My biggest fear happened earlier this week when I tested positive for COVID-19 for the first time. It was a bullet that I ducked and dodged for nearly a year, but it has finally caught up with me.
Going into the weekend, I was feeling totally fine with no symptoms whatsoever. Things unfortunately took a turn for the worse on Sunday night when I started to feel very achy with a bad headache. Ever the optimist, I was hoping that whatever I had would go away within 24 hours and that it wasn’t the one thing I didn’t want it to be: COVID.
As Monday started, everything got progressively worse and magnified. Then Tuesday was when I lost my sense of smell. It was here that I pretty much knew what was up, so I made my way to a local testing site the following day and waited for hours just to get the rapid test done.
Unsurprisingly, it came back as positive. I would’ve actually been shocked if it was negative, given my whole loss of smell issue as that is what we all have been hearing from the start of this pandemic as a major determining factor if you have COVID or not. Before I left the clinic and dragged myself home, the staff provided me with a bunch of related info on what I should do while riding this out.
Having COVID sucks. What’s even worse is that there is still a great amount of people out there who think it’s a hoax. I can’t even wrap my head around that, and now that it’s in my system, I do feel a much larger level of disdain for said folk.
Receiving the diagnosis was also a very difficult reality for me to set into because of all the past health problems I’ve had, not to mention ones that have affected my family. I lost my mother at a young age to cancer, so being in this kind of environment ,when getting the tests done, never sits well with me as it reeks of sadness.
The physical pain COVID causes is no joke. It’s been virtually impossible for me to sleep through the night as I’ve had to deal with an awful cough that keeps waking me up. The general fatigue is terrible, too, not to mention the overall icky feeling I have at all hours of the day.
Then comes the emotional and mental side to this. I am someone who considers themselves to be very extroverted. I love hanging with my friends and tried to do so as much as possible this past year while remaining as safe as can be any time we were together. Now, I’m stuck doing a Big Brother kind of thing inside my room for the next two weeks where I truly wonder what kind of toll this will have on my mind.
The list goes on and on. I believe I have a mild case, but worry about what will happen if things don’t get better. I, like many others, have lost friends to this and have also witnessed one of them go through pure torture inside a hospital room for months while trying to recover. Being in limbo is the worst and all I can hope is for this to exit my body sooner than later so life can resume for me to the best of its abilities.
It’s also made me think about all the #GaysOverCOVID guys who appeared to have zero f***s traveling over the past couple of months during a global pandemic. It’s a level of selfishness that disgusted me while it happened that has now turned into full-on rage as they don’t seem to care about who they’re hurting as long as they can party on their own terms. WTF.
It’s been said a zillion times at this point, but here it is once more: WEAR A MASK. Contrary to some, we are still in the middle of this pandemic and do not know when and if it will be over. I wouldn’t wish this kind of pain on my worst enemy, so mask up and do your part in this. Simple as that.
This is the opinion of one contributing writer and not that of Instinct Magazine or other contributing writers.