Breathing, Alive-Again
A brief reflection on surviving two bouts of COVID (and floods).
Since my last post, I’ve seen three more major floods and had not one but two bouts of COVID, “rebounding” into a more severe manifestation of the infection after a course of Paxlovid. Today, after a slow, mile walk with my dog, Charlie, I realized that I’m finally approaching full health, though my head is still fuzzy, my voice still a bit lower, leftover gunk still resident deep in my lungs. And after last night’s soaking rain, my basement didn’t flood! Only a few small seepages found their way in through some thin, foundation cracks. So perhaps this plague of floods and illness is behind me (though part of me still braces for swarming locusts, flaming skies, rivers of blood…).
Both the flooding basement and COVID were firsts. I had, somehow, managed to avoid infection till now—even when my students fell ill early on in the pandemic, one just arrived from Wuhan who sat right next to me, or when two of my own children were sick with it and locked away in their bedrooms, an air purifier working overtime in the hallway outside their doors, meals left on stools like prison fare, masks, hand sanitizer, distance. My wife somehow avoided catching it from me on the first go-around. She pulled out all her pandemic goodies, Clorox wipes, KN94 masks…and moved in with one of the cats to our guest room. Neither of us paid enough attention to my sniffles that began a few days after I finished my 5-day course of Paxlovid and twice tested negative, and we thought she had avoided it again, as she was still not sick when I began to feel almost human after the 5 days of incessant sneezing, coughing, chest and head congestion of my second course. But alas, in that day or so between infections enough viral load must have found its way, and she is now on her second day of COVID agony, still living with a cat at the other end of the house.
I took Paxlovid because of my asthma and my age, though my doctor said the choice was mine. After complaining to her about the rebound effect (I went in knowing that 1 in 5 have a rebound; what I didn’t know was that the rebound could be more severe), I was reminded it may well have kept me out of the hospital. The 5 jabs of vaccine I’ve had over the past several years also surely played their part as well. Given that I was the sickest I have been in many years, decades even, I am deeply grateful to the determination and wizardry of modern medicine that found a way to make something so potentially deadly no more than a bearable (at times, just) annoyance.
I could feel the potency of this thing, though, a virus never seen by human immune systems, felt it bouncing through me from raging sore throat to unending sneezing, to chest-filled congestion that sent me reaching for my inhaler and into long, steamy shower sessions. From the outset it behaved differently than any illness I’ve ever had—and we know now that it has a way, especially when unchecked, of venturing into heart tissue, brain cells, muscle, to develop into a still unsolved mystery, “long COVID.”
I’m certainly glad it’s behind me, and especially glad to hear that for 90 days or so, at least, I have “super immunity.” And I’m more excited than ever to get back into a regular rhythm with my writing—here on Substack, on my Hemingway podcast, on the novel I’ve begun, on polishing up my book of fly fishing essays…. I woke this morning with several ideas, reached for my phone, opened a note and jotted them down. I took a deep breath, dumped some Kleenex into the trash, glad to feel my brain, my body rebounding into health, all at once happier than ever to be a breathing-alive-being with time to think and walk and bike and read and write…..
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”
Loved this, and welcome back to health, the world, and the writing life.
Get well soon. And yr wife, of course. How miserable.
A plus: Vaccinated people have a much, much lower incidence of long covid too.