Convalescent

succumbing to The Plague

“The Convalescent Woman” by Henri Matisse

Well, gosh, it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted here, and I don’t actually have a good excuse for it other than the fact that I finally, after three and one half years and countless exposures, including a solo stint taking care of Sophie last summer when she had it, got The Plague. Or rather, boy oh boy, it got me good. It will be three weeks on Thursday since I sort of walked on a slant in to work and joked a few minutes later via text with my astral twin. I think I might be having a series of strokes, I said and described how I felt like water was sloshing in my head and how I walked at a slant in to work. That’s so weird, she texted back, I was just telling G that I think I might be having a series of strokes and then we laughed because we are after all astral twins, born on the same day in the same year. Maybe we’d die, too, on the same day in the same year and maybe it was imminent and this is the kind of thing that makes us laugh and sustains me, to tell you the truth. That was on a Thursday, the brain slosh and slant walk, and on Friday morning, after letting in the nurse who helps take care of all things trach-related, I went back to bed and slept for two hours which is highly highly unusual. I was exhausted for the entire day and thought to myself that the 44 days in the hospital and every day since had been rather brutal and I really needed to do some serious restoration work, something beyond the usual treacly admonition to take care or put your own oxygen mask on before you put your child’s yadda yadda yadda (the dumbest or perhaps second dumbest after put your marriage before your child folderol) so I went over to Sycamore Kitchen and ate some delightful lunch not even once thinking that perhaps I had the Plague. Apologies to all those upon whom I probably aerosolized, but later that day I went to a place that stretches you out (one of my summer treats for myself for the program of restoration), and Victor, my flexologist, had to go get me a tiny Dixie cup of water because when I sat up from being stretched the water in the my head really sloshed around and I felt as if I were going to faint. When I drove home I talked to a friend who lives in Santa Barbara and she randomly said You should take a Covid test and I said I don’t have Covid! I’m a Super-Dodger! and she told me some story of a friend of hers in LA who had just come down with it, so when I got home I rummaged around in the bathroom, looking for the Covid tests and found one and took it and it was negative. You know the story: the next day I felt so exhausted, had a headache and was beginning to feel my skin in a way that suggested it was raw and tender. There’s no other way to describe it. I took another test and watched the little pink line fill out and stared at it for a bit like it was a pregnancy test or something and said, inanely, I have Covid! Let’s fast forward through the panic and then into my room where I stayed for the next five days except when Carl and Oliver and Maria needed me to change a diaper or do some trach suctioning. I’d drag myself in, masked and gloved up and do these things which are damn hard when you don’t have Covid and maybe just maybe heroic if you do. Who lives like this? as Oliver once said so perfectly when he was about seven years old, but the nurse wouldn’t come and the ex wouldn’t help and so we managed. Carl was a saint and did not flee to his own dwelling but slept on the floor of Sophie’s room, keeping watch over her. Thank God for Carl, for Maria who spent long hours during the day, caring for Sophie, for Oliver and his relentless cheer and for my neighbor Tali who brought me chicken soup and my neighbor Amanda who brought me ginger soup. I felt horrible for many days, really horrible and actually am still only about 85% back to my baseline which is moderately tired in body and soul nearing my seventh decade on the planet and only recently recovering from the near-death of one of my children and a new life with her trach and her g-tube and was certainly burnt out but able to muster up strength, resolve and a certain innate southern Italian peasant stubbornness. I did not take Paxlovid because I’ve had bad reactions to antivirals in the past. I basically lay in my bed and stared into space. After the third or fourth day, I still felt like shit but was able to watch tv and got through all episodes of “The Forsythe Saga,” all three seasons of “Happy Valley” and a movie about the Bronte sisters and their life in Yorkshire that transported me back to my childhood and the irrevocable moment when I became a reader, a real reader, aged eleven or so and deeply lost in Jane Eyre. The movie, “To Walk Invisible,” was made by Sally Wainwright who is the same person who made “Happy Valley,” and both are brilliant and got me through Covid. I still feel weird — dizzy and weak and listless. I am told that this is normal for the virus and while I am so grateful to be getting well unlike the millions who didn’t, and relieved and grateful that no one else in the house got it, I feel sad, too. A nameless sadness that leaves me spent. It’s like the pandemic, and Sophie’s hospitalization and trach and g-tube and the need for a nurse and the added care requirements and continued acrimony from the ex and my Covid and the Supreme Court fuckery and the relentless downfall of Terrible America and recognition of its rotten core are all mixed together, persistent, the slosh of water in my head, the dizziness and vertigo, a soup of sad. I guess, though, that my body has spoken to me quite roundly and emphatically and I am listening and trying to give it some rest.