COLUMN: COVID

I've been accused before of being set in my ways -- that I live my life too much by routine, that I'm afraid to try new things and unwilling to accept change.

Pshaw, I say to that. I am both hip and happening. I can roll with the changes like any thriving modernist. Just to prove it, a couple weeks ago, I decided I'd finally be trendy and participate in the latest fad. Yep, I figured it was high time to finally experience this COVID-19 thing everyone's been talking about -- and I've gotta say, having given it the ol' college try, I'm not a fan.

After two years of masking, vaxxing, distancing, dodging, and weaving, COVID finally caught me. Bleh. I was starting to think I was some kind of immune superhero. I've read a couple articles where scientists are starting to wonder if certain people are genetically immune to COVID, and I may have started to get a little cocky assuming I was one of the chosen ones. No such luck. I'm a regular schlub.

A couple weeks ago, I was leaving work on a Tuesday evening and thought, "I feel a little off." Well, it went from "a little off" to "uh oh" in less than two hours. It's supposed to take up to fifteen minutes for the results to appear on one of those home COVID tests, but it was more like fifteen SECONDS before the Positivity-Line-o'-Doom appeared on mine. Yuck.

It's two weeks later, and I'm effectively all good, though I'm still waiting to regain my sense of smell or taste. I have terrible allergies, so my nose is barely functional on a good day. But losing the ability to taste is weird and annoying. I just ate a watermelon jellybean, and it may as well have been a piece of plastic for all I could register. 

I wasn't especially prepared for sudden quarantine, so I spent most of the time raiding my freezer remnants for some back-shelf sustenance. Once upon a whim, I purchased a box of weird-looking frozen turkey burgers that have stuffing and herbs baked inside. You know, the kind of thing that could either be delicious or disgusting. Over the past two weeks, I've eaten that entire box -- and the jury's still out. They might be amazing and they might be unfathomably gross. I honestly have no idea. All I know is that I'll likely associate turkey burgers with illness for the rest of my days.

Still, I feel pretty lucky that I seem to have come out the other side okay. I felt like poo for a few days, but it never really evolved beyond nasty upper respiratory cooties, and I'm thankful for that. It wasn't fun to feel my heart beating through my sinuses, or to go through three boxes of Kleenex in three days, but in the grand scheme of things, it could've been WAY worse.

I barely took any time off and ended up working remotely through most of it -- it was actually better to distract myself than wallow in snotty self-pity. Thankfully, I could handle most everything over e-mail, because trust me -- no one wanted to be on the other end of a phone call with the COVID Goblin from Planet Phlegm. One afternoon, I went to yell at my cat after she knocked over the trash, but the voice that came out of my throat was better suited for a revival of "The Exorcist." Hand to God, I didn't see that cat again for a day and a half.

The CDC says if you don't have a fever, you only need to quarantine for five days. I opted for ten. The only thing worse than getting COVID is the potential of giving it to someone else, and I took no chances. I tested positive on a Tuesday. The Saturday prior, a good friend of mine had called because her car had broken down and she needed a ride. On Sunday, another friend called because HIS car had broken down. I dropped what I was doing that weekend to give both of them lifts. I could only pray that I didn't give them something much worse.

It turns out I likely DID infect my Saturday friend, or maybe she infected ME, because she tested positive two days after I did. Thankfully, her case was mostly asymptomatic and her worst symptom was having to listen to me apologize eleventy different times. All other friends and co-workers escaped unscathed from the gift that keeps on giving, so hopefully I can keep "professional super-spreader" off my resume.

I'll spare any lectures, because I'm as sick of them as you are. But COVID is clearly still a thing and I'm continuing to be cautious. I'll still be working every day and doing my side hustle DJing on the weekends. But I'll also probably be the ONE dude in the club still wearing a mask that you snicker at. I'm cool with it. I don't want these cooties again. This is one gift exchange I never signed up for. Use good judgement, stay safe, and be considerate of others. Mild case or bad case, you don't want this.

Trust me, you don't want to NOT know what turkey burgers taste like.