I’m 49, lift weights, run 50+ miles a month, and am currently recovering from post-COVID issues. The initial hit was over for more than a week and a half ago, but COVID was serious enough that it fully-triggered the lung damage I have from Iraq, and now I’m dealing with major upper airway inflammation and a ridiculous Eustachian tube dysfunction (ETD) that doesn’t allow my middle ear ways to pressurize normally. While all of that hasn’t been fun, the worst part was believing for more than a year and a half that I had any real control in preventing COVID from affecting me and my family.
When the pandemic struck, I’d been tracking the outbreak for more than a month. I’d heard from several sources that it was only a matter of time before COVID would be in the US. I stocked up on supplies – including toilet paper; go me – two weeks before the lockdown hit on 13 March 2020. Because I was high-risk from the Iraq lung damage from toxic exposure to burn pits (see my columns on that topic), my family was locked-down for 13 months. I didn’t write about it because I knew we were more fortunate than many, and I didn’t take it for granted. We did what many families did – wiped down packages, used hand sanitizer the way Tony Montana used cocaine, and avoided crowded places when we did have to go out. Still, 13 months is a long time in the same house, day after day, especially with the mind-numbing impact of so-called virtual learning impacting the kids. But the lockdowns ended, and my wife and I emerged fully vaccinated with Moderna. The kids returned to sports, and there was that initial period this spring and summer where things seemed to be heading towards a “new normal.” But then the Delta variant emerged, and everything changed.
In Maryland, I returned to wearing a mask while out, I was careful whom I was around, and the cocaine-train of hand sanitizing continued. I was making the best possible decisions I could for me and my family. But the real variables are the ones you can’t control – other people and life.
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On 28 September, I suddenly – like a switch – got hit with my ETD (not an STD; that’s something else), and I went downhill quickly, thinking it was just another cold, as I’d tested negative 3 times in the past 6 months for minor colds. But I grew significantly worse and tested positive for COVID the next day. The day after that, as I continued to deteriorate (it was aggressive and progressive, kind of like the Biden administration), I was fortunate enough to receive the Regeneron monoclonal antibody infusion at an empty missionary church school near FEDEX Field outside of Washington D.C. I grew sicker still, and 26 hours later – exactly as they told me – the infusion stopped the COVID in its tracks, and I started to get better. I was still sick for another 9 days, but I managed the low fever with Motrin and Tylenol and the cough with my two normal inhalers. I also ended up taking a z-pack and methyl prednisone dose pack. There was a 96-hour period at the beginning where I wondered fearfully how bad it was going to get, especially with my lung damage, but the infusion worked just like they said it would. In fact, the First Call group that administered it told me that 100% of the recipients since they started in April had avoided hospitalization. You read that right – 100%.
In addition to hitting me, the virus hit our kids, both who tested negative for an entire week (while I lived in basement isolation) before finally showing symptoms so mild they made the common cold look like…well…a serious case of COVID. And my wife, she must have an immune system that the Moderna vaccine loves because she never contracted it.
Now, with every passing day, I realize how foolish I was to believe I could control COVID. I know where and from whom I got it, and there was no avoiding it, especially when the close contact while masked I had with that person was during the pre-symptomatic stage. I strongly believe that at some point, every single person will come in contact with the virus. I believe the vaccine – which is a choice between you, your doctor, and your family – will prevent the spread in some (like my wife), will prevent extremely severe symptoms in others (like it did with me), and will prevent death in most but not all. Life’s just not fair enough to save everyone.
Like with most things in life, the thing you fear usually never turns out to be worse than the fear itself. I learned that in the Marine Corps, I learned it in life, and it was just reinforced with COVID. There has been so much confusion, politicization, and deception about masks, vaccines, mortality rates, comorbidities, etc., that the only people you should listen to are you and the doctors who know your health as intimately as you do. We are a politicized and divided society. That’s not changing any time soon. As a result, there will always be noise trying to drown you out, intimidate you, and oppress you, but after what I just experienced, the one thing I can remove from all of that noise is fear. Like I said earlier, I believe COVID will touch all of us at one point, one way or another. To semi-quote Jeff Goldblum in JURASSIC PARK, COVID finds a way, and all you can do is be informed, be prepared, and be free of fear.
Semper Fidelis.
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