Those Dryer Balls

I have Covid.  Little spiky dryer balls are bashing me at the cellular level and I feel like that potato chip bag flattened in the gutter so long ago you can’t get those particular chips anymore.  Feverish, I happen to read Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language and realize now is not the time to read Adrienne Rich.  Because she insists on being intelligent through heartbreak and adversity and I’m afraid the time for intelligence is past. I suspect now is a time for hiding intelligence.  But maybe that’s just the zany, paranoid and curiously entertaining fever.

Music was almost certainly the vector for Covid’s invasion, my eternal, Hamlinesque weakness. Play the right music and I’ll follow you off a cliff. I love the aerobic dance music at the gym, good, current stuff, not the ghastly old Silver Sneakers tapes with bad, scratchy covers of My Boyfriend’s Back and Stand By Your Man.  So I went, twice. Indoor gym, no open windows, 35 women and one man breathing hard in a smallish space for a solid hour. Twice. I know better. But hey, there’s magic in dancing with a crowd. Worth the risk. I’ll probably do it again, so ratlike is my response to the piper.

Assuming I survive. And I will, thanks to some extent to Rachel Maddow who spent all of last year teaching her viewers about monoclonal antibodies, the post-infection treatment for Covid 19.  There are several versions now and this afternoon I pulled on my N-95 mask to wait at CVS’s outside window for mine. It’s called Paxlovid and is actually two different pills you take twice a day. It’s all complicated and you have to ask for it, which assumes that you know to ask for it.  Thank you, Rachel!

There was one bad moment when the nurse told me, “Sleep on your stomach.” In my head, instant replay of countless hospital videos. Medical people in tons of protective gear turning inert, blurry-faced bodies onto their stomachs.  Last-ditch effort to keep the bodies alive, an effort that usually failed. I was reminded that this is no joke, that millions are dead and nothing stands between me and that fate but privilege – my Caucasian skin and an educated background that made getting all those vaccinations a no-brainer.

But hey, for the next few days I’m a lethal weapon! I could go anywhere – a Trump rally, sports bar, anti-choice meeting – sneeze, and possibly take out a few deplorables. But I won’t.  I’ll stay in, have food delivered from the grocery and write Rachel a thank-you note, all because there’s likely to be at least one good person even at a Trump rally and I can’t hurt her. It’s a fun fantasy, anyway.

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash