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Covid Keeps Quarantines Coming

  I'm not even sure how to start when it comes to Covid. As a writer I'm a professional smart-ass, but with this I got my ass kicked, and didn't feel too smart about it.

Illness or injury traditionally accompany our vacations: Last December Emily and I came down with the flu when we were supposed to visit her family and friends in Missouri. This year we decided to head down on a Thursday.

On Wednesday we started to feel a little ... off. By Thursday morning we had to call it--we couldn't risk giving her father whatever bug was now traveling with us. It wasn't until Friday night that we began to suspect the modern medical boogieman, Covid. We missed the trip, we missed Saturday's Holiday Pops concert, and I felt so bad I couldn't even write. By the time it was done I had to contact my editor at History Press to push back our deadline for the Haunted Noble County book, because I'd planned to use half of my vacation to work on it.

The only question left: Could I turn it into a funny blog?

It doesn't LOOK like 102 degrees.

 No. No, I could not.

The only thing we did was marathon the TV show The Expanse, and unsuccessfully try to listen to Good Omens on audiobook. (We kept having to go back when one or another of us fell asleep.)

You know, watching TV and reading books wouldn't be such a bad vacation. The problem is that for the first couple of days we were unable to enjoy anything, and in fact we were too sick to sleep. You heard that right. Over that first weekend I, who can't function on less than eight hours of sleep, stayed awake for twenty-fours straight. Even Nyquil wouldn't put me out.

Then, for a week after that, we were too sick to stay awake. That was the period during which we kept having to go back and decide what we remembered last from the audiobook.

"It was Agnes Nutter and the book, wasn't it?"

"No, it was Adam and the Them meeting the dog."

(We were both wrong: It was Crowley terrifying his house plants.)

I took this photo of Emily at the same time the one above of me was taken. She's in there, I swear.

 

 Part of it--let's face it--is that I'm no spring chicken pox. When I was in my early 20's I once rode the back step of a fire engine to a mobile home fire on the edge of town--while running a fever.

This truck, specifically. What an awesome truck.

 A couple of years later I rode a different engine to Kendallville, to a tire fire so big it could have been seen from the International Space Station, if there'd been one at the time. I was coughing up junk that looked like it belonged in an alien invasion horror movie, despite never getting into the smoke. Yet there I went, for twelve hours. Our Chief later ordered me to go home and go the hell to bed.

 No more.

 It's not just that Covid is bad. My normal temperature runs around 97.6, and by the time it hit 100 not only could I not go to a fire, I couldn't pick up the TV remote. (Thus the marathon of one show.) It reached 102 at one point. My skin kept trying to crawl away to somewhere cooler, or so it felt.

Emily was running about a day behind me, so I had the pain of knowing what she was about to go through. She's still got a terrible cough weeks later, while mine is just awful. We were like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, just laying there in a lump. Christmas preparations? Hah! We'd bought a new, pre-lit tree, but we never even got a chance to fluff out the branches, let alone decorate it.

I kinda like it like this, though. Yes, it's black.


I was so sick--brace yourself for this--I lost my appetite.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've completely lost my appetite, and I was in the hospital for most of those. I dropped six pounds. This is not a recommended diet.

The moral of this story is, of course, don't get Covid. We didn't mind at all being quarantined, at least not until the chocolate ran out. (Everything tasted salty or metallic, except chocolate.) Other people in this area passed away from it, so we count ourselves lucky now that we're feeling 50% better.

Yeah, I'm exhausted all the time, but I work nights--I was already halfway there, anyway.


 

Remember, books aren't effective as masks, but they're great for quarantine.


 

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