Our COVID update

Someone is waiting for us to recover!

Here’s the deal with COVID:  just when you think you’re done with the disease, you discover it is not done with you.

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I wrote that sentence and suddenly thought, I need to lie down, and went upstairs and took a two-hour nap.  It was 3 p.m., and I thought I’d sit down and write the column, but COVID had other ideas.  It’s been exactly one month since I showed my first symptoms of the disease – no appetite at dinnertime, woke up the next morning with a 100.5 fever.  Same for Tracy, with a two-day lag.  We both felt really shitty for a week, started to feel a little better at 10 days, but there has been no bam! You’re better!

Not with this disease. What we’ve come to think of as the long-haul stage of our breakthrough COVID has set in, and boy are we glad that we got vaccinated early in the Spring.  Both of us occasionally experience shortness of breath – not as bad as the first week, but it’s noticeable – and we both have regular bouts of fatigue, like I experienced this afternoon.  You never know when it’s going to hit.  Sometimes it’s profound.  You feel like if you don’t sit down, you’re going to drop.  But more often, it just comes on as you go about your day. 

“Fatigue” is the right word for it, too.  It’s not tiredness.  It’s exhaustion of a unique kind.  You know that you don’t feel right, and then whatever you’re doing feels impossible.  It has hit me as I’ve stood at the stove waiting on a pot of linguine to boil.  All of a sudden I just can’t do it anymore.  I need to sit down.  It has hit as I walk across the lawn outside to where I park my car about 50 yards from the back door.  Suddenly I feel as if I don’t get to the car and sit down, I’m going to have to stop and sit down on the ground.  Sometimes I’ll lean up against a building or a wall for a moment, and then I can move on, but not like I usually do.  I can move on in what I have come to call a fatigued way. 

The strange thing is that when you sit down or lie down it goes away fairly quickly, and it might not return for the rest of the day, or it will return in a different form.  Sometimes I’ll get over the bout of fatigue, but when I walk upstairs my legs feel really weak.  It’s almost as if you can feel they’re not getting enough oxygenated blood or something.  And then, like this afternoon, I laid down for a couple of hours and when I got up, it was gone – the fatigue, the weak legs, all of it.

Tracy experiences persistent headaches and occasional bouts of nausea along with the fatigue.  She describes the headaches as debilitating and the nausea as highly unpleasant.  Sometimes she gets sick to her stomach, sometimes not.  Lying down helps, but basically she just has to wait it out.  

We both spend at least some time each day waiting out the fatigue.  We both find that we can’t complete normal tasks we usually do every day and feel like if we don’t sit down right now, we’ll fall down.  Neither of us has actually fallen, but we live in a very small studio and a chair or the sofa is never more than 10 or 15 feet away.

But we can’t spend all day every day within 15 feet of a chair.  I drove to Riverhead the other day, about 25 miles distant, and took the opportunity while I was there to go to Target for the first time since the spring.  I was okay walking from the parking lot to the building, and okay for the first 20 minutes or so that I walked through the store shopping.  But suddenly, when I was at the end of the store furthest from the check-out counters and door, the fatigue hit.  I stood there in the coffee aisle, and I couldn’t check the bags of coffee anymore to see which were ground and which were beans.  It seemed like the check-out counters were a mile away.  If I hadn’t been pushing the cart, leaning on it as I walked, I think I would have had to look for a place to sit down.

Neither of us feel like we’ve recovered in the way you feel after you’ve had the flu and gotten over it.  The fatigue and other symptoms have been persistent.  There have been days when each of us has felt almost normal, like maybe we’re shaking this thing off, and then the next day it’s back.  Both of us have had to spend part of each day in bed, the way you do when you’re sick with the flu or a cold.  But then we’ll be able to get up and fix dinner and read or watch a show and go to bed.

But nothing has been normal for the past month with either of us.  The first days after we had been diagnosed with COVID and felt really sick were rough enough, but the weeks after that have been almost as bad in a different way.  Being fatigued makes you feel continually weak, like you’re a half-person, not fully taking your place in the world.  Maybe the worst part of it for both of us is the uncertainty of when it will end, when will we start to feel truly better and able to resume our lives. 

You feel like this virus is still alive, and it’s taking away your strength and your ability to function like a human being.  It’s like living with something evil and awful inside you, and there is no pill you can take to kill it.  You wish it was something you could could just recover from like every bothersome disease you’ve ever had, but its dawning on both of us that we can’t. 

This is a vicious disease.  It has killed 670,000 people in this country.  Thanks to the vaccine, it didn’t kill us, but the damage it is still doing is present in our lives every day.  If I can’t wish it gone, maybe I can write it away.  I’m going to try.