To paraphrase Anne Hathaway’s character in “The Dark Knight Rises,” “There’s a storm coming…and you better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how we were so stupid as to have created this next great self-inflicted mess.” See, I told you? Paraphrased, liberties taken.
After all of the insane stories we’ve heard about children with sniffles being sent home from school and adults from work, and being told not to come back without negative Covid test results, I suppose nothing should surprise me. After hearing about countless friends and their relatives who have previously known medical conditions, long before Covid, which attack the respiratory system, still being told that they were presumed positive for Covid after negative test results, I suppose I should have been better prepared. But when it actually happens to you, it does have more of an impact.
While we can’t prove it, the RAD show is convinced, as are some of our doctors in hindsight, that we were on the front lines of Covid in early January, of 2020. Over the course of much of the month, we passed around an illness amongst the show that decimated Dawn for a week, kept gnawing at Brandon’s throat and lungs, and gave me 4 straight days of never-ending headaches and fatigue. At the time, we merely called it “the ick,” only to find out by June, that between us, we each had all of the potential symptoms of what was, by then, known as Covid-19.
I’ve got a bad feeling we’re about to do this to ourselves all over again. Only this time, the price could be much higher and the suffering even greater if we don’t make some serious adjustments, which we all know we won’t.
My week started Monday morning at 2AM with a scratchy throat; nothing at all serious, but worrisome enough that with Dawn having a medical procedure scheduled for Friday, I had an obligation to ensure that I hadn’t caught a breakthrough case of Covid, which if she got, would cancel her surgery. Six hours later, I felt like absolute hell. Still with the sore throat, now a headache added in, and total fatigue. By noon, my wife Christina was feeling crappy, but with totally different symptoms, including nausea, which I never had. Eventually, she started having bouts of dizziness, while I introduced some lovely intestinal problems into the mix. Over the next four days, she improved quicker than I did, but we both spent more time sleeping than we probably have all year combined. At no time did either of us have any sort of respiratory or congestion issues (this is important to the story).
Oh, and we both tested negative to Covid…multiple times. But guess what? We had Covid. At least, that’s what every god-damned single person on the planet kept telling me.
Let me ask you a few things:
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- If the tests are that unreliable, why are we even using them? If we’re just going to self-assert and demand that everyone and anyone who gets at all sick in 2021 has Covid, why don’t we all just walk around saying that we’re Covid positive all of the god-damned time?
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- If the number one, main symptom, that is consistent throughout all cases of Covid are respiratory issues (thus the ventilators being used in hospitals), and that’s the one and only symptom neither of us had, then how in the hell did we have Covid?
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- If we’ve both been vaccinated, (and we have), if we’re both otherwise healthy, (and we are), if we both rarely if ever get sick at all, (and we don’t), and if breakthrough cases are mild, why are we still presumed to have had Covid when this is as sick as either of us has been in as long as we can remember?
Could it be possibly…that….wait for it…we didn’t fucking have Covid? And that maybe everyone should stop telling us that we did and start to prepare for the next big thing, whatever this may be? Because we’re all looking the wrong way, and it’s going to start costing people a lot more than merely a week off of work.
To be clear…we were sick, period. I realize that getting sick in America is now a fate worse than death that we’re all terrified of, but that’s what it was. Being sick. At least that’s what it was for us…but given our otherwise good health, her youth, and our proclivity to bounce back quicker than most, whatever we had is something to be reckoned with and taken seriously.
But here’s the thing; no one will help you do so, because they’re all terrified of Covid. Even if you’ve tested negative, most doctor’s offices won’t see you in person, and most Urgent Care places and hospitals will send you to a special department to get yet another Covid test before speaking with you, despite you feeling like you want to die (and having no business driving yourself around anyway). And then, in the end, they’ll tell you, no matter how many times that you’ve been tested, that they’re going to presume it’s Covid, and that you should stay home and rest and let them know if you start to have trouble breathing.
Only towards the end of the week was I able to hear from multiple people the same thing that many doctors are saying: “Yeah, we’ve been seeing this go around now for a few weeks. We don’t know what it is, other than it isn’t Covid, and it seems to last between 3-10 days.”
HUH? What in the hell are we doing here? We know it isn’t Covid, but because of Covid, we’re not going to do anything about it, even though it really seems to be kicking the ass of people who get it. Brilliant…and this will all only get worse as we head towards winter.
One theory is that this is this year’s flu, which logic and common-sense dictates will be brutal on most people, who have done a number on their immune systems by mostly staying away from humans and being overly hygienic for the past 18 months. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10017531/Former-FDA-Commissioner-Dr-Scott-Gottlieb-says-flu-season-complicated-now.html
Whatever it is, here’s what I’d do differently if I had to do it over again:
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- Take it more seriously at the first symptom and start with heavy doses of additional zinc, vitamins D, C & B, and L-cysteine.
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- Drink way more water and Gatorade
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- Give in and rest, no matter how annoying it is(which after the first day is easy because bed is the only place you actually want to be)
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- Most importantly: I’d text all of my friends that I am fine, everything is fine, and I am just taking an unexpected vacation. Therefore, there is no reason to send me all of the things that “worked for you when you had Covid,” since I DON’T HAVE COVID!!
One final observation that may actually say it all; of the few friends I have who actually believed that we didn’t have Covid, most of them fell off the Earth after hearing those results. In other words, if it isn’t Covid, it must not be serious or important. Because, after all, Covid is all that there is. It’s one thing to respectfully leave someone alone and let them rest, but that wasn’t the case when test results were being waited on. Once we were confirmed negative it was basically “ok, well then…good luck with whatever you have, at least it isn’t Covid!”
We’ve been wondering for more than a year and a half what the true levels of damage are that we’ve done to our society and it’s safe to say, as we get ready to head into year three of this mess, that we still have absolutely no idea the depths and gravity of how we’ve fundamentally and stupidly altered this country’s view of merely getting sick for perhaps lifetimes to come.
