you post about covid a lot lol

Hey anon.

Wasn't sure how to answer this. Yes, I do!

In March 2020 I got sick. We didn't know with what, and we'll never know. All I know is I had no fever but my lungs were fucked. Tests for Covid didn't exist then - I went to the ER about a week before lockdown, they sent me on my way. Back and forth with video visits, trying to get follow-up care. As long as I had no fever and my blood oxygen was normal, doctors could, would, do literally nothing. Only option was the ER again - which was also, of course, full of Covid patients, and at that point they wouldn't accept you if you weren't, frankly, actively dying.

It took me a year to breathe normally. A full year, using an inhaler every four hours. There were days I thought I'd never get better, and at least a few when I thought I wouldn't make it because my lungs were so sick. We didn't have vaccines at that point. We didn't have masks, actual masks available - N95 masks, respirators, for much of that first year.

I got off lightly. I'm still not sure if I prefer it were Covid or not - that I haven't had it and whatever else I had was that bad, or I have had it, and it was that bad. (Lungs are fragile like that - they don't recover well, they leave you susceptible to worse things and worse recoveries even years down the line.)

I never want to be that sick again. My health has been kind of fucked since. Maybe it's related, maybe it isn't. I'm waiting for a surgery right now actually - amidst the second-worst wave of Covid we've ever had. But I need the surgery, and I can't wait it out til cases drop. Imagine trying to heal from surgery with a disease that ravages your immune system. Imagine getting the disease that makes you cough with several abdominal incisions. Imagine it's because even doctors decided they didn't give a shit.

I should not have to make that choice. I'm fucking furious the world is like this. I want to scream at everyone who has decided this is over, at everyone who has decided our lives aren't even worth the inconvenience of wearing a fucking mask. I am astounded at the profound ignorance and selfishness of people I once considered intelligent and kind. I am aghast at the collective amnesia. This disease killed more people in four years than every war in the US's existence. It is still the third leading cause of death. And yet people find it odd to care about.

Yes, at some point, I hope and believe it will become less virulent. But it isn't yet. We're only just beginning to understand the ramifications of the disease on our biology, but everything we uncover is bad. Extremely bad.

There are a million essays here. They've been written. The failure of policy. The failure of healthcare. The failure of community. The failure of scientific communication. The failure of every single individual choice that every single person is actively making, right now -- it sounds like, including you -- all of which mean people get permanently sick. People fucking die. The collective decision to absolve yourself of your responsibility, to decide there is an acceptable percentage of the population to sacrifice for your convenience. The "individual choice" to not mask or vaccinate weighed against someone's fucking life.

So yeah. Yes. I guess I do post about Covid a lot, relative to some other folks. Because jesus fucking christ.