Effects

I consider myself lucky in my dealings with Covid-19. Considering how many people lost loved their lives, lost loved ones, or lost months to illness I got lucky. 

It hit my family hard, to be sure. 

My infant daughter brought it home from daycare and when she started projectile vomiting it had to have taken a year or two off mine and my wife’s lives. It hit me a few days later and her last of all. I have never been sicker in my life than when I had Covid. I dealt with a handful of illnesses as a kid and then as a young adult but never like this. I have never vomited more in my life. Worse was that when I was a little better I had a kiddo to take care of and a wife, as my wife had taken care of me. 

We got hit hard but none of us wound up in the emergency room. None of us went on a vent. 

None of us died. 

None of this sounds really lucky but the way the virus hit people, it could have been far worse. 

I am changed though, we all are. 

My sense of taste has changed. Things I once liked to eat taste off and terrible now. Not everything, but some things are SO drastically different that it always surprises me. 

I get sick more easily now as my body tries to fully recover. I got a bad, bad flu that was similar to Covid and put me on my butt for half a week. Colds too hit me harder now. 

I lost a lot of strength and am still struggling with being able to do as much as I used to before catching Covid. 

My wife’s lungs are scarred and will take months to heal. She catches everything that comes through the house and it hits her harder as her already compromised immune system struggles to recover. 

We can’t say how the baby was affected other than to see that she gets sick, like her mother, with everything that is going around daycare. 

I cannot tell you how enraging it is to see people still espousing conspiracy theories. To see that the Republicans want to bring Fauci up on charges of some sort when they get power again. The dead people of course never died, or existed, or were going to die anyway. The idea that something that was killing so many, and took so much from so many of us has become a political talking point and a rally cry for make believe freedom warriors drives me crazy. 

No one WANTED Covid, or wanted it to damage the world as it has, but of course, it’s all made up, because it’s easier to believe in conspiracy than in truth. It’s easier to believe people you’ll never meet or anonymous people on the internet than it is to look with your own eyes and see what is happening. 

I still wear a mask as much as I can. That will change, as my wife doesn’t much wear hers anymore, but I don’t want to get sick again and don’t want to get the people I love sick. 

So I do what I can. 

The very least that I can. 

I don’t know what happened to common sense in this country. 

I don’t know what happened to common courtesy. 

I don’t know what happened to empathy. 

Were they ever things at all or merely phantoms of the fabled Americana we tell ourselves lies at the heart of us. 

The powder keg of division lies in our American hearts if anything does and while it wasn’t one man that put it there it was one man that surely lit that fuse. 

But this is nothing new. 

I remember September 11th and how frightened we were. How the gas prices rose immediately to gouge us. How we all jumped to conclusions and at shadows. How we joined hands and hearts to support one another in horror but how quickly we let go of those hands and grabbed bricks to punish our enemies. 

Jingoism and revenge were the flavors of the day and suddenly we were united in our hate. 

A hate that never quite went away because it’s always been there. 

The American soul is sick, the effects of too much greed, too much political exploitation, and too many drinks from of our own made up narrative that God gave us this land. 

We are drunk on our own stash and we are poisoned from our own well. 

Together we can figure anything out. 

Apart, we are what we are now, a wounded animal that backed itself into a corner and fears every shadow, be it friend or foe. 

The effect of an illness that has long taken root. 

…c…