It's Covid Time!

I made it two and a half years without Covid. I’ve lasted seven days with it. You know how you sometimes think, being sick for a couple of days might not be so bad if you’re not too sick so you can stay home in bed and read a good book and binge watch some TV show like The White Lotus or Enlightenment (if you don’t know about Mike White go directly to any show he creates). And even with the dreaded Covid-19, you figure you’re not going to die if you get the Omicron variant, as everyone says it’s not so bad, just the symptoms of a cold: sore throat, cough, runny nose, headache, and fatigue.

Then you get sick with all these symptoms and you say to yourself, what the fuck was I thinking? I feel terrible. All I want to do is sleep but I can’t because my throat is so sore I can barely swallow, and my head is so full of snot I can’t breathe when I lie down and if I try to lie with my head elevated on three pillows I get a kink in my shoulder and my back starts killing me. If it weren’t for Xanax I’d have been awake for four nights now (sorry all you doctors out there who don’t like to prescribe Xanax or Valium, but it’s imperative we all have a stash of either one for situations just like this).

Then there’s the other person in the house who’s watching you warily and trying to wear a mask and stay ten feet away and eat in the same kitchen and use the bathroom while remembering to feel sorry for you. Then they have to take the dogs to the dog park and get your apple juice and your prescription for Paxlovid, the anti-viral they prescribe for old people like me who get Covid.

I’m sorry I have to malign my local health care clinic, which I’ve gone to for 30 years with pretty good results, but they really missed the boat on this one. First, my primary doc, a Physician’s Assistant whom I love, isn’t at the clinic when I call to say I have Covid so they transfer me to the other clinic down the road in a different village. The only provider there is a PA who’s filling in and he prescribes the Paxlovid and tells me to call him back if I have any problems.

I take it for two days. Shortly after ingestion, your mouth tastes like metal and remains so the rest of the day. After two days of metal I develop a rash across my back and by the third day my mouth is so sore I can’t eat anything that has any kind of seasoning such as salt. So I call the number on my phone that showed up when speaking to the prescribing PA, but it guides me to my home health clinic where no one answers the phone and tells me to call back. Which I do, any number of times, until hours later someone finally answers the phone and I ask why I’m not getting through to the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid, because that’s who I need to talk to. Apparently all the calls get routed to the clinic where there are no providers on duty and the person answering the phone says the PA who prescribed the Paxlovid isn’t at the other clinic today so I just hang up and that’s that. I quit taking the medication. The next day I test positive—again.

Would I not have tested positive if I’d kept taking the Paxlovid? Who knows? Covid-19, in Donald Rumsfeld’s parlance, is full of unknown knowns but apparently the only known known is that we’re all going to get it at some point, just like we all get colds (do you think there’s anyone out there who’s never gotten a cold?). I hope all your cases are mild, that you have Xanax or Valium around, and someone to watch over you who doesn’t get sick by doing so. I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed with the new issue of The New Yorker, which luckily has a bunch of articles I want to read (many times it doesn’t) and one I already read, Ben Lerner’s hilarious short story about choking. And if you’re not feeling all that bad and want a really good, funny distraction, read Richard Russo’s Straight Man, which is being made into a movie next year starring Saul Goodman himself, Bob Odenkirk. Now that’s something to look forward to.