COVID-19 is back and ready to ruin your week
Guess who’s back?
COVID-19.
Guess who has it?
Me. Again.
Yeah, I know, this novel coronavirus never actually went away after what was a pretty terrible couple of years. But there was a while there where it felt pretty irrelevant to me personally. Kind of like how I know the Backstreet Boys are still technically a band, but a lot of the members are now popping up in low-budget commercials on local TV stations, so there’s no real danger of them winning a Grammy or anything.
COVID-19 felt like that to me for a while. But now it’s on a comeback tour, and it’s ready to ruin your life. Or at least your week.
I should have known I was in trouble when I flew across the country recently, because planes are gross and the soundtrack of that particular flight was sneezes and coughs from all over the coach cabin. And yet a few days later when I returned home and started to get clammy and sneezy, I assumed it was just another cold brought home from school by my children.
I thought it would be courteous, however, to reassure my travel companions that I had not exposed them to the virus, so I dusted off an old COVID-19 test stuffed in the back corner of the medicine cabinet and swabbed my nasal cavities, mixed the solution, and dripped three drops of fresh slime onto the test. No two lines have ever appeared quicker. I would not be surprised if I set some sort of COVID rapid-result record.
Then I did the logical thing: I panicked.
Because honestly, who even knows what the isolation protocol is in 2023? I eventually found the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which read like a riddle being told to you by a troll guarding a bridge:
“A positive test have ye? Isolate ye must for two days plus three. Five days inside yer been? Cover thy face ye must for ten.”
After a number of trigonometry calculations that I had to solve with a brain that has not been firing on all cylinders, I determined I needed to stay isolated inside for five days, and that’s when the real pain began.
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For me, the physical symptoms of the virus have been unpleasant — in the past few days, I’ve Googled “why are my nostrils burning,” “weird metal taste” and “COVID toes” (I don’t recommend looking up that last one). I also fell sound asleep immediately after drinking an energy drink.
But the real pain for me this time around has been having to reschedule the approximately 5,000 appointments and meetings I had planned for this week. Remember during the early COVID-19 days when those of us who weren’t sick — or taking care of someone who was — were kind of enjoying staying in pajamas all day and baking bread, and we said we were going to slow down and live a quieter life once the pandemic was over? Turns out none of us were serious about that and the world on this side of COVID-19 is busier than it’s ever been. We just haven’t noticed because, like the frog being boiled in the pot of increasingly warm water, our return to normalcy has been gradual.
I have had to make more phone calls this week than in the past three years combined, and I don’t like making phone calls even when I’m feeling good. In this state of feeling unwell, sounding like an injured toad, and having a brain that’s functioning at like 7%, I’ve had to call schools, dermatologist offices and physical therapy clinics. And it has not gone well. Partly because of the aforementioned issues, partly because of my phone anxiety, and also because the soonest next appointment for some of these places is in 2027.
When I first got infected in 2021, the world was still moving slow enough that staying home caused little disruption. But in the year 2023 me being sick is now very much everyone else’s inconvenience. As nice as everyone is about making accommodations for my isolation, I know it’s a hassle to have to pull out the schedule book and pencil in new times. And as a people pleaser, that’s a pretty tough pill to swallow.
Some meetings have been moved to Zoom, some appointments have been rescheduled, and others are just gone forever, but figuring it all out has been a Herculean task that I’ve had to perform with the strength of a newborn baby.
I’m lucky my case is relatively mild, as it seems to be for most people getting this latest variant, and physically it’s been OK, burning nostrils, weird taste, COVID toes and caffeine-proof exhaustion aside.
But I’m here to warn everyone the world does not have time for you to get sick in 2023.
Prepare accordingly.
