In March 2020, the struggle bus quietly parked in front of my house. I didn’t even recognize it at first, but that changed before the ides were out. Caesar might envy me, but he might just roll over and die rather than face the slow death grip covid has inflicted on the world. I’ve been looking for a brighter day throughout the pandemic, and that is where I’ve struggled most.
I dislike change.
The first change I noticed was when all my doctors cancelled my appointments. Routine check ups, non-essential visits, and even some health issues I really wanted to address were pushed back indefinitely (I’m still a month away from a final appointment I managed to rescheduled from March 2020). How I wish that was the only impact.
Stores and restaurants started to close or cut their hours. I’m a night owl by nature, and loved the weirdos like me who shopped overnight to avoid normal people. We were an early casualty of the lockdowns. Of course flattening the curve was just the beginning.
Masks became important, I bought Pedialyte, extra toilet paper (not every roll I could find but enough to last a while), more bottled water than usual, and downloaded the FEMA guide to surviving a pandemic. I didn’t use anything but the water, and I consider myself lucky at that.
When will it end?
The year wore on. Summer, my favorite time of year, went by with hardly any fanfare at all. No gatherings, even for 4th of July. But few people near me got sick, so that’s a blessing all by itself. Still, the isolation wore at us all. Even though I already avoided people, I missed gatherings. Ironic isn’t it?
I took some wild chances for random nights out with friends and managed to avoid getting sick. A few of my rowdier friends went out more, and weren’t so lucky. None of them died, although covid did take people I knew. Shauna Wolf, one of the best writing mentors I ever had the privilege to work with lost her struggle with the disease. It was real, but thankfully distant from my day to day life.
In 2021 a flurry of vaccines became available. They were designed quickly with new mRna technologies I’d read about, but who wants to be first in line for untried vaccines? I’ve read adverse reaction reports since the 90’s, I didn’t want any of that. But I kept reading, and kept watching the news. There were potential dangers to taking the shots, but definite dangers by not getting vaccinated.
Choices shape our chances.
I’m one of those imuno-compromised people who sought out the vaccine fairly early. Not in the first round of doses, but by May of 2021 I had both shots. I didn’t have any side effects, or even a mild adverse reaction. My body may have remembered all the shots I got in boot camp, who knows.
The vaccine and dropping numbers of hospital patients made Summer better in 2021, but it still wasn’t the same. Backyard gatherings were still hit or miss, although our 4th of July party was more like those we’ve had in the past. Children still swam in our pool, and a few people came out to sit by our fire pit. I went out a few times, but even the rowdy crowd at a local bar was less rambunctious than before the pandemic.
You take the good and the bad, add them up, and there you have…
I finally convinced my wife to get the vaccine, after six months of not becoming a zombie. She tested positive for the disease in 2020, but had no symptoms while she quarantined in our house. She just got her second shot today, which is what prompted this rambling post about the struggles I’ve had. My struggles weren’t physical, aside from a kidney stone that I had to have powdered. The pain of the stone, the recovery from the procedure, and the removal of the stent are all near the top of my Never Again list.
Most of what I’ve struggled with has been internal. Stuck in the house with grandkids, my wife, and my thoughts, hasn’t left me much room to vent. Random nights out when I didn’t expect to find big crowds helped, but that only does so much. My thoughts were still melancholy the next day. I have a few go to coping methods, I write, play games on my PC to escape, read and watch TV or movies as a last resort. Only writing and reading feel truly cathartic for me.
“Difficult to see. Always in motion the future is.”
The pandemic is still raging, new variants are cropping up, and debate is ongoing about booster shots. But I feel lucky. I haven’t gotten sick, not even the flu. Knock on wood. Even just typing that makes me feel better. So I guess as long as we have to worry about covid, there will be fewer gatherings, fewer hours to shop or eat out, and one more worry for those of us who worry about everything.
In the mean time, I’ve written more short stories than I have since 2019. I finished and revised (more times than I can count) Fantastic America, wrote the first half of Midwestern Magicians, and started querying agents. I don’t think any of us are happy there is a pandemic going on, but at least I have hope society won’t collapse from it anytime soon. There are many more human culprits to worry about collapsing the modern world anyway…