Third COVID-Versary

Hey, Yesterday-Self... We really need to talk.

Image by Amanda Vick on Unsplash

Year Zero: No Worse Than a Cold

You stand at the counter in a hotel room in Olympia, Washington as two pink lines appear on a COVID test. The conference you were attending has kicked you out for showing symptoms. You are alone and free of obligations, woozy but upright, bored out of your mind. Outside and just down the hill stretches Marathon Park where Capital Lakefair offers up carnival rides, live music, and funnel cake with all the toppings.

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July 13, 2022 - Year One: Admonition

Do not open that door. Take off your visor, untie your sneakers. Grab a bottle of Gatorade from the mini-fridge, pull the curtains, and get your ass back in bed. Open your laptop just long enough to delay your flight home. The work emails can wait. The PBS documentary can wait.

If only you had made everything wait.

If only you had investigated the dangers, had engaged your curiosity to learn about Long COVID beyond impaired taste and smell. If only you had found the courage to ignore the fatphobia hissing that you would sacrifice “fitness” if you stopped moving. If only you’d asked your doctor to send a Paxlovid prescription to the local pharmacy.

If only.

If only.

If only.

Turn around or you’re in for it. Turn around or you’re done for.

You’re still walking out that door? You’re doing this to yourself?

Look what you’ve done to yourself.

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July 13, 2023 - Year Two: Hunger

Step just outside the door and find a bench in the shade. Locate yourself in the here and now, breathe in the air of a place. This could be the last hotel you stay in, the last time you look through trees and across a lake at a state capitol building.

Savor every morsel of it. Nothing you understood as given ever truly was.

You will seek to know her, the terrible condition who attacks you from all sides. Research newsletters will reveal her proclivity for decimation. When you join an ME/CFS Reddit sub, you will read with horror how others have failed to keep her at bay.

Protecting what remains of your precious capacities will claim all of your attention. As you find your way into the promise of smallness, you will invite friends for quiet games or a movie night. You will dust off your sketchbook and start doodling. You will listen to a podcast about living with chronic illness and learn to meditate, then eat a warm bowl of oatmeal with strawberries before taking a delicious, restorative nap.

You will commit to a plan for quitting work while you can still walk unaided. For nine focused months, you will gather every possible piece of documentation to submit a long-term disability application.

You will wait three more months.

You will be denied.

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July 13, 2024 - Year Three: Bargaining

Fine. You can put on your visor and go for that walk to the lake, but take breaks as you go, and come back in an hour. If you crawl into bed right after, she might let you cross an item or two off your to-do list.

Clock the fatigue as you check your work emails and chip away at the mounting pile of tasks. Maybe if your neurologist and HR sign off on a telework accommodation, she’ll permit you to hold down your job.

Clock the fatigue as you check your work emails and chip away at the mounting pile of tasks. Take an two-hour nap and she might or might not clear your head enough to make a meal so you can sit down with your family. But when you wake up, she tells your son he can find eggs and tortillas in the fridge, he’s on his own for dinner.

Clock the fatigue as you check your work emails and chip away at the mounting pile of tasks. Maybe your promise to use a wheelchair and abstain from alcohol will compel her to let you attend your son’s graduation. But probably not. How about a conversation with a neighbor? Nope. You give up all sugars and refined foods, practice diaphragmatic breathing, darken the house and wear noise-canceling headphones. She still drags you through each day with concrete in your veins and sludge in your brain.

Commit utterly to your end of the deal. Conserve every gram of energy. Put away the sketchbook. Give up on sitting at a table with family. Stop inviting friends for visits, even brief ones. Abandon all outings. Silence all music. Rollator to take the dog out then nap. Smoothie for lunch then nap. One weekly shower then nap.

Clock the fatigue as you check your work emails and chip away at the mounting pile of tasks. Stumble to bed for the night. Sleep in as long as possible. Wake up after 8 hours and clock the fatigue.

Won’t she please let you hold down a job? Won’t she please stop making you sicker? You’ve upheld every term negotiated.

Then you look again and see your name is the only one on the contract. It turns out she never signed at all.

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July 13, 2025 - Year Four: Shared Governance

Past berating, past begging, past every laughable attempt at subjugation and every desperate demand for fairness, what next? Here on the other side?

Welcome the unwelcome. You are in it together, this illness and you. Her vote counts as much as yours and her needs now compel your actions. If you resist, her tantrums will upend you while she remains standing.

She does not care to earn your trust but you must give yours willingly. She will tell you what she needs in fractions and demand you decipher the whole. She will take far more than her share of everything you thought was yours and leave you to replenish the larder.

There is no way around it. You have to believe it is possible to cohabitate in this strange new land, because what is the alternative? It is on you to reach a fragile peace, and on you to keep it once you have.

So open the hotel room door.

Invite her in.

Hand her a bottle of Gatorade from the mini-fridge.

Lay down together, one on each bed.

Settle in for whatever comes next.

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