This Sauce Is Weak

Sat 18 Nov 2023 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Long Covid | Posted by: Gavin

I have — hilariously to me — just had my first cold in 3 years or so. Having a cold while having long covid. Phew, I do not recommend it.

To get the generally unsaid part over with now rather than at the end (my own tl;dr), no matter when I die, mine will be a Covid-related death. To be brought so low by a basic cold demonstrated that my defenses/immune system/resources are weak sauce indeed and one energetic butterfly flapping its wings in a nearby town will be enough to tip me over. It sounds melodramatic but I’m over 50 and I read new studies every week about long Covid’s effects on my age group. So far, so not great. Check out the drop in my already low number of daily steps on the tiny chart. On the other hand, I am reading my first Vita Sackville-West novel, All Passion Spent, about an 88-year-old widow and very much enjoying every slow minute of her looking around and back at her life.

Anyway. What about lying around feeling even more rubbish than usual was hilarious? Just the very fact of picking up a cold despite taking the same Covid precautions as we’ve done for the last 3 years.

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve only seen people who are either masked or people who test for Covid when they arrive. Last week I saw some friends — wait, I know how this often goes, but this story doesn’t go that way: we hadn’t dropped our guards, everyone tested negative and then we took masks off. So, no, since they tested negative and I did daily tests Sunday to Wednesday, it seems unlikely I had Covid23.

But despite all that, despite testing whenever seeing friends, despite me masking if I go to Book Moon (I go to so few places, it’s a curtailed world, but at least I can read and write about it), after all that care, I caught a simple cold, ha! The less hilarious part was how it absolutely flattened me. So stop reading here if you don’t like icky stuff about bodies. Which is me, I’d like to stop reading.

Colds, as I learned during this pandemic, are also coronaviruses. On Thursday morning, which I think was Day 5 of the cold, I started improving. Those five days were a grind on the household. I stayed in bed a lot more or, as is usual, on the couch. Not that different from my new normal, but without my usual ability to potter around the kitchen and put together a quick meal. That morning I made some porridge and felt that sitting at the table to eat (instead of lying on the couch — how often I have to type those words; almost as often as I . . . ) was a huge and difficult accomplishment. I’m expecting a congratulatory telegram from the president to arrive any time. Maybe tomorrow.

After, as I shuffled — these feet would not be lifted — to the couch, my watch was showing my heart rate at 118 and when I lay down it was ~95. I was lying here doing nothing, resting after a 10-yard shuffle, thinking about picking up my laptop, looking at our dog, unimpressed with me as I was not scratching her, on the other of the couch, then . . . I started sweating, and sweating more until I was wiping sweat off my forehead. Or fivehead as our kid likes to say. I was a whole gleaming ball of fivehead.

Was I moving a pallet of books per the photo above from a few years ago (I do order optimistic print runs) or the terrible selfie in the cargo lift (ugh, too lazy to shave) from October 2021? Nope. I was lying around. Maybe working out the poisons? I had a few sessions of sweating it out this morning and now I’m improved.

I wrote somewhere in a previous long Covid post about my new ability to lie around and not do anything and this week I levelled that up. When I was sick as a kid I remember being so bored lying in bed. Now, despite not going to sleep, I could look out the window — or more likely, at a wall, the window being too stimulating — for a while. When I’m sick(er than my new normal, etc.) I often feel I could do what needs to be done. Walk the dog? Of course. Do this, do that? I could, but the lever (pick your own mechanical, literal, or technological metaphor) won’t flip. I could do it and there’s no impatience as to the why not, it’s just I don’t. There’s no Bartleby, no draft card or bra burning, just seeing what needs to be done and being aware that I am not doing it.

I became a different person 23 months ago. Curtailed, diminished, disabled. When I caught the cold I’d roll between the high point of perhaps if I kick this my body will return to what it used to be and the low point of what if this is my new, new normal? Every day I wake up curious to see what’s happened and it’s not until I stand up and my heart rate jumps that I find out how I am. Meh.

Looking at what’s to come leaves a little to be desired. It’s taken a couple of days to write this because there’s no good ending. I answer a some work emails and just I run out of juice. When I walk, I shuffle and this new, new normal is a bit painful. I watch TV and try not to miss walking or running or singing or dancing. When I walk I feel as if I have worked hard all day. Step count, faithful step count, proves me wrong. It is a bleak series of thoughts to take into the darkening of the year. There are millions like me, trying different meds (yep, still am), masking when they see anyone, unable to do most of what they used to. Kelly described me as profoundly changed. My vulnerability has placed huge limits on what she and our kid can do. I am chronically disabled and now it looks like I am one good infection away from real trouble.

How annoying. How are we — all of us, not just this household — supposed to live? Well, I certainly don’t have a neat and tidy answer to that.

If you read this far and want to help:

— Please wear a mask in public.
— Or: we publish good, slightly weird books that make great presents and my PR efforts are a bit weak this year.
— Or: donate & support our kid and Kelly’s mum who will be doing the annual Hot Chocolate Walk in a week or two.