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The Double Whammy: Sick and Sad
Many of us get hit with depression and anxiety after a virus. Why?
For the past three weeks, I have been felled by viral pneumonia. I have not slept. I swear my ribs are cracked from relentless coughing. My memory is shot. I don’t want to do anything or see anybody.
I know I have missed a lot of things I will have to make up. But my room is such a mess, it will not be easy to find the reminders, and I dread the searches.
I am actually doing much better in the breathing department. No fever. The viruses are resolving. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that now I am depressed and anxious as hell.
It is the kind of anxiety that turns my legs to Jello. I have tremors such that I can’t read my own handwriting. My heart is not happy where it is and feels like it’s slapping around to find another place. My sleep is awful. My mind doesn’t work. It is jammed with incomplete statements, like “Oh my God,” “What if?” “No one can help me.” I am lethargic, and disinterested. My emotions are all over the place.
It is panic and depression that ignores 65 years of the same health challenges in my life. It is in the dread of re-entry. Of losing my bearings. Of being “behind” — probably forever. Of being the focus of people who wonder “what is wrong” with me. Of being terminally fatigued. Of failing. Of relapsing, even I do get well.
A common history
Since childhood, I have suffered chronic respiratory problems that could keep me out of school forty to fifty days a year. My eventual recovery was always a sure thing. But then a second wave always knocked me down -depression. When I was young, the terms anxious and depressed had no meaning to me. But I could feel a growing sense of dread, and symptoms that I would later learn were depression.
My mother tried to “talk sense” to me, reinforcing the fact that this one-two punch always happened to me, and I always re-entered my life, healthy and capable of finding my place in my social and academic lives.
And while she made a lot of sense, she gave me no real comfort. For five to ten days, I had to manage a dread and…
