Things I’ve Done Out Of An Abundance Of Caution

I’m now brain-damaged, but I don’t have COVID.

Written by Jennie Young and Christopher Shelley

Photo by Tai’s Captures on Unsplash

Contrary to what my girlfriend says, I’m not a “maniac.” I just take reasonable precautions to keep us safe during the pandemic. For example, I’ve always taken a multi-vitamin, but recently I added separate Vitamin D and zinc tablets to boost my immune system — reasonable stuff like that.

I also eat seventeen fish oil caplets a day so that if I do travel and my plane crashes in the ocean, the fish will think I’m part fish and I’ll have a fighting chance at survival. I mainline Vitamin C three times per day. All my veins are collapsed, and I have something called “necrosis.” I don’t know what that is, but it’s probably not as bad as COVID.

I take extra precautions in the elevator in our apartment building (for all of us!) In the elevator, I don’t touch anything, not even the buttons. I wait until someone from my floor calls for the elevator. If someone from the wrong floor calls for the elevator when the door opens I scream at them not to come in and I keep waiting. Once, it took me three hours to get to the second floor. If there is even one other person in the elevator before I get on, I turn around, go back to my apartment, and quarantine for fourteen days.

To fortify myself, I sleep twenty-two hours per day. During the two hours that I’m awake, I breathe as little as possible. This has twice resulted in hypoxia, once rising to the level of neurological damage. I’m now brain-damaged, but I don’t have COVID (probably; I get tested every day, haven’t gotten today’s results yet).

Just to be extra safe, I make my cats wear hunter-orange safety vests so I’ll notice if they try to get too close to me, and out of an abundance of caution, I put an invisible electric fence around each cat.

My cats are very angry with me right now. Sometimes they try to suffocate me while I’m sleeping, but they’ve been unable to breach the oxygen-delivery system I engineered to oxygenate myself while sleeping. There’s no proof that prophylactic oxygen prevents COVID, but there’s no proof that prophylactic oxygen doesn’t prevent COVID, either.