Last week I finally caught COVID, after dodging that bullet for over two years. I triple-vaxxed, I masked, and still I got it—and with full-blown symptoms to boot! What follows is a sometimes delirious account of my days in CDC-mandated isolation (and beyond!) Is it helpful? I don’t know. Is it at least entertaining? Who’s to say. Why am I doing it? Because I was TOO SICK to actually come up with a genuine edition of this newsletter. Have some compassion, you heartless content gobbler!
Day Zero
It’s a Friday, and I have no plans. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown wayyy chiller about not having plans on a weekend, but still I try. I invite a friend to go see some people die by dinosaur in Jurassic World, but he can’t make the time work. I get invited by another friend to see Corsicana but her comps are for Saturday and she can’t change them to Friday. Eventually, I give up. God wants me to stay home, apparently.
I indulge in some alone drinking and smoking while watching TV, and on my second cigarette I feel pain going from my left nostril to my left tonsil. Weird. Am I getting a sore throat? I chalk it up to allergens in the air.
By the time I go to bed, though, I feel woozy. I only had one drink! Maybe it’s the stress of the week crashing down on me? I go to bed bothered by how cold the AC feels on my body.
Day One
I wake up still feeling woozy. Hangover? But I then notice my finger joints hurt as I use my phone. I’ve had that happen before, most noticeably when I had the flu. Uh-oh. I take a COVID test. It’s not even ambiguous: two lines, very clear. Just to make sure, I take a fancy rapid PCR that my friend, uh, procured from his job (and gave to me) a while ago. Again, not ambiguous at all: I definitely have it.
I get a manic “start spreading the news” energy. I text people—the ones I might have exposed, the ones with whom I have plans that need to get canceled, others whom I just wanna tell I have it for the novelty of it. Baby’s first COVID! A friend who works as a COVID compliance officer explains to me that yesterday (the day I first showed symptoms) is Day Zero, today is Day One, and on Day Six I can end my isolation if I test negative. I mostly reply with gifs and puns. I’m low-key thrilled—I’ll have five days off to do my own shit! I have a stack of plays to read, I have a script I need to work on… this is great!
Then after lunch, my mania subsides and I realize I feel like fucking shit. I can’t do anything except lay on the couch. I take a big nap and call my parents. I need to be babied.
Getting up to pick up the groceries I had delivered feels like a triathlon—I don’t even have the energy to feel guilty about my privilege.
Day Two
I wake up feeling even more like shit. My thermometer, which uses sounds and color to tell you the intensity of the fever, is flashing red and making the scariest of beeps, like a bomb is about to go off. I’m scared. Will I have to go to the hospital?
I remember that a co-worker had it and she said there’s a hotline you can call for Paxlovid (it’s 212-COVID-19). I call. There’s some waiting time and they get my name wrong (and then they fix it, thankfully), but eventually a human delivers Paxlovid to my house. Is this America? Doesn’t feel like it!
I start watching the Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers cartoon series (after having recently watched the live-action movie, which I was underwhelmed by but reminded me that I used to watch the cartoon as a kid). I remember only two things about it: the theme song, which slapped, and a scene in which Monty Jack said “it’s the howl of a devil dog!”, which became a meme in my house. The rewatch is successful: it’s the exact amount of complexity my fevered brain can handle—though sometimes I’m still confused by certain plot points, either because I can’t follow them or because they are bewildering for a kid’s show (such as an episode in which Chip and Dale do drag and then get sexually harassed by goons). The theme song still slaps!
I have diarrhea. It could be my regular IBS diarrhea, but I sense a COVIDness to it.
Day Three
I wake up with a disgusting taste in my mouth. I Google it and it seems to be a thing called “Paxlovid mouth,” which happened to 5.6% of patients in the clinical trial. I hate that I’m one of the 5.6%, both because I now have to deal with the bad taste but also because I am the sort of person who tends to discredit the 5.6% in life and say they’re letting their neuroses get the best of them. Now I feel like I have to write a New York Times Op-Ed titled “Paxlovid Mouth Was Funny—Until It Happened To Me.”
Speaking of taste: I haven’t lost my sense of taste and smell. Rather, it feels like someone has rubbed Hipoglós (baby rash cream) on the inside of my nose and over my tongue. It’s not good.
Also, I’m upset that more people are not checking up on me. I COULD BE DYING HERE! What the fuck?
I take objection to a lyric in the Chip ‘n’ Dale theme song: “somehow whatever’s wrong gets solved.” It’s not “somehow”—it’s due to their hard work as rescue rangers!!
Day Four
Maybe no one was checking up on me because everyone had COVID? An inordinate amount of people I’m talking to seems to have it. I mean, that’s how pandemics work, but I’ve never had it before so I never experienced this. There’s some comfort in knowing it’s not just me; I feel like part of the group. “Mom, everyone was doing it!”
Also, the fever has finally gone down, just as Chip ‘n’ Dale starts getting crazier. For one, I realize there are two versions of the theme song. The one I like less, which has backup vocals and is accompanied by shoddy editing in the credits, is rarer, and initially I wonder if I’m just hallucinating the differences when it pops up in an episode—but no, it seems the show randomly chose between them as it went along. Also, for whatever insane reason, a five-parter airs midway through the show that introduces all the characters. This is not a flashback (at least it’s not framed as such), it just… tells you the story as if you didn’t know it. What is going on? Probably a glitch in airing order, but you’d think they’d fix that before putting it on Disney+? Plus it involves robbing a bank with a giant gell-o AND has a content warning at the beginning for racist stuff. It’s not as fun without a fever.
Day Five
Today is technically the last day of isolation and I start feeling upset. I was finally settling into my COVID vacation and it’s about to be over! (At the very least, I come back to remote work tomorrow).
The signs that it’s ending are all over, especially on my TV. The fever has been gone long enough that I can’t watch Chip ‘n’ Dale anymore; I give up during an episode in which genie lamps are taken for granted without any sort of explanation. During my delirium, I was able to watch an episode in which aliens were introduced casually, but now I’m struggling to suspend disbelief as intensely.
I mourn. I was even kinda enjoying Paxlovid mouth. After a while, it started feeling like grapefruit aftertaste. That’s not that bad, is it?
Day Six
I take a test and it comes back positive, so I guess my isolation isn’t over yet. BUT I feel well enough that I can come back to work.
I think Chester may have it? His breathing feels labored and he’s sneezing more than usual. On the news, I read about a woman who caught COVID from her cat. So the vice-versa feels possible. I guess all these mornings of waking me up by rubbing his face all over mine have come to collect.
Day Seven
I’m still testing positive. I’m not thrilled about this, less because I want to get out of my house (I don’t give a shit about the outside world) and more because I have an in-person workshop of one of my plays next week that I’ve been really looking forward to. All this time I’ve been saying “well, at least I got it now and not the week of the workshop!” I better fucking test negative before then.
Chester shows no further signs of having COVID, though you never know with him. Just the other day I thought “it’s so nice that he’s not puking anymore, I guess his meds really worked” and then he puked THAT VERY MORNING.
Day Nine
I finally test negative!
KN95 firmly in place, I step past the threshold of my front door into the great beyond. I go to Mass to thank God for curing me of my leprosy, and then meet a friend for a Shake Shack picnic in Central Park. Before heading home, I pee in the Delacourt bathroom and it feels like everything’s back to normal.
Day Eleven
One day before my play workshop begins, I TEST POSITIVE AGAIN. My friend tells me it’s a thing called “COVID Rebound,” which happened to 1-2% of patients in the clinical trial. A new op-ed: “I thought I was cured of COVID—and then I rebounded.”
It looks like I won’t be able to attend the workshop of my play.
I’m of two minds. One is to scream, punch, kick, scratch. WHYYYYY?????
The other is to practice radical acceptance and stop mourning a future that was never going to happen—as I often say, “there is only one timeline.”
I text the people I hung out with during the weekend to let them know. I email the theater that’s doing the workshop of my play, to set up a virtual presence in the rehearsal room. Everyone is very nice and accommodating, expressing condolences. It doesn’t make me feel better.
I consider going back Chip ‘n’ Dale, but I don’t have a fever. This fucking rebound couldn’t even get that right. All I feel is the Hipoglós on my nose and a tongue. No Paxlovid mouth.
Day Twelve
I take a test as soon as I wake up—still positive.
The stage manager does way more work than she signed up for to make sure the iPad I’m Zooming into faces the actors and that I can hear them clearly (and vice versa). Everyone seems bummed that I’m not there and asks if I’ll be able to come in at all (rehearsals go until next Wednesday). I say “the thing with COVID is you gotta go with the flow.”
It’s not ideal, but I can hear and see them and it’s a good day, full of interesting discussions that allow me to see the play with fresh eyes, which is exactly what I had hoped for.
Day Thirteen
Still positive. Maybe fainter? At this point I don’t know.
Rehearsal goes great. Wonderful discussions. At the end of the day, the team asks me if I think I’ll be there tomorrow. I tell them I don’t think so; next week is more likely. They seem sad. It gives me dread—I thought this was working, but they seem to want me in the room. Are they not getting what they need from me? Do they hate me on the iPad?
Or maybe they just care about me and would like to share physical space with me. That feels unlikely, but the world is a crazy place.
I order Popeyes, avoiding last week’s mistake of trying the Buffalo Ranch sandwich (two thumbs down) and going for what works—Classic Chicken sandwhich. I’d worry about the effects of it on my COVID gut, but it’s not like my gut was working before.
Day Fourteen
It’s technically the day to send this newsletter. Was hoping to end this on a high note with a negative test result, but no dice. The line looks as faint as could possibly be, but then again it always does these days.
Rehearsals wrap up for the week. Virtualness aside, it has been a lovely experience so far. We have broken the play down and really examined it—I’ll be doing rewrites this weekend, and I have a pretty good sense of what I want to achieve.
I’m watching Breaking Bad and it’s a huge bummer. Can I really not handle Chip ‘n’ Dale anymore?
Day Seventeen
It’s been five days since my first rebound test, so technically I’m okay to end isolation regardless of what the new test says—but the new test says I’m negative! I wanna be more enthusiastic about it, but there’s no enthusiasm to be found in a person that has taken as many antigen tests as I have.
Is the nightmare over? Possibly. You might find me roaming the streets with a KN95. I’m particularly excited to go into rehearsal with the rewrites I spent the weekend on.
BUT, of course, this could be a Goosebumps ending, in which I wake up tomorrow and what starts as a faint line starts getting redder and redder, and I hear evil laughter coming from my lungs, as millions of tiny viruses celebrate duping me once again…