The C Word

It will leave when it's good and ready

Since I got the gorgeous Covid-19 virus in December 2021, every time my throat tickles I do the responsible thing and ask my husband, “Do you think I have Covid?” Since he is not a medical professional he responds, “Why don’t you take a test?” I do, and (historically), I do not have Covid. Until this week.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A gif of Michael Bluth telling Job Bluth to “get rid of the Seaward” and Lucille Bluth responding “I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.” A great joke, a great show.

Life has been busy. My mother-in-law was in town. My friend James was in town. I screened a short film, twice. The baby turned one, once. I went to Costco. I felt tired and slightly sick and couldn’t sleep but that’s increasingly what I understand to be motherhood.

But when I woke up drenched in sweat at 3:15 in the morning I thought, “Hm, this might be a little bit more.” My husband was settling the baby so I asked myself, “Do you think I have Covid?” I could hear his answer in absentia, so I struggled to the linen closet and took out a Covid test.

A fun thing about Covid tests is they make you feel like a scientist, laying out your swabs and tubes and drops. I felt like Marie Curie, minus the radiation and plus an extra-long Q-tip up my nose. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait long for the results of my ambitious experiment. I had Covid.

When my husband came back into the room, I delivered the exciting news so he could set himself up on the pullout couch in his office. I spent the rest of the night awake, feeling each cell in my body succumb to the illness now coursing through me. My phone’s light kept me company as I looked up important things like “medications + breastfeeding + covid” and “how to get over covid” and “kevin richardson backstreet boys 2024.” I feel asleep at 6 AM, my body propped up on a mound of pillows, my phone as hot as my forehead.

One thing I had forgotten about having Covid is that it’s bad and it sucks. The last time I got it, I underestimated how long it would take to get over it, so I vowed not to make the same mistake this time. I was going to take it easy. My husband waited on me hand and foot so I could watch every episode of Masterpiece Theater’s The Forsyte Saga (2002), which has greater healing powers than Sudafed, and unlike Sudafed, is safe for breastfeeding. If you haven’t read it or seen it, the quick version is: this woman Irene marries Damien Lewis and then realizes it was a big mistake but Damien Lewis won’t let her go and it ruins a lot of lives.

After two days I felt better so I got up and despite my husband’s protestations stopped taking it easy, leaving a half-installed baby gate in my wake.

People like to say that at this point, Covid is basically “just a cold.” I disagree. Covid-19 has a je ne sais quoi—a little something extra that sets it apart from other respiratory illnesses. I had a cold a few weeks ago (just lucky, I guess) and let me tell you what: colds walked so Covid could run.

If there’s one upshot to having it, it’s not constantly wondering whether I have it, and being able to not wonder for a few weeks or months or years or however long it takes to find its way back to me, like Damien Lewis chasing Irene, across the distance, across the years.