What’s it Like to Be Sick with COVID-19
I straddled the line between reality and dream world
It is day 59 from my first noticeable COVID symptom as I write this, and I am covered in the sheen of my own sweat in the heat of the Singapore afternoon. I’ve been awake since 5 A.M. as I can’t sleep more than 5 hours per night. My lungs do not enjoy being squashed against the rest of my swollen organs, my heart palpitates at the slightest inkling of stress, or at unexpected sounds — my breath gets stuck — and the existential discomfort would have driven me nuts a long time ago if I hadn’t already come to terms with it. You see, this is my new lease of life surviving COVID-19, and I am happy to simply… exist.
When I first contracted the disease, I brushed off the dizziness just like I brushed off all my problems. Classic ostrich — I stick my neck far enough down in the ground and the problem will go away. I trust my body to take care of itself. And then France went into lock-down; I flew home in a blur, and slowly but surely, the dizziness began to set into all aspects of my day. The fever started and soon, I was unable to get up and I lost all appetite.
There was an unexplainable vertigo in bed as I swam, fell, floundered and thrashed around. I straddled the line between reality and dream world for 4 days as the… Hallucinations? Nightmares? … closed in. I remember trashing against my blanket which I thought was a gladiator net, swimming upwards and unable to break water, yelling at imaginary people who weren’t there. It was a mess.
When the 5th day rolled around, my brother decided that was enough and drove me to the NCID (National Center for Infectious Disease) to be tested. I was warded immediately after they did an x-ray and discovered that my right lung was mostly black with fibrosis.
That day was the most lucid for me, perhaps because I got to be outside. Now, checking in with other COVID survivors, apparently it was the incubation period where the symptoms lapsed for a while.
The eye of the storm.
Then it all came crashing down again as the black-outs happened. It started with light-headedness as I stood up. The spots appeared, and then continued. Once they had blanketed my vision, I realized that it was not going away, so I sat back down. Then lied back down and stared wide-eyed at the nothingness, waiting to climb back up onto the surface of my bed, my ward, the world, something. I hadn’t been afraid of the virus until that point. Now, as my vision slowly cleared, I began to feel fear.
The staff at NCID were the friendliest. They had their full masks and protective gear and said their names, which I promptly forgot, and passed me food via a double-doored box to reduce their contact with me. Food which I picked at and left alone. My ward was negative-pressured, to ensure any water droplets spewed by my infested lungs would be sucked away. I was a prisoner. Of my own body.
Once the blood test results came back, they suggested that I took the drug that was making headlines: Hydroxychloroquine. The doctor did not mince her words — they had no idea how to fight COVID-19, there was no cure, and HCQ was just a trial drug and they weren’t sure how I was going to react to it. So for two days, I staved it off, not trusting anything but my body.
It is darkest before the light. On the night of 25th March, I had a near death vision which brought me to the earth-shattering reality that I needed help. The next day, I accepted HCQ. This was unlike the blurry hallucinations I had before, and is now burnt into the retinas of my inner eye.
“Come.” She took me by the hand gently
“But I just got comfortable!”
“You don’t want to miss out on this.”
We stepped away from the warmth, and started down a tunnel. The darkness enveloped us like a wing, and then began to release. I was seeing different shapes in the black. Soon, the shapes became clearer, and they morphed into a subway station, then a train, a bus, an MRT station, a limo, an ambulance; all manners of transportation which I have taken before. Was this my boat of Charon? I can’t pay. Every now and then I’d catch familiar flashes of faces I knew, and before I could place a name, just as quickly, it was gone and replaced by the next flash.
A man’s face, twisted by the streams of rain coming down from the bus window, we almost recognized each other, and then another face, and then another. One old man looked up from the 103rd st subway, singing Sinatra, and I was gone.
The journey sped up. I was travelling through these places, sure, but I wasn’t walking them. I was experiencing them, and she was my guide. I didn’t know a lot about dream worlds but it seemed right to have a traveler and a guide. Perhaps she was my shepherd.
As quickly as it had started, the scenes ground to a halt. I was standing in a pavilion surrounded by friends from all walks of life. Some of their faces were brighter than others, and others were stone-faced, some entirely made of stone. Yet they moved as I went for a closer look. ‘You’re from 306!’ ‘No, 301’ I frowned, that wasn’t right. ‘You’re from TJ!’ Silence. Impassive faces now looked back at me from the benches of the pavilion. Was this as far back as I could remember? Has my memory failed? The cracks were beginning to appear in the faces of these featured-statuettes. They were going to break.
Into a million pieces.
With all my will, I clenched everything I had. I threw away all dizziness, and focused my attention only on order, and brought everything back into focus.
I stared in wonder at the avalanche before me. The pavilion had been shredded and the rocks and granite and chunks of wood were all floating around, calling to be pieced, like a jigsaw puzzle. Where to begin? Pieces of the void had showed up at the corner of my eye too, although I wasn’t sure if that belonged to the drainage system, or perhaps the subway. My guide was no longer by my side, although I sensed her presence nearby.
With all my will, I clenched everything I had. I threw away all dizziness, and focused my attention only on order, and brought everything back into focus. Only, we were at a different place, and the image was distorted. It was all just, slightly, off. My guide got ready to leave.
‘Wait!’ I yelled after her. ‘Did I do something wrong?’
‘You were supposed to do it with them.’
An orange spot hit my right eye. Ah, sunlight from the real world. I have another day.
HCQ indeed helped me turn the corner, and within the week, most of my lungs were clear. What I am understanding now is that I was hit by the Cytokine storm created by my immune system to fight the virus, and HCQ calmed my immune system enough for it to fight COVID. That week, I finally had the symptoms that everyone was talking about: the diarrhea, the dry cough, the phlegm coming up from the lungs, the pneumonia-like nose. My fever gradually abated.
Post-COVID is happiness mixed in with the understanding that my body might never be the same again. The world is slow, and I’m slower. Any quick movements bring the light-headedness back. Which makes yoga wonderful, because I move slow, and breathe through my motions. Tree pose is my favorite as I imagine expanding my roots downwards and my lungs outwards into space, just as the trees root and branch. I’ve managed to attain my headstand again. I’m also reconnecting with all my old friends everywhere.
Because I can.
