I have a recurring cough. I've had it most of my life. A couple of times a year I start coughing, and it lasts for a month or two. Sometimes the cough gets very bad and I need special medications to get through it all. And these days it keeps people from my door, but I'm not going to make jokes about that for the time being.
On Tuesday evening, after a particularly bad day of coughing I developed some pain, chills and a fever. I felt miserable and in view of how this fucking year has gone I went to the hospital. With how much I was coughing I was kept away from other people in the ER, including a man that it would turn out had broken his arm in 4 places, a man already in a wheelchair suffering from renal failure, and a man who it would turn out was suffering from a large rat in his pants leg.
I wound up waiting 4 hours for an isolation room. The ER was that busy with various issues, even with only 4 people in the waiting room. Oh, and in case I've never mentioned it, I live in a major city. Getting an isolation room, in case I had finally come down with COVID-19 took time. That's okay. I was miserable but these are the times we are in.
The nurse in charge of the ER was angry with me. Even masked, I had exposed her to COVID-19 and now she was going to have to go into quarantine. I was tested for COVID, X-rayed, had blood drawn, gave urine, scanned for a blood clot and at 1 in the morning it was finally announced to the staff and everyone that I had tested NEGATIVE. Service suddenly got a lot better, including the nurse coming to the realization that I hadn't forced her into Quarantine. We had a lovely talk while I waited for a room to open up.
I finally got a bed at 4:30am, more than 10 hours after first being admitted to the ER. It didn't occur to me at the time, but I had had to wait for a bed to become available. No one gets discharged at 4:30 in the fucking morning. The hospital was full and there are only a couple of ways a hospital gets emptier.
Try sleeping once that realization hits you.
I would wind up getting up tested three more times, and I did not and do not have COVID-19. I had an infection, which made my cough more pronounced. A couple days of antibiotics and I'm home, and a bunch of medical students get their first real look at a medical mystery; my cough. Up to now no one has ever been able to explain why this happens to me and this hasn't changed. Sometimes, my little ones, a Man my size ISN'T diabetic, DOESN'T have heart trouble, despite coughing like a dying man has nothing in his lungs, and will defy your every expectation.
Sometimes you won't be able to explain it - you just have to treat it and that's what they did. I'll be taking antibiotics for a weeks and cough meds for a month.
I didn't have COVID-19, but my entire experience was shaped by the pandemic. Getting criticized by medical professionals for not being cautious enough - despite the fact I've barely left my home since March and ALWAYS masked. Until the test came back negative I was treated harshly, like an idiot, like a leper. Once it turned out I was "normal" sick, the treatment I have come to expect from the staff at this hospital returned. That was kind of strange, but upon reflection I'm okay with it - I mean no one likes to be treated like an idiot, but you kind of have to be one at this point to catch it. Or horribly unlucky.
Or a believer in lies - which I think is a majority of cases.
During my brief hospital stay 187,567 people were diagnosed with COVID-19. 2,616 people died from it. I have been keeping track of these statistics since April and this was the closest I had come to being one of them.
My 2 1/2 days were awful, and I have NOTHING to complain about. That's the world we live in right now.
And to make it all political, because everything is politics anymore, this is Trump's fault. We live in a miserable, painful, sullied America right now, Where every day the population of Pasadena gets sick and every day families are just vanished by a disease we can prevent the spread of with very little effort.
I look forward to the day when I never have to utter this fuckhead's name again. We need to treat him like Germans treats the name Hitler - erase it. This man has left our country with a great scar, and we may never be rid of it.
Being sick with anything in this era is just awful - but just look at how much worse it could have been.
