Covid on My Own

I was in my early 70’s when Covid 19 came along, and Covid was in its earliest stages… it had only hit the national news as an ‘item’ the day I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and it got me!

I’d seen the announcement of the presence of the disease on the news early that evening. We were on our way out, after supper, to the opening of an art show in which I had some work. We intended to stop for groceries on the way home. The art show was so steeped in Covid 19 news that we didn’t stay long. Hearsay and conjecture are two of my least favorite things.

To our surprise, the food store, normally practically vacant in the early evening was a-swarm with shoppers. I’d never seen it that packed, not even prior to major holidays. And, for some reason, toilet paper had become the item of the day. Almost everyone’s cart had at least two of those gigantic 12-roll packages in them. Thankfully, my needs were few, so I headed over to the ‘refrigerated’ aisle which was just as packed with people as everywhere else and, just a bit ahead of me, in the aisle, was, among the throng, a store employee pulling behind him a long, high — maybe 7 feet high — and narrow — perhaps about 2 feet wide — metal cart on wheels. Five of the possible sides of the cart were enclosed in much the same way that a shopping cart would be; the other side was open from top to bottom; it had to be, because that was the way that an employee would access the contents of the cart in order to place them on shelves or, as was the case here, in the refrigerated cases that held all the dairy items like margarine and butter and cheeses and… eggs.

This particular cart was filled — bottom to top — with cartons of eggs.

I do not know how what happened, happened… but something happened, and when it did, in a flash, the cart fell backwards into the aisle. The air above us all was suddenly filled with air-born eggs and their abandoned cartons. Almost immediately it began raining eggs. Screams filled the air… along with, I had to imagine, a few days later, the virus that everyone was so afraid of.

I don’t know about what happened with all those folks, all I know is that at some point shortly thereafter my body began to manifest all of the symptoms I’d heard about. Knowing that the immune system has no ‘pump’ so to speak — (my parents were physicians) — I got horizontal. I stayed that way for quite some time. For a couple of days, I moved from bed to couch. My symptoms worsened. My husband wanted me to go to the doctor. My daughter wanted me to go to the doctor. I rebelled. I knew, that old as I was, any doctor would pop me right into the hospital and that was never going to happen. Never. Hospitals, for me, are where people go to get dead. You want germs? Go visit someone in a hospital. Also, I can still hear my father’s words echoing: “I see more people in the morgue from physician’s errors than from anything else.”

Nope. Not me. I lay on the couch and found, on You Tube, a lot of information on the disease as well as one doctor who was demonstrating breathing exercises specifically designed to deal with this particular condition. Breathing was about all I could do. I had exactly zero energy. So I watched and I learned and I just about drove my husband crazy because this was no quiet affair. It sounded a bit like I was hacking up a weasel. I had zero energy. When I walked, my feet never left the floor. Turtles move more rapidly.

But I got better! In less than a month I was almost normal although it did take me about four months to get back to full speed which, for me, is pretty quick. And here I am. And that’s that.