’22 In Review

The Year so Far–Part 1

            What an interesting few months we’ve just been through. In December, the week of Christmas, my wife had a cough. We thought it was bronchitis, as that seems to visit her every winter. When she didn’t improve, she tested for COVID. Positive. She was out of work for a few weeks. I stayed with her for two weeks, both to take care of her and to quarantine. After those two weeks, I had no symptoms and returned to work. She returned to work when she was better. A couple of weeks later, I had a cough, chills, lethargy. Just to be safe, I took a COVID test. Positive. How I could be with my wife for several weeks while she was ill and have nothing, then weeks later end up with COVID doesn’t make sense to me. And that wasn’t enough. As I felt worse and worse, I got into the doctor. He ordered a chest x-ray. Double pneumonia.

            For the next couple of weeks, my time was spent moving between three chairs and the couch. That was all the energy I had. Any time I had to go up the stairs, I had to sit for a minute or two just to catch my breath. And the cough wouldn’t go away. I looked forward every day to the relief of sleep but would wake up during the night from weird dreams. It hurt my stomach to eat, so I didn’t.

One night I had to get up to drain my bladder. On the way back to bed, the world began to spin and I knew I was going down. I wanted to get to the bed so I wouldn’t end up on the floor. Disoriented, I ran into the wall—which woke up my wife. She asked what was wrong—screeched “what’s wrong!?” is more accurate. Hearing her voice gave me the direction I needed to the bed, and I fell onto the mattress. Whew! As I lay in bed waiting for the room to stop spinning, one of the voices in my head suggested I do better about keeping myself fed. Malnourishment was not going to help me get better.

It’s tough to eat when either you can’t taste at all or the things you can taste are repellant. Something about the illness made things taste fishy. Not pleasant fishy, like a good piece of salmon or tuna steak or trout but left-out-in-the-sun, bloated, rotten fishy. Even the bland cereal that is normally as tasty as cardboard had that disgusting, fishy taste. One of the soups I had previously liked had a chemical taste to it, along with the fishiness. Fortunately, my wife and I found some things I could easily eat that didn’t have that taste. Once I began to eat, that need to pass out faded.

(To Be Continued)