Catching COVID over the phone

My brother Clay had said he and his wife Karen would be there for breakfast, so of course they weren't, but my brother Dick and Young-sook, his wife who speaks three words of English, were the first to arrive. Hadn't expected them, so for at least the dozenth time I told Dick to please please let me know in advance when they're coming to breakfast, and for the dozenth time I know he never will.

Breakfast was full of our family's ordinary news and inanities. We never have conversations about anything that matters, mostly just what happened at the hairdressers', on reality TV, who's recently died among the senior citizens we all know and are.

News that I'm quitting at Vector was delivered, received, and quickly drowned in the conversation, with no objection from me. I don't want to talk about it.

The biggest news was Aunt Debbie's centennial. When I was a teenager, my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Kyle taught my Sunday School class, and also ran the church's youth group for middle- and high-schoolers. They weren't really my aunt and uncle, just very good friends of my mom and dad, but they were sorta like family.

And also, they were great. I loved 'em both, but when Uncle Kyle died a few years back, I didn't go to his funeral. I don't do funerals, on principle (and the principle is, I hate funerals). I live my life pretty much alone, and prefer to mourn alone.

Aunt Debbie continues to be alive and well, except that she has very severe Alzheimer's disease, doesn't know who she is, doesn't know that her husband died, and for the last several years before his death she hadn't known who he was.

Now she's 100 years old, and my mom's planning to bring a cake to the nursing home. Not even trying to lean into my rotten bastard persona, I wonder who the cake is for? Aunt Debbie isn't there, isn't anywhere.

♦ ♦ ♦  

On the bus after breakfast, I felt more than slightly askew, which is well past my askew limits. Nauseous, achy, and at home, tilting back in the recliner, a fever announced itself. For fevers, take aspirin with plenty of water. That's a rule, right?

So every time I awoke fevered over the next several days, I took aspirin with plenty of water.

Sleeping was a series of absurd dreams, clearly based on my soon-to-be ended work at Vector. Dreamed of taking call after call after call, working the familiar Vector screen to book rides, yes, but also inexplicably double-alphabetizing the titles of every episode of Doctor Who. Double-alphabetizing means that each episode's title is re-arranged alphabetically, so "The Tsuranga Conundrum" becomes "Conundrum The Tsuranga" and is indexed under C, where no-one would ever think to look.

Several sweaty days were lost swirling in those dreams, waking only to pee and then take some aspirin with plenty more fluids. I had no appetite, but occasional, unstoppable bursts of diarrhea.

Once, the house's only toilet was occupied, so I pulled out my emergency toilet here in the room, but by the time I'd attached a plastic bag only about 60% of the flow splashed into the bucket. The rest has dried on the floor, until the day — not today, certainly — when I might have energy enough to mop the carpet.

Most of my spray of shit hit a pile of dirty clothes, which I did find the energy to launder the next day. Now all my gray t-shirts and underwear have squibbles of brown, apparently permanently.

Usually I pee into a pisspot, saving myself thirty footsteps to and from the toilet, but following the standard instructions to drink plenty of water, pee sprang from me frequently, and in directions it hadn't sprung before. Several times over several days I lined up my dick to the mouth of the pot, let loose, and saw my stream completely miss the pot. What exactly went wrong I don't know, but I started taking the extra thirty footsteps to the toilet.

I called in sick on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week, except that when I tried calling in sick for Wednesday my phone said it was only Tuesday, this morning. 

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Guess I'd only called out sick twice.

There's a test coming in the mail to confirm it, but everyone knows it's COVID I'm describing. In four years wearing the mask, the coronavirus never touched me, but now it's kicked me upside the head.

I thought it had snatched about 25% of my IQ, too, what with all those bonkers dreams about double-alphabetizing Doctor Who, and me feeling incapable of coherent thought even while nominally awake.

Today, writing about it, is the first time in too many days when I've felt a little like me. Hello, I'm Doug. So far, anyway. 

On the bright side, COVID's wiped out my final week at Vector, a job I was coming to hate more and more, maybe more than any job I've ever had. How slowly those days crawled by. I would willingly choose delirium over answering another hundred calls for bus rides, and then another hundred calls for bus rides, and then another...

♦ ♦ ♦

Vector is where I caught the disease, by the way. I'm sure of it. I wore the mask at work, of course, same as I've worn masks everywhere in public since 2020. But there was one call...

An old lady on the line said she couldn't hear me, and speaking louder wasn't helping, so on that afternoon, last Thursday, I pulled my mask down, and asked, "Can you hear me now?"

"Oh, yes," the old lady said. The mask stayed down for the rest of that call, and that's the moment COVID got me.

 2/6/2024   

itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS           NEXT →