How I try to cope with COVID anxiety

I’ve changed how I feel about COVID a few times. First, I thought it was a little disturbing but I’m healthy and don’t hang out in big crowds (it’s been years since I went to the movies or a bar or a concert; yes, I have a boring life).

Then Queens became the bull’s eye for COVID. My husband (who is in his early 70s) practices dentistry five blocks from the hospital where the virus exploded.

He’s doubly vaccinated (and finally, after much argument, boosted), but he feels that the concern about the virus is much ado about nothing. He rarely wore a mask even when it was required, and is furious we have to do it again. And mandates? “No one’s going to tell me what to do.” I remind him he’s not four anymore.

I’m very lucky. I know no one who has died from this sickness. But as each day went by, and the numbers edged, then skyrocketed, I began to become a little more anxious.

My anxiety reached a peak when my son decided to go on a trip with two friends who had been exposed to a third friend who’d tested positive. Six hours in a closed car with people breathing on each other (with masks? Yeah, right), then camping out in sleeping bags on the floor of the friend’s dorm room. Six feet of distancing. Ha ha.

We won’t know for about a week whether Phillip will test positive. It’s true his two friends who were exposed don’t have it — yet. But it can take up to two weeks to show its ugly face and the doctors say we’re all going to get it. I figure our chances are up. And then, I was exposed. A friend I saw last week now has it.

Of course, they’re saying this seems to be a less serious illness than Delta. But who really wants it?

So, what does it boil down to? Luck, I guess. That may not be enough for some but I learned long ago, with two cancer diagnoses, and then one for my husband, that no one knows what’s coming next.

I try not to watch CNN when I’m at the gym, cases rising 106 percent, hospitalizations up 20 percent, but deaths down 4 percent. A new study says that Omicron doesn’t seem to affect the lungs, as Delta does, cutting down on scarring and inability to breathe on your own.

Here’s how I try to cope. I take deep breaths and think about something nice, a trip to a beach or a big dish of pralines and cream, without the calories. I’m going to try to turn the TV off when they start talking about surges, and skip the headlines with “COVID” in them.

Let’s face it. Some things you can control, some things you can’t. So, what can we do? Most important of all, take it a day at a time. We only have the present, after all.

As a philosopher of physics at Columbia University beautifully put it in the New York Times on New Year’s Day, “we’re all waiting to get back to our stories.”

And the simplest? Breathe, and be grateful for what you have, at this very moment, in your life.