A Fever Dream

This week, I’ve been reacquainted with an old friend. A few years have passed since we last interacted but we picked up where we left off—I swabbed my nose, swirled sufficiently in both nostrils, and waited for my old friend, the Covid test, to wick up my drops of nasal juice and render a verdict: Two lines, positive.

“We’ve got to stay away from dad for a few days—he’s got Covid,” my wife pronounced. Then she banished me to the guest room. It brought back memories from five years ago when she left gatorade and food outside my door while I sequestered myself. Back then, she had the baby monitor set up in my room so she could monitor my progress, while she kept Thomas in the bedroom with her.

This time I didn’t have a pounding headache, but it was the same old fever, then several days where you feel like you’re living in quicksand. I first got Covid on March 4th, 2021. Back then, when you got Covid for the first time, you worried about whether or not you would survive the next five days. Five years later, the Covid era feels almost like a fever dream.

Did that really happen?

It did. I know because Thomas was born in the hospital in 2020, with no family or visitors present for fear of spreading the virus. While my wife and I were celebrating our new life in the maternity ward and I was learning to change diapers, up above us in the ICU, people were on ventilators. In January 2022, as a county employee, I had to work at the first vaccine drive thru at our local high school. I’ve never seen people so happy and relieved to get a shot before, but that excitement wouldn’t last. By September 2022, when the Delta wave was peaking, our rural hospital was overwhelmed and turning people away. We had one of the lowest vaccination rates and the highest positivity rate of any county in the state. From that peak (or trough), Covid tapered off and slowly faded from the forefront into the background, into memory—at least for some of us.

“What’s Covid?” Thomas asked.

I’m glad he has no memory.