From the Depths
I came back to my hilltop last week with a cold. It wasn’t COVID, it was a cold. I tested for COVID on Tuesday morning and again (COVID can be a tricky bastard) yesterday…Monday…since we had guests coming and I felt I owed it to them to be sure of my infectiousness. I had also heard from friend Gary in West Hollywood that what he had thought was a cold upon returning from his Mediterranean Cruise last week, turned out, several days later, to be COVID after all. These are challenging times for us all epidemiologically speaking. We have lived through two and a half years of COVID scares that have at times involved us watching daily hospitalization and mortality charts like hawks with the realization that our entire healthcare system was on edge and not so available for us if we needed care other than COVID, certainly for voluntary procedures, but even sometimes for very necessary or urgent procedures. Luckily, neither Kim nor I had any of those, but we did have family and friends in those places, as one might expect with an aging cohort like us and ours. We got through all of that, more or less, and then have had to consider carefully when its safe to “go back into the water” of traveling, using personal care services, seeing friends and family freely, wearing masks, then wearing special N95 masks of higher filtration quality. We have also had to learn how to handle other people who do or don’t wear masks in public places as mask mandates have gone away and vaccination recordation has more or less gone back into the back pocket of the passport wallet along with your evidence of Tetanus and Bubonic Plague vaccination.
When I did get my perfunctory case of COVID, which I suspect but am not certain, was the Omicron strain (who knew we all should have taken more college biology), I got it in May when I had been on a motorcycle trip to Moab, Utah and had passed through a number of Native American reservations, where the bugs were particularly prevalent for some reason I have not fully researched, I suspected I was getting sick while in Canyonlands and by the time we had returned to civilization in Las Vegas (strange definition of “civilization” don’t you think?) I had not only fully blossomed in my symptoms, but had managed to infect several of the car passengers who made the trip back with me for convenience…or so they all thought. I did the Urgent Care run for some ungodly $800 fee, which they chased me for for six months until I conceded that it was easier to pay it than wait on the Muzak line for Medicare or Aetna Supplemental Part D Insurer and their minions to give me the healthcare two-step run-around. But here’s the thing, the COVID symptoms came and went within 48 hours and I was left to only five or six more days of morning ritual testing and the frustration of waiting for my system to clear itself of the virus fully. As far as illnesses go, it was what Trump would call a nothing-burger.
So imagine my surprise this week when I came down with what we have always called a common cold. I know it isn’t COVID, and I had my 2022 regular flu shot (the super duper one for seniors like me), so about all that’s left is that this is just a cold. It started with the normal sniffle and never really went to full sore throat or real aches and pains, just a stuffy nose for two days until I got myself off of the NyQuil. But now for the last week, I’ve been trying to lose what I would call a variable chest rattle that has sounded for that week that it would be gone in the morning. And then it isn’t gone and I have a coughing fit until I can down some cough medicine and then it quiets down finally. That’s for a little while, but so far it doesn’t want to go away for good.
You know the old expression that a watched pot never boils? Well, by extension, a watched cold or cough never goes away either. And I am watching this damn thing every time I go into a coughing fit where I just can’t quite have a “productive” cough. Isn’t that a funny turn of phrase? If it was productive, it would produce a nasty glob of sputum that can sometimes amaze even an old nose-picker like me with its rich coloring, but it rarely seems to. This cough, hack, wheeze (especially when lying on my left side, which is, naturally, the side I tend to sleep on) produces little if anything except a temporary bout of light-headedness as I take a moment to catch my breath. I get right to that uncomfortable edge which is not entirely unlike when I was eight and tried to do a football placekick on our street in Madison, Wisconsin when all I had to wear was standard issue tied leather shoes that look like something Forrest, Forrest Gump might wear. The shoelaces had several knots in them since who could be bothered buying replacement shoelaces when you are eight (and Mom was busy in graduate school), so I kicked the ball full throttle and suspect that I went higher into the air than the ball in the best of Charlie Brown fashion as Lucy pulls the football away. Smackdown like Hulk Hogan in the ring, right on my back, but unlike Hulk on the buoyant canvas, this was hard macadam and the wind just left my body in one big whoosh.
Do you remember that moment of bug-eyed realization that you had done something finally that might not be recoverable? That panic that sets in when you truly cannot breathe thanks to the involuntary vacuum your idiotic placekicking zeal had summoned up in your lungs? You literally plumb the depths of your lungs and then your soul, looking for an answer and a way to put your eyes back in their sockets. It isn’t really that bad when I cough, but I fear that I am falling into that old trap again where I convince myself that I’m getting better and am a mere overnight away from a full cough-free recovery. Remember when you didn’t wake up at 5:32am with a deep-seated and raggedy cough that rattles at you on the side of the bed from the depths of your chest? That is what tomorrow morning is going to be like, I swear.
Unfortunately, I have the added problem that I may not be able to go quickly to sleep tonight because it is that fateful day we have all committed to our nation that we will cast our votes in the midterm elections. Most of the midterms in my life have been somewhere between boring and mildly consequential. Is that me or did things really change this much over the past few years? I suspect that its some of both, but I would be prepared to suggest that its mostly the latter. We hear every day about our divided nation and our divided world and it doesn’t seem to be an exaggeration. It’s sort of like this cold I’ve contracted this past week. It initially seems like a mild affliction that will pass soon enough and then it just doesn’t go away. And the next thing you know, you are coughing up your lungs wondering where all that shit in your lungs came from. I don’t know how our country got so hateful and I believe the analogy to the nasty sputum I am hacking up regularly is very apt. I find the vehemence and the unwillingness to listen and compromise the most disappointing aspect of the political phlegm in my throat. I have no idea yet where today’s election will leave us but I hate giving up hope. Maybe I will go to sleep tonight and both my cough and my country will all be better in the morning. I certainly hope so from the depths of my soul.