It finally happened. I got Covid.
Even though my symptoms were classic, I’ll admit that I was a little shocked when I got the positive results from my PCR test. Which is funny if you think about it. After all, I’m a nurse. I take care of sick people every day. It’s pretty amazing that I’ve gotten this far without getting Covid. We nurses have been working in high risk conditions without the appropriate tools to protect ourselves for the last two and a half years. And over time, we’ve rationalized these conditions. We’ve normalized them. I wish I had gotten a chance to experience nursing pre-pandemic. It sounds like it was a lot less stressful.
ID: A photo of a person who’s fallen down stairs and gotten their head stuck inside a ladder. Above the photo reads, “when people ask me what its like to be a nurse.”
I was talking with a friend about it today (over zoom, cuz Covid) How is it that we’re living in this moment in a full blown pandemic, but I’m still surprised when it catches up to me? Why are so many people continuing to choose to live in denial about the severity of this pandemic? And they summed it up perfectly. My friend said, (and I’m paraphrasing, though I wish I had recorded it so I could give you every brilliant word verbatim) “The level of cognitive dissonance it takes just to get through all of the things we’re forced to live in and accept every day is so high, of course this is how people are reacting to the pandemic.” And that hit me hard. I’m still processing it, to be honest.
ID: A classical painting of a person in a brown robe looking up with a small child next to them and the word “bruh” next to their face. Above the image reads, “When you are a single mom and responsible for 100% of all the things.”
Having Covid has put a magnifying glass on so many facets of my identity and lived experience.
As a single parent: both me and my kid got the virus, and we’ve been isolating together. I’ve had to caretake for them while I’ve been sick, which makes me think of a question I’ve been asking for a long time — who cares for the carers? And as a femme, how much of my identity is tied up in caring? As a person with a history of heart defects and open heart surgery: How will the virus impact my cardiovascular system? Will I come out of this safely? As a person with significant medical trauma, It’s been a full time job coping with being triggered the whole time I’ve been sick.
All of this is to say —
Covid is traumatic. The amount of trauma we’ve been forced to normalize just in the last couple of years is unreal. We are collectively coping with fear, danger, and insurmountable grief every minute of every day.
We can’t let ourselves forget these truths:
If you are able bodied, it is absolutely temporary. And… AND…
This pandemic is not over.
This virus is still a mass disabling event and people are dying from it every single day. We need to do better to take care of each other, and to protect our immunocompromised siblings. So let’s bring that masking up energy of 2020 back, because it does feel weird being the only person at the grocery store wearing a mask… and it has for quite a while. If you do nothing else, wearing a mask reduces your risk of not only being infected but also of spreading the infection to folks at higher risk by about 70%.
We’re given the message every day that Covid is no longer that big of a deal, and I am asking you to question why that message is so prevalent. Because it isn’t true. Capitalism tells us that getting back to normal is the most important thing. But normal as we knew it before (which we can all agree was nowhere near what we’d want to go back to) no longer exists. We need each other. Let’s keep supporting each other in every way we know how - checking in, mutual aid, community care, masking up, social distancing, vaccines, compassion, and leading with love.
Speaking of mutual aid… Here are a few folks to donate to.
Some covid resources: Cornerstone’s Covid resources list and free download
Find a free covid testing site near you
Find a free covid vaccine site near you
Please share helpful covid resources in the comments.
Alone we know a little, together we know a lot.