I woke up today with a stuffed nose. Normally, I would shrug my shoulders and get on with my day. I’d chalk it down to a cold or the beginning of bronchitis and move on with my day. Yesterday, I coughed a few times because I had something in my throat and my mother immediately commented both times. When I said I had something in my throat for a second time, she said, “You get things in your throat a lot.” Which, I mean, twice in several hours is not a lot, but even if it were, so what? It’s really annoying to have someone scrutinizing your every move and analyzing the hell out of it.
My voice has been a bit raspy since the hospital. Understandable as I was unconscious for a week and had a breathing tube in my nose for a week-and-a-half (different tube once I woke up, but still a tube). It has gotten better over time, but it comes back in times of stress. I had it yesterday; I’m not sure why. I wasn’t particularly stressed.
Anyway, as I said, I woke up today with a stuffy nose and a bit of a sore throat. It would normally not be a big deal except the thing that started off my whole medical ordeal was pneumonia. Non-COVID-related. I sent an email to my Taiji teacher the Tuesday before I went into the hospital that I was feeling unusually exhausted. I’m tried all the time, but not like that. I could barely keep my eyes open and I wanted to sleep all the time. I thought it was my imagination, but it was non-COVID-related pneumonia.
Here’s the thing. My mom is obsessed with the fact that we don’t know what triggered it so how can we prevent it? While I was impatient with her when it came to dismissing my home nurse, she’s not wrong. We don’t know what caused it so it’s hard to know how to prevent whatever happened from happening again.
I just had a long talk with her about this very thing. And about how to set it up so she can be reasonably assured that I’m OK when she and my father goes back to Taiwan. My brother and I are going to set up an auto-email that I can send off every night saying I’m in front of my computer and doing fine. I added that my brother can come over more often as well. And, we know that Ian will spring into action if he doesn’t hear from me. In other words, I’ll do almost anything to get my alone time again. Of course, I couldn’t say that to my mother, but I emphasized that I was ready to be on my own again.
I also was honest that we may never know what happened to me. It’s human nature to wonder, but at the end of the day, I had pneumonia. We don’t know where I got it (though my brother is sure he knows) and we will probably never know. I was very candid about not wanting to live my life, second-guessing everything I did. What was the point of being alive if I overanalyzed everything I did? I was very candid about her anxiety making her think she was doing something by worrying about it obsessively. That’s her way of trying to control uncontrollable situations, which is very ingrained in her. She agreed and we had a very productive talk. We’ll see if she can actually stick to the timetable. If so, then I’ll be baching it up in less than a month!
I want to emphasize that I do sympathize with her discomfort. I know it’s really hard to accept that we just don’t know WTF happened to me. One day, I was fine and the next, I had pneumonia bad enough to make me collapse. And to trigger two cardiac arrests and a stroke. That’s not nothing! I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about it sometimes as well. Wondering how it happened, I mean. Just because I’ve accepted that I’ll probably never know what exactly happened, it doesn’t mean that I’m completely fine with it. Was it one of the two times I went to Cubs? Was it getting lunch with my brother? Was it my monthly pharmacy run? Was it none of the above? I simply don’t know. I’ll ask my heart doc the next time I see him, but I doubt he’ll have a more definitive answer.
In the background of all this is the fact that we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I know that many Americans would like to pretend this isn’t true, but it is. I have a hard time remembering it sometimes just because ‘died twice and was unconscious for a week’ has overridden my pandemic brain. But I know it’s still happening and that we have to be prudent when we’re out and about. That means masking up and distancing as much as possible. It’s especially important to me now because I’m fresh out of the hospital and don’t want to have to go back in.
And, even though I had non-COVID-related pneumonia, I can’t help but be wary about COVID. It was out of my mind when I was in the hospital, but I can’t ignore it in the real world as easily as I could then. At the same time, I can’t get myself worked up about it the way I was before I went into the hospital. Part of that is because I’m fully vaxxed, but it’s also because I had a massive perspective shift while in the hospital. Not on purpose, mind, but it was imposed on me by my situation. Being jolted into consciousness after a week of being unconscious will change a person.
In addition, I went from hardly being around other people to never really being alone. Even when there wasn’t someone in my room, I was hooked up to machines that would bring them in a matter of seconds. And they took my vitals every four or six hours (can’t remember which). And they were constantly making sure I was ok. Every single one was masked, of course, but I wasn’t. The only time I had a mask on was when I was being taken from one room to another, which was maybe three times in total the week I was awake. Oh, and when I went for my walks. That was twice. Maybe three times. Other than that, I was unmasked as other people bustled around me.
So, yeah. I have a different view of COVID now. It’s still there and we’re not going to be rid of it. The best we can hope for is that it’ll be like the flu. We get a shot every year, a few thousand people die, and we move on. I know that sounds callous, but we gave up the hope to eradicate it when we acted like selfish assholes in dealing with the pandemic. I say this with more resignation than anger, by the way. I’m going to be getting my booster soon and I know that we’ll have to keep dealing with tis. Because I’m fully vaxxed, I most likely won’t die from COVID. I’m glad, of course, but we didn’t have to be here.
I told my mom that I couldn’t live as if I were afraid of dying. Not in so many words, but that’s what I meant. What I didn’t tell her was that I died twice and it wasn’t so bad. I’m less afraid of dying now than I was before (though I am not rushing to experience it for real any time soon). I still count any days I have remaining as a bonus; I just have to find a way to spend them well.