by Shenzhan/申展
Xiao Mi, April, 2020
One night in early April, 2020, I was having a really bad headache, with a stronger-than-usual sense of loneliness after being in bed the entire day, and the day before. Around mid-night I was panicking for a moment that I might have contracted IT.
IT being COVID-19.
I am in New York City so contracting the corona virus would hardly be a surprise, especially in the peak weeks. By the time I was having headaches, the entire state had been on emergency lock-down for over two weeks. I had been working from home for 15 days, living with my cat Xiao Mi within the four walls of an apartment in Queens. With the highest number of patients and death tolls among the five boroughs of New York City, Queens was NOT the kind of place you would want to be at this point if you had a choice. The city was in the thickness of the pandemic. I could hear sirens all day long from my balcony.
Earlier that day, my friend M, who lives in Manhattan and is very kind to check in on me every now and then, sent me a photo of dead bodies piled up and stored in trucks of a hospital as death just overflowed the city capacity. Of course, she could not possibly know my state of health. Only a couple of my colleagues knew since I had to call in for a sick day and everyone was nervous. My boss called me to check if I was ok. I was ok -- just body aches, chill, fatigue, maybe a little fever, “but no coughing, no difficulty breathing. I’m sure it’s just a typical cold, very bad timing.” I added after describing my symptoms and went back to sleep.
When you are living alone, sick with fatigue, and the creature you live with is not the kind to cook or bring you food, feeding yourself happily becomes more or less an issue. While loss of appetite helped the situation, I was soon reminded by my friend H in Beijing, which is a few months ahead of NYC in dealing with the virus, that sufficient protein intake is important to fight against the virus. My intelligence had diminished at the time, so I forgot that protein ALSO, obviously, as one article I read argues, feeds the virus so it’s quite debatable the role protein plays if you are sick with the corona virus.
Anyway, I was having body aches, chill, headaches, fatigue, and loss of appetite, so was not in a good shape for any kind of debate. Nevertheless, I kept debating in my own head what went wrong. I had worked from home fine for two weeks before I got sick. So logically, nothing, not even the MTA, between my apartment and the workplace would have got me sick. I carefully followed all the right precautions, maybe even more so than the heroic New York State governor Cuomo recommended: I wore an N95 mask whenever I went out for grocery shopping once a week; I used alcohol-based napkins to wipe anything I brought back home, from milk boxes to oranges (leafy vegetables were problematic!); I jumped into a shower after I wiped down, sorted out, and stocked away everything from my weekly shopping. Social distancing while shopping proved to be impractical. Some stores were just too small for a surprisingly high volume of shoppers. But I was wearing a mask, which theoretically should have prevented most contracts even if the distance was not six feet. Right? So, what went wrong to get me sick? If it’s not COVID-19 (thankfully I was still breathing with ease, maybe a touch of tightness in my chest, but a bad cold makes you feel that way too, right?), how the hell could I have caught something that was probably with fewer chances than the corona virus to catch out there now?
I was in bed puzzled by these questions, and felt my intelligence was slightly insulted by not being able to adequately protect myself against whatever out there. Then the idea that I might die from COVID-19 got me. Damn! WHAT IF I die from it, joining the other thousands in NYC? Since I wouldn’t get a test, and probably wasn’t able to get a bed in the hospital, I might just die at home, with Xiao Mi watching me and begging for food as usual while I wouldn’t be able to respond. And my death probably wouldn’t be counted towards the death toll since the city wouldn’t magically know about it.
AND how can I tell my mother in China about this? Obviously, I have to save my last breath to deliver her the horrible news myself. Imagine that! It would be the worst moment of my life, and her life too! I can’t bear to think that a mother has to take the news that her only daughter is dying, away from home and out of her reach. Plus, my mother had been fighting with cancer since her diagnosis last August. She had gone through bone fractures, a surgery, chemotherapy, acute kidney impairment, and loss of mobility... It would be too cruel to just add this on top of the suffering she endures already. Of course, there is no way to do the math. I mean, having cancer and losing a daughter don’t necessarily add up to more suffering than just losing a daughter or having cancer. (Well, it sounds horrible however I phrase it.) Understandably, at the moment when the realization that I might die from COVID-19 struck me, I wasn’t doing any math. Instead, I started crying.
It was a lonely cry. I cried over a betrayal boyfriend, frustrating relationships, half-cooked doctoral dissertation, general depression, work, child never to be born, and the passing of my first cat Chino (that was a bad one), etc. Each time I cried for how I felt for myself. This time I cried over the possibility of how I might have made my mother feel. Somehow it made me feel lonelier given the circumstance: she is only a phone call away, but I can’t tell her, nor anyone. Not now, not until I got tested. And there was no way to get tested. Still, even if I were tested positive, would I tell her? Only 20% of the positive cases get into the critical situation.
The moment of panicking and crying was nevertheless very brief. Crying literally made breathing hard when lying in bed. So, I had to get myself sitting up and Xiao Mi jumped in bed and demanded to sit on my chest (as if she knew I was NOT having a breathing problem!) for two minutes, like she often does. After she went off, I had made the decision that the best way to avoid delivering the terrible news to my mother was NOT dying. If I am not going to die, I would have never needed to tell her anything about her daughter's death.
I took a Tylenol my neighbor brought me to subdue the headache and went on sleeping that night.
Weeks later, after I fully recovered from the sickness, cause still unknown, and resumed with zoom happy hours, yoga, biking, and packed work meetings, I came across an article on New York Times, “C.D.C. Adds New Symptoms to Its List of Possible Covid-19 Signs”. It says:
“Chills, muscle pain, sore throat and headache are among the ailments now considered potential indicators of the disease”.
Still, with all the symptoms now included, it is a mere “potential”. How helpful is that supposed to be without a test?
And where is the antibody test?
April 30, 2020
Astoria, New York