Bye Bye Cousin COVID!

I saw a plaque hanging on my Aunt Ida Lea’s wall when I was a kid.  It said, “All our guests bring pleasure, some by coming, others by leaving.”  That’s definitely true.  However, with Cousin COVID, Benjamin Franklin was closer to correct when he said, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.”

I think old Ben was an optimist.

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As I wrote in my post, “Cousin C Creeps in” Annie and I were diagnosed with COVID-19 a couple weeks ago.  We looked forward to the two-week quarantine with mild trepidation.  Annie is a few years younger than I, and quite a bit healthier, so I assumed she would laugh the disease off as she seems to do whenever she gets sick.  I, on the other hand, don’t get sick often but, at my age and with diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, I fit the category of people most at risk of serious complications.

But, hey, two weeks off with the woman I love?  All we had to do was sit around, watch tv, and make plans… It had the potential to be pretty nice.

It wasn’t.

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As a Youth Specialist with DYS (the Missouri Division of Youth Services), I was forbidden to go to work, where I would have exposed the youth and other staff to the disease.  Also, I was granted two weeks of paid leave that was not charged against either my vacation time or sick leave. 

Overall, not too bad of a deal, but there was the whole, sick as a dog and possibly dying thing.

Yeah, there was that.

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Normally, when I get sick, I don’t take it any more seriously than conditions require.  I’m not afraid to sit around, swaddled in a blanket, watching TV, reading, or writing, but I had heard too many horror stories about COVID-19, and they often were too personal. 

I knew and worked with John Williams for 20 years.  He was one of the many great staff I have gotten to know while working for DYS, and we had been friends from the git-go.  A year back I was excited for my friend when he began his well-deserved retirement.

About a month ago, another friend of ours asked me, “Did you hear about John Williams?  He died of COVID.”

I felt awful for my friend and his family, but his passing raised concerns for myself too.  If anything, I believe John was healthier than me.  He was diabetic and didn’t take care of it as well as I do (I’m not saying I care for mine like I should, just better than he did…a lot better).  He was probably of average weight for his height/age, whereas I’m obese.  I was told a couple years ago that I have a congenital heart condition called “The Widowmaker.”  The doctor told me, “If you have a heart attack, and there is no doctor standing right there, you die.”

If COVID could kill John, I knew I was at risk too.

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A few days into my battle, one of my friends (a brother-in-law) butt-dialed me, then hung on when he found out who he had accidentally called.  Ed and I caught up on each other’s lives, and talked about our shared grandchildren, then he begged off, telling me he had to go help his wife with some of the details of her brother’s passing.  He had died of COVID-19.

Thanks for the encouragement, old buddy.

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Well, it turns out, I was one of the lucky ones…very, very lucky.  My temperature was about 99.5°F for a couple days, but that’s as bad as it got.  A mild fever, yes, but nothing to get worked up over.  My primary symptom was lethargy.  I had an extreme lack of energy.  I didn’t even feel like getting dressed for several days.  I just sat around in my bathrobe and watched TV for most of the day, or worked/wrote on my computer for short periods…as long as my energy lasted.  I might go out and get the mail or check on my chickens, but it was out-and-back, and in my robe.  I never had a cough and never experienced extreme shortness of breath.

I did struggle with increased depression, but nothing that was too much to deal with.

I didn’t feel like crap, but I just didn’t have any energy. 

Annie was a different story.

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My “never give up, never surrender” wife (Heck, she’s put up with me for 37 years!) didn’t take a fortnight off from work like I did.  Nope, she wasn’t allowed to go to Three Rivers College for two weeks because of the contagion, but she was allowed to work from home.  Excluding the normal hour drive each way, “Never-say-die Annie” put in about as many hours every day, going down to the little house so that I wouldn’t bother her.  She would put in a solid day’s work on her laptop and cell phone, then come back up late in the evening to eat, shower, and go to bed, then it was back to the grind the next morning.

But I could tell my sweetheart was sick.

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We both took supplements recommended by a friend’s holistic (As opposed to half-istic?) medical doctor.

In my own ham-fisted, hard-hearted way, I tried to pamper her.  Several times I cooked for us.  Sometimes she cooked, but we ate a lot of leftovers or cold meals.  I saw to it she checked her temperature.  No, she wouldn’t let me actually take her temperature, (well, once when she felt really bad) but I did prep the thermometer and take it to her, then supervised its use, and read it. 

Early-on, she got the dry-cough that many COVID sufferers complain of, and it has hung on.  She still has the cough, about three weeks after she was diagnosed, but it has never gotten too bad, just a little more than noticeable.  I got more concerned when her fever hit 102°F, but I started to really worry when she came up to the house around noon one day and went to bed for a few hours.  My tough-as-nails wife was SICK.

As she went into the room, I asked if she needed anything, but she said no.  She closed the door, so I knew not to bother her, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t monitor the situation. 

Knowing how quickly the disease could get serious, I didn’t want to bother her, but I didn’t want to ignore her either, so I went to her door every fifteen minutes to a half-an-hour and listened to her breathing.  If I didn’t hear anything, I’d open the door and stick my head in.

She was breathing…every time.

Thank God!

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After a few hours of sleeping/bed rest, my bride returned to the land-of-the-living.  Her improvement was slow but steady.  Although, as I’ve said, my condition was much milder than hers, my improvement was excruciatingly slow.  I just didn’t feel like I was gaining any energy.

On Friday, January 15, I got a call from the Dunklin County Health Department.  The kind lady questioned me on my condition, then told me I was officially off quarantine and allowed to mingle again with normal people.

I still had no energy.

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That evening, Annie and I headed to Oklahoma to visit one of our granddaughters for a late birthday celebration.  Except for her naggingly persistent cough, Annie seemed to be basically back to normal.  I still felt the extreme lethargy, and kept to myself most of the trip out.  We spent the night at a hotel in Joplin before making the rest of the trip to Oklahoma on Saturday.

I won’t say it was like flipping a switch, but I felt MUCH better that day.  Maybe it was the prospect of seeing some of my favorite people in the whole world, but I had ENERGY.  Now, I wasn’t up to running a marathon or anything like that, but I was fully capable of walking around my son and daughter-in-law’s property, and playing with the grands. 

Recovery is great!

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Some of the boys had checked on us by phone frequently while we were sick.  I don’t know if Travis felt obligated as the one who exposed us to the disease, but he checked on us virtually every day, even though he and his family of six was going through the same thing.  Like Annie and me, they all had slightly different experiences with the bug.  A couple had fever up to 102 and others just didn’t feel good. 

Thankfully they all rebounded with the resiliency of young, healthy people.

I can’t say any of us enjoyed experiencing the pandemic personally, but we were definitely blessed to have gotten a relatively mild case of the potentially deadly malady.

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On a side-note, some of my buddies have asked me, since I was at Sweetwater when I was told I had been exposed, why I hadn’t just stayed there.  Don’t get me wrong, I would have rather sat on the porch at the cabin, drank coffee, and watched and listened to nature, but I didn’t want to be so far away from Annie that I couldn’t tell immediately if she got too sick and needed help.  I also didn’t want to get too sick to be able to drive home if she needed me.

Perhaps it was nature’s way of giving us a consolation prize, but Annie and I realized that we were both scheduled off from work for Martin Luther King Day, so we drove in to Sweetwater on Sunday evening, on our way home from Oklahoma. 

Since we hadn’t planned the trip to Sweetwater, we hadn’t brought the pickup or any of my chainsaws or other tools, we chose to walk in first to make sure no trees had fallen across the driveway.  Turning the van around on the narrow driveway through the hills would be quite difficult in some places. 

We were welcomed by a couple of the resident deer on the walk.  Well, they waved their flags at us as they ran away.  When we established that the driveway was clear, Annie went back for the van (The deer flagged her again.) while I went on to the cabin to get it ready for us.  I found the place beautiful, crisp, cold, and absolutely peppered with tracks from more of the hooved inhabitants. 

Awesome!

We didn’t even bother trying to get any serious work done, but we did have some relaxing fun.  We walked along the creek, and down the creek bed once we got to the point where the water went subterranean.  At the south end of the property, we both felt well enough along the path to recovery that we took a hike up the steep hill to the southwest corner, then north along the ridge, across the driveway, and to the northeast corner, which is within view of our lovely little cabin.

We both felt great!

As I said, Annie and I had not originally planned to go to Sweetwater, so we hadn’t picked up any food for the short stay.  Thankfully, our son, J.B., had given us a small ice chest-full of venison from the deer he took this past season.  That haul included some jalapeno-and-cheddar summer sausage.  I peeled the casing off one of the frozen sticks, then used a butcher knife to slice it into burger-sized chunks, which we then grilled over a warm fire in the pit.  We ate and sat beside the fire as the sun sank, taking the temperature with it.  The summer sausage, washed down with crisp, clear, delicious water from the spring, made a meal fit for a king.

That was appropriate, since the next day was Martin Luther King Day.

After hanging around on the porch long enough to revel in the sky bejeweled by billions of stars, we went inside to enjoy a peaceful night in the warm cabin.

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Annie and I were both up at the crack of dawn and I went out onto the porch, then quickly made my way down the steps and out into the yard to take some video.

I have seen some awesome mornings in my 63 years on this planet, but Martin Luther King Day, 2021 was one of the most beautiful.  Because of the below-freezing temperature, when I first got up, I expected to find that nature had frosted everything with sparkling diamonds.  No such luck. 

My eyes were quickly drawn to the sunrise.

Oh, my gosh.

I rushed back inside to get Annie and convince her to come outside with me.  Although she grumbled light-heartedly about my goading, she did follow me, and was glad she did.

Over the tree-covered ridge east of the yard, the sun shone through a mass of reddish-orange clouds that filled the sky.  The incredible glory of nature shone down upon us.

Annie spoke for both of us when she said, simply, “Wow.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Wow.” 

It was a glorious day to be alive…and to be done with Cousin COVID.  

His visit really did stink, and it didn’t take three days to get that way.

Sorry, Ben.

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