Tag Archives: Covid-19

Near and Far

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I haven’t even tried to write a blog post in quite a while. We have been moving and downsizing, and I intersperse work with playing games on my phone. Five minutes of work, one hour on my phone. I “multitask” by listening to podcasts or videos while playing games. I could multitask by working and listening to the same things, but I don’t. Hence, no new posts in a while. But today is a new day!

The World

While my fingers have been lazy, the world continues to circle the drain with the occasional moment of optimism. Take the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites: Yea! Take the Skrmetti decision from the Supreme Court: Yea! Take the recent decision to sell arms to NATO so that NATO countries can give them to Ukraine: Yea! (So, yes, Trump found a way to make money off of the Ukraine war. At least arms will move to the good guys.)

Am I truly in favor of bombing Iran? Actually, yes. Iranian leaders are not good guys. Am I truly supportive of the Skrmetti decision? Yes, actually. I’d prefer that medical professionals avoid the need for such cases by taking a more cautious approach to youth gender medicine. But if the docs are going to swallow the lie that there is a consensus based on good evidence that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries!!!, yes, surgeries, are appropriate for teens who’ve had barely a whiff of counseling, then I support actions of legislators to rein in such practices. And no, that doesn’t mean I deny the right of trans individuals to exist, whatever that even means. 

And while we’re at it, yes, I continue to support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state (even though I’d prefer that all states be secular). There are plenty of Islamic states, Christian states, Hindu states, Buddhist states, etc. One Jewish state is fine with me. And no, the Islamic Jihadists who chant “from the river to the sea” have nothing positive to offer the residents of Israel or Gaza or the West Bank.

On the Homefront

Meanwhile, here at home, we caught Covid for the second time. No idea where, though the only time we’ve been indoors around lots of people was a trip to IKEA about the right number of days prior to testing positive. But I have to admit that we’ve not worn masks at the grocery store for several months. Frankly, I think lots of people who say they’ve caught a cold actually have Covid, but not many people are testing any more, and God knows, the government doesn’t care to track Covid any longer. We were not very sick, so we put our camping gear in the car and went off for a few days.

And meanwhile, we are getting older. A year ago, I was ready to give up camping completely. We had a tent that was easy to put up, but somehow bought the most difficult to assemble cots that have ever been invented. We finally donated the cots last spring and bought simpler ones. They worked well on this trip, but frankly, the need to get to the toilet in the middle of the night is the final nail in the coffin of our camping life. Also, it was hot, so hot that we couldn’t sleep well, so ugh. We will donate our gear and let some other happy campers enjoy it all.

We felt relieved to return to our air conditioned apartment. But, you know what? I was also thrilled to stand at the edge of the world, i.e. the Pacific coast, and just thrill to the sound of the waves and the sight of the misty islets just offshore. What must it have been like to be on those shores before Europeans or Russians arrived? Traveling by canoe when weather permitted, sufficiently isolated from neighbors to the north and south that native languages diverged into dialects. Salmon were never in such short supply that hunger was an issue. Good news: the 1974 Boldt decision that enabled the tribes to legally fish in traditional waters without harassment by the state has enabled them to gain an economic toehold such that they can rebuild their communities. La Push looks better than it did 50 years ago even though the Quileutes are not well situated for a casino.

We still have work to do to get settled in our new digs, but we are liking Olympia for its walkability, relative calm, and food options. We have a nice restaurant in our building and a new coffee purveyor which sells excellent pastries and quiche. But today we spent $30 on two espresso drinks and two slices of quiche, both excellent, but no, we cannot make that a daily indulgence. 

I’m wondering if anyone besides us has noticed that inflation has yet to be brought to heel. Washington has just added a new gas tax on top of previous gas taxes, so it’s rare to find gas under $4.00/gal, often it’s $5.00 or more. Has anyone noticed that the effort to empty the country of immigrants is resulting in horrific disruptions to agriculture and small businesses, and brought fear to families of immigrants everywhere. Maybe there were not millions of criminal immigrants out there after all? 

What’s weird is that I’m not opposed to everything Trump said he would do, but I truly do not like the way it is all playing out. Why is he so slow to recognize that Putin has no interest in being “reasonable?” What do you all think? Can we piece things back together again or is this ripping apart of government and institutions a permanent thing? I hate it. And I’m too old to do anything about it. Hope the youngsters are up for the challenge. 

Yell at me in the comments if you like. I’m up for it.

I Wish I Were Sick

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Seriously? Nobody wishes they were sick. Well, maybe when you were a kid, and you just didn’t want to do something such as go to school. But now we’re all adults, and we don’t have to go to school if we don’t want to. So what’s going on here? 

As I was waking up this morning, I moved around in bed to see if the vertigo was acting up. Yep. How about brain activity: present or absent? Present but minimal. Energy? Ha. Lost track of that months ago. Should I call the doctor? Ha. I could say something like, “I don’t want to go to school today.” And she’d say: “Get dressed and get out of here.” 

Seriously. What is this? Is this what it feels like in the months leading up to a diagnosis of something serious? Or is this what it feels like to have one of those chronic things that never gets a name? If it’s the former, OK, great. At some point, I’ll get a diagnosis, and the amazing American medical machine will gear up to poke me and prod me and take images of me and schedule one appointment after another and rack up amazing bills, and maybe it will all work and I’ll get cured or at least get better. 

But: if this is a chronic thing that never gets a name, then what? I could spend my own money trekking around town to various people with various titles (some they’ve bestowed on themselves) who want to sell me various products or procedures or tests that will give me ambiguous results but fail to give my condition a name or a cure. Or maybe they’ll give it a name, but not a cure, but I’ll convince myself I’m just enough better to justify spending yet more money on their tests, products, or procedures. Or maybe I’ll just settle in for the long haul. 

Long Haul? Isn’t that one of the names given to people who caught Covid and failed to fully recover? Yes, Covid Long Haulers. Am I one? I don’t think so. I caught Covid in early August, got Paxlovid, and recovered quickly. Did I recover fully? Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember feeling like this, but we were traveling at the time. When we got home, I was tired from traveling, as usual. I didn’t have vertigo then. I’m not sure what it would feel like to have a fully functioning brain because I’m a bit scattered in the best of times, but I think I felt OK. I was still taking walks back then, so I had some amount of energy. 

But then there was that Covid booster in mid-October. I’d had a bit of vertigo before that, but only as I was going to bed. It wasn’t interfering with anything. Then, the day after the booster, I was sicker than I can describe with the most intense vertigo ever. Better the next day, and the next. Then I saw a PT and got worse (yes, worse). ER, Rx for nausea, and it’s been on again/off again since. I had 48 gleeful symptom-free hours following a massage, but then it’s been on again/off again since. My walking stick is by the door for days like today when I don’t even want to walk to the elevator without it. 

A friend with ME/CFS loaned me “The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness” by Meghan O’Rourke. Am I just trying on the experience of chronic illness which she so articulately describes? Oh, please, no. If so, I don’t want this role! Let me out of here! I’ve had other experiences that have taken months and months to right themselves (broken leg, broken foot). But they were so definitive: See this fracture here on this X-ray? We’re going to fix it! And yes, eventually, I was fixed. 

Today, I’m wondering if this was how my father felt in the months before he was diagnosed with a form of chronic leukemia. Was there just a malaise that slowly settled over his life? Was there a pain that couldn’t be attributed to anything in particular? Was his brain less clever than it had always been? I wasn’t home then, so I don’t know what the prelude was like. But today I wonder.

I have a previously scheduled appointment with my primary care doc in two weeks. I’ll find out if the lung nodules that appeared in my ER X-ray have resolved. I’ll tell her that the physical therapist who specializes in vertigo has told me he has no new ideas to resolve my persistent vertigo. I’ll tell her that when my brain is working so hard to figure out where I am in space, it can’t seem to do anything else I want it to do. And I’ll tell her that I don’t want to be chronically ill. What ideas will she have for me? Anything useful, or just a shrug?

Catching Covid in Kodiak

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We caught Covid in Kodiak. Yes, we did. We had an amazing trip. Kodiak is awesome. Go see for yourself.

But we did one stupid thing, and now we are both positive for Covid. We are back home, but quarantining in our apartment in our very careful retirement home. We’ve been ridiculously cautious all summer, including on our road trip to Wyoming, to the point that I’ve actually lost weight because of our caution about eating out. But we blew it all for breakfast at a very busy Kodiak cafe owned by a relative by marriage. Service was slow as a slug, but our coffee was refilled constantly, so our masks were off for a long time. We are fortunate because we have very mild cases, and we are old enough to qualify for both the anti-viral and the monoclonal antibody treatments that are available. I got one, he got the other.

We skipped the museums we had hoped to visit on the last two days of our trip. We took a long walk along the waterfront, lined with many seafood processing plants, and the walk about did me in. That was a surprise, so I will have to be careful when we can finally leave our apartment. Neither the doctor I saw, nor the doctor my husband saw even blinked when we said we had reservations to fly home Thursday. I’d been afraid they’d order us to stay put until we tested negative, but they didn’t.

People are just so casual about masks both in town and in the airport terminals. I estimate ten percent of people wear masks indoors. Same at SeaTac, Anchorage, and Kodiak, and on the planes. Oh, well. I’m guessing that most people who are not as much at risk of serious disease as we are, and who don’t get very sick, don’t even test to see if they have Covid anymore. We could have considered our cases to be mild colds – except that the cough I developed was not like other coughs I’ve had. Top of my throat, and it just felt different. So this variant just circulates, and life goes on. But occasionally, a seemingly healthy person of any age gets seriously ill or dies, but fewer than a couple of years ago; and we are all so tired of this virus, so apparently the number of people dying or settling in with Long Covid now is acceptable. 

Besides which, Monkeypox sounds much more exciting! Let’s move on to that.