Filed under: anger, pandemic | Tags: anger, coronavirus, Covid 19, positive, symptom
On Monday, March 4th, I tested positive for COVID. I tested negative on March 1st when I woke up with a swollen throat and subsequently slept for the later part of the weekend. By Monday, the fever had gone and I was feeling a bit better. But I tested anyway because I had a rehearsal to go to and I wanted to be able to go in clear. Surprise!
The thing is – I have been very careful. I’ve rarely eaten indoors at a restaurant. I don’t go indoors for longer than a couple of minutes without a mask. I wear a mask on the subway and also the grocery store, two places I’m often alone in my caution. The week before I tested positive, I’d barely gone anywhere. The lone risks I was taking were related to my show – rehearsing and attending our shows without masks and celebrating our performances indoors unmasked afterwards. That’s it. I knew I was taking those risks (for the first time) and I did it with full awareness of what I was doing. If they’d have been responsible for this case, I would have felt it was an appropriate consequence of the risk but all those things were three weeks before I caught it. I don’t know where this came from. And after nearly four years of doing everything in my power to keep this virus from spreading through me, it knocked me down and stole all my lunch money, the bully. And I was pissed.
I’ve been so mad. About everything. I could not receive an email from anyone without becoming irrationally angry. Is anger a symptom of COVID 19? I haven’t heard anyone talk about that but oh my goodness, I was so full of anger during my week of COVID! It seemed like it might be some virus triggered irritant in my brain that made everything seem irritating. I went to a Feldenkrais eye workshop a few years ago that somehow spoke directly to my amygdala and made me afraid to leave my apartment for a day so I feel fairly confident that brains and emotions can be impacted by things like viruses. This has been my working theory because it feels pretty irrational to get mad at innocuous emails and texts and so on. I found everything irritating. My own work, my space, my self – music, theatre, videos, social media. It was all awful.
I felt like it had to be a symptom. Because I couldn’t just hate everything could I? I couldn’t just be pissed about the circumstances.
I suppose I could be angry that after four years of taking every precaution, I got this thing anyway. It feels an awful lot like four years of wasted effort. But I know that’s not true. It is a much less terrible situation to get COVID now than it was four years ago. I’d had all the vaccines and boosters to make it not that big a deal. It is a whole different ball game now, for which I am grateful.
But the thing is – I haven’t been so careful for myself. I figure my immune system was probably in good shape but I was mostly careful in solidarity with people who might be a lot more vulnerable than me. I wasn’t afraid of this for me – but for them. I didn’t wear a mask for me so much, as for the people who need extra protections. And if I couldn’t prevent this, being as careful as I have been, what hope do any of those people have? I’m incredibly frustrated that we, as a society, have so little care for the vulnerable. Like, what good can one person in mask on the train do? Apparently not much. Maybe that’s why people stopped wearing them.
I’ve given up a lot for this safety. One of my greatest pleasures in life is to sit in a warm cozy café and write. I haven’t done that in so long. Instead, I sit outside, shivering under heat lamps, writing with cold fingers. I love restaurants but I only sit outside of them for the most part. I’ve been to the movies twice since 2019. And the theatre I’ve seen has been pretty minimal in the last year since people don’t wear masks at the theatre anymore – even when the theatre has signs around declaring that they prefer you wear them.
I know everyone stopped worrying about COVID a while ago but that doesn’t mean it went away. And now it is tearing through a lot of people who managed to avoid it all this time. I know quite a few people who got COVID recently who, like me, never had it before. Many people say it’s just inevitable, that we just have to all expect to get it sooner or later, or again and again. But there are a lot of people who will not survive that and that is not okay with me. A man who survived in an iron lung for 70 years died of COVID this month. There’s no word about how he got it. Probably from someone who figured it was inevitable, who had contact with someone who had contact with him.
Now that we’re treating this virus like an inevitability, it’s tearing through people who could have remained untouched by it with a little extra collective precaution. All the little individual precautions are not strong enough to keep the whole wave at bay. I’m pissed because I’m not convinced it was an inevitability. I think if we’d handled this pandemic better, we wouldn’t still be watching COVID roll through our population four years later. Pretending it’s not happening isn’t working. It got me sick. It got some of my family sick. It got friends sick. It got my support system sick. It’s still going on. And sure – I had a blessedly mild case – but I lost a week of my life and I put some people I care about at risk before I knew it was happening. That sucks. The first day I had symptoms, when I tested negative, I was planning to go see someone with leukemia. I really thought I just had allergies. It felt like allergies. Luckily – we both were extra cautious so we postponed. But that could have been a disaster. I’m glad we averted the disaster. But I’m pissed that it was such a close call. But maybe that’s just a symptom of the virus.
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