicron? Delta? BA.4? BA.5? Cajun-style or super-chunk?
I only know we got the kind that makes you feel crummy for 10 days with a week-plus hangover.
The culprit was our 2-yearold grandson who shall go nameless both in this column and in my will since he has shown zero remorse for having infected his all-loving, all-caring grandparents who would do anything for him.
After a weekend spent snotting and sneezing all over us, we didn’t need the CDC or “CSI Sesame Street” to uncover the source of our infection.
While the boy tested negative, we are positive we got COVID from him.
So, now we’re members of the club we had hoped and labored never to join, with all the aches, pains, coughs, sneezing, wheezing and stigma that go along with it Yes, there is COVID stigma. After swabbing our nostrils and waiting the obligatory 15 minutes for the little line to appear, it was time to start calling people to let them know we were carriers.
The Wife and I made up a list of all the people we had seen during the period we were asymptomatic, a word that was not part of my vocabulary until February 2020. Fortunately, our list was very short.
Our social orbit has shrunk to pretty much each other. There’s something to be said for unpopularity.
Still, I have been playing softball with a bunch of really old people and I don’t dislike any of them enough to want them to die, so I alerted the powers-that-be to spread the word that I was unclean.
Thus far, everyone appears to be OK. But that doesn’t mean I’m in the clear.
I was grilled several times about my exact path to infection, and after testing negative for three days and clearing the quarantine period, I put my toe back into society only to physically repel people as I approached.
Mostly, it was subtle, a reflexive flinch, and I can’t say I blame them.
Once you had COVID you don’t want to get it again. And the chances are you will get it, and then get it again.
While we are vaxxed and double-boosted, we can’t spend the rest of our lives living in a bubble.
This is our new normal. To be as careful as possible, mask up indoors and in crowds, and trust Big Pharma will keep coming up with vaccines to keep us out of the cemetery.
Yet, while we’ve been pretty diligent throughout the pandemic, we haven’t been perfect.
I’ve had to fly multiple times during the worst of it and there was a Dodger game with 48,000 screaming around us, and Tierney Sutton at Catalina’s Jazz Club and multiple other events we decided to risk death to attend.
Like many of you, we rolled the dice from event to event only to come up snake eyes with our own grandson. Sometimes COVID comes in the cutest package.
The so-called Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1920 ran its course at the cost of 50 million (maybe more) lives. While COVID has not been that lethal, it’s likely to be with us for much longer than the Spanish Flu, maybe forever.
The Spanish Flu was fueled by millions of refugees, soldiers and sailors returning home after the First World War.
All those displaced people — frequently suffering malnutrition and other ailments — carried the sickness home with them.
Still, once home, they stayed home. That is not the case today. We travel everywhere all the time, from Antarctica
to space tourism; there are no more undiscovered places.
With globalized travel and trade comes globalized illness.
It has always been the case. Christopher Columbus, infamously if ignorantly, carried diseases to the New World for which the indigenous population had zero antibodies.
Less known is the New World returned the favor, sending syphilis, then unknown in Europe, back to the Old World when Columbus returned home.
There’s no going back from travel or trade.
There’s no going back on visits from adorable grandchildren, even if they’re out to get us.
But take my word on this, if you haven’t gotten COVID yet, don’t!
And if you see me coming, feel free to flinch.
I won’t take it personally.