(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
The Beginning, Imagined.
I have never been a COVID patient, but I want to understand what it is like to be one. Imagination must thankfully take the place of the virus for me.
The many symptoms of COVID are mentioned in many articles published over the last 10 or 11 months. See also the article posted here this week, "THE COVID REPORT." PART ONE: THE PATIENTS. The Beginning. That was written as a summary of what patients, doctors, nurses, and families have reported about their real-life experiences with having or treating COVID from the onset through the first several days following admission to the hospital.
The present article is written as an act of imagining what COVID patients go through during that time. If I get COVID, I imagine that I will probably run a fever for days. Some people run a fever of 103º or more for three or four days before they go to the hospital. I can imagine what it is like to have such a fever, because I have experienced my own bedsheets wringing with sweat. Wringing with sweat the way a face cloth in a sink is wringing with water, so that they both need to be wrung out.
I imagine too that I will have chills to go with this fever, if I get COVID. Chills are part of my own experience with fever, so I know what chills can do to a body. I have also gone septic as they say, when it is impossible it seems either to stop shaking or to feel warm.
And then from among all the other symptoms that so many people get (and so many people don't get) with COVID, I expect that I will have fatigue and sleep deprivation. However, I also expect that I may not recognize the difference any time soon after the onset of COVID. Perhaps because of the stage of my life, or because I am a cancer survivor, or for other reasons, fatigue and sleep deprivation are often my companions. Unlike the effects of fatigue and sleep deprivation on COVID patients, which can be severe, I will have to imagine fatigue so great that I cannot concentrate on watching the television and to imagine sleep deprivation so great because it is the result of aches all over my body, particularly in my joints.
The key symptom of COVID, shortness of breath in the sense of difficulty breathing, is frightening to me. I don't believe that I have ever experienced shortness of breath in that extreme. Oh, sure, I have experienced shortness of breath during and after exercise and things like that. However, that is not what people mean when they talk about difficulty breathing because they have COVID.
(Victor J. Blue / New York Times)
They mean gasping for air. Sometimes they mean that they have so much difficulty in breathing on their own that they need outside help, a machine like a respirator, in order to breathe. I have difficulty imagining that from my own experience.
I am left to imagine that from the experiences of others, from the experiences of people who have had COVID and from the experiences of people who have treated COVID, but there are few stories and understandably there are no videos that I have yet found showing exactly how respirators make COVID patients able to breathe. It may be too personal an experience, having a respirator help you breathe. I do know it is so extreme a procedure that at his press conferences in 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that if you have to be on a respirator, that's pretty much it for you because your chances of surviving COVID are not good after you have been put on a respirator.
That does not help me imagine it any better. It does add to making the difficulty breathing part of COVID scary.
But wait a minute. I had pneumonia and bronchitis together when I was in high school. I just remembered. That was a time of wringing sweats, chills, high fever, and many times, difficulty breathing. That may be comparable to having a mild case of COVID, sufficient at least for the task of imaging what having COVID would be like.
So far, I continue to be fortunate to only imagine what having COVID is like.
To be continued. Please read the disclaimer. ©2021 Dennis J. Wall. All rights reserved.
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