When will this end?
A virus has derailed my week.
No audio track this week.
I got very sick this past week. With the help of two doctors, two nurses and Google, I’ve deduced it down to some kind of unnamed virus, most likely passed along at a work event in San Francisco last Tuesday night. Here dozens of people, straight off a massive conference where they interacted with hundreds of other people, crammed into a living room with loud music, yelling to be heard. I was not at the conference, but I was five inches from many of these people’s faces on Tuesday night.
I’ve had chaotic fevers, body aches and chills for six days now. Every time I lay down to nap or sleep with a light blanket on, I slip back into the chill — core temp starts to heat, body thinks it needs to catch the limbs up and kicks chills back into action, and it sets off another fever and starts the cycle over again.
When my body shakes, I can’t help but be reminded of seeing my dad in the hospital, treated for what we thought was pneumonia, and walking into his room to the sound of his metal bedframe rattling loudly. It was shocking. I burst out crying and he said to me from across the room, I’m not going to die, Amy — I’m just sick. (Spoiler: he did die. Story for another day.) I remember the nurse pulling me into the hallway to tell me in a raised whisper that I should stay strong for him. But that “second mom” I mentioned last time was also a nurse, also in the hallway, and she clasped my upper arm and told the attendant, she can feel what she needs to feel. I was 22.
Lying here now, my senses feel heightened. My head lightly aches, like the end of a day wearing a too-tight headband or cap. I can hear a jet plane flying above at the same volume as the sound of my hand moving under my pillow. It’s so beautiful outside, not a single cloud in the sky. A mockingbird is singing, showing off. The dissonance is stark, the world outside the window reminds me of a Willy Wonka set that’s not real because how could it be when I feel like this? Somehow it doesn’t even help to stare out the window at the long valley; it just makes my headache worse. I can’t help but think of our limited number of days, and this is how I am spending an entire week. Make something, at least! Read a book. Write something down. Have this not be an utter waste of time. But also, don’t I say I believe in rest? And what is rest for if not times like this? And in the grand scheme of things, it will just be a week. Or maybe 10 days. Hopefully not more.
The roses in the garden are in full force. Smaller bushes have a few perfect papery bundles of color, while the bigger ones explode with 40 to 50 fragrant blooms. They are scattered throughout the fruit trees, vegetable beds and herbs — the functional and the beautiful as perfect complements, interchangeable. The grasses from winter rains are still tall, because I can’t bring myself to weed whack them; they’re too green and vibrant. I’d rather have weeds than bare ground. I like the ethos of weeding, making space for the right things to grow, but I struggle with the act of it because I love the look of wild. This is my inner conflict. I’ll probably become a more ruthless gardener over time; my mom is an expert weeder. The grasses fill the orchard, the trees burst with new leaves and citrus, everything is thriving and I can’t believe a yard can look like this. Earlier I spent about 15 minutes outside before it was time to lie down again.
I always feel the need to try and figure out where an illness came from. This could be covid-era programming, when we were all tracking our family networks and pods and neighbors and then reading that now it apparently it can come through the ventilation system of an apartment building and wondering if that moment you took your mask down in the supermarket to smell the bottle of dish soap, maybe in that single moment did you breathe in the virus and you’d spend the next few weeks regretting that unconscious mistake?
Or maybe my attention to source is an imprint from that 20-year old “gotcha” of losing my dad. Maybe it’s the same reason why some part of me can’t help but catastrophize illness — not always, but sometimes I convince myself that even though people get sick for weeks, all the time, with really heavy symptoms that put them flat on their backs and then they recover, mine might be different. What if the doctors are missing something important? I’m probably not alone in thinking this way. I did hear there’s a nasty virus going around right now, I’m sure I’ll be fine.
Parts of the experience are also reminiscent of how it must feel to get old: creaky knees, sensitive skin, moving slow. I walk through the house at a snails pace. When I’m sick, I have immediate depths of empathy for people who are sick with chronic illness, disability, and elders. Isn’t it interesting how hard it is to truly relate and live inside of someone else’s situation, until we *are* living in it or at least interconnected with it as a caretaker or housemate? It makes me feel guilty for not spending more time asking my friends about their chronic pain or illness. Or do they even want to talk about it? I hope I remember to feel grateful for my health for a long time after this ends, and to tune in to the people around me who are not well in case I can help.
For 35 years my mom was a teacher for infants with special needs, and I remember that gave her an uncommon calibration for baseline health. She was always impressed by developmentally on-track babies, because of how much time she spent with the ones behind schedule: Look at the way he crawls! she’d say. He’s doing so great! She explained once how sometimes her job looked like teaching the parents how to love their new baby in the same way they love their other kids. Teaching someone to love sounds like pretty much the best use of time I can think of.
When you’re sick, your priorities change, your world temporarily changes. Everything slows down. But maybe that’s what’s most important right now. I’ll see how it goes.
“Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.”
― Rumi