I am alive!

I don't want to go all, "Look at me I fought COVID" cause let's be real, it was a bad, bad battle and my doc felt more out of control and when the car driver is outta control you know it's the end. 

To be fair, I was content if it had been the end. I don't think I cared enough or at all for the material belongings. I had abandoned my phone on Day 3 and was in fact losing it when people were reaching out to check on me. This will probably be the only time I'll confess but besides my family, I didn't want to hear from anyone, including the people I said I love you to (a fair few) and then there were some I was thinking of, hard, for some reason, when I was choking and out of breath. I am yet to open that pandora's box because I never reached out to any of those despite thinking of them when I thought it was it. Pleasantly surprised with my behaviour in the last month.

There was also a lot of crying. A lot means a lot, like thrice a day daily from Day 3 onwards. I don't understand how the Oximeter kept showing a level upward of 90 when I found it hard to breathe from Day 3 and even at the hospital, things kept getting delayed (treatment, medicines) cause the indicative levels were decent, until one day when things just came down crashing. 

Things felt more helpless a fortnight later (which is when you're officially considered non-infectious whether or not you get a test) and I was still there. The medicines were not working (or well, working as much as I expected them to). I was constantly on injections, steroids, anti-biotics, anti-coagulation shots, oral medicines— despite there being no sense of taste, my mouth was constantly dry and bitter and I was emotionally a mess. I found myself to be helpless, useless and a general waste of space where my parents were trying hard to save me, the team of doctors and nurses were working their best to rescue me, but my body was like, "Nope, nothing doing. We off, fam!" I've never felt more betrayed. What's the point of not drinking alcohol, not eating processed carbs and fasting 18 hours a day while not smoking if this is how hard everyone had to fight to keep me alive and pump medicines like petrol in a car? 

To be fair, things were also extremely grim cause everyone I gave any fucks about here was sick out of their minds and people were losing other people. Some of the coldest people I know reached out to me with their "I love you don't die" texts and it freaked me out a little. Like dude, come on, you think I was trying to harm myself? I actively didn't want to die and my body wasn't cooperating.

At this point, it's a bit of a joke, all of my trauma but given how real it all is and how slowly my body is recovering, I'll probably make fewer jokes when I write about this again. It just seems hard to process everything— of not knowing whether I'll have oxygen, of not having parental support and just crying my eyes to send me home or give me a toilet that I could access. I could write a whole essay on my trauma of using shared washrooms over the years across institutions but I'll spare everyone the horror, and myself too. 

This is actually the first piece of writing I've attempted and along with the sense of taste and smell, covid has snatched my writing, editing and punctuation skills. I also don't seem to care about it mostly because the sense of entitlement of kicking covid after three long weeks is so real and heavy that I don't know if I'll ever want to take myself seriously again.

Until then, handy advice. If you're down with covid and want a burger from McDonald's, only eat McVeggie cause that's the only one which will taste of something.

Also, is there a covid/institutional version of Stockholm Syndrome? I miss the hospital bed now, the food that I threw 7/13 days and my space there. It seemed like it belonged to me on my last day there and now it feels like it's gone and that if anything were to ever happen to me, I just want to be there and die in Room 300, bed 08, right in front of the window where a lizard would rest.