Dave FINALLY Gets COVID-19

It Was A Long Time Comin', And Now It's Almost Gone.

Monday 7/8/24

After four years of disruptions, at every level, we’re finally beyond the pandemic. So of course it’s now, in a busy week with a big show coming up, that I catch myself a dose of ‘the coves’. And so I’m writing this from friggin’ quarantine with a misty bank of brain-fog clouding my mind.

I woke up before dawn Thursday morning with a sore throat. Oh oh, I thought, this is traditionally the first sign of a cold for me. I had a package of Cold Eeze in the medicine cabinet, so I grabbed one of these zinc lozenges and went back to bed, slowly dissolving it in my mouth as I went back to sleep.

I’d bought a huge bag of onions and bell-peppers the night before, and my task on this morning was to chop them up, for my chili-cooking activities the following day. This I proceeded to do once I was awake again. Still hopeful that bi-hourly Cold Eeze doses would short-circuit my ‘cold’, I tried to be resilient. But by mid-day I was getting discouraged. I was less and less certain that I’d caught a rhinovirus that could be headed off at the pass

The preceding day, I’d pulled all of my camping and busking gear from my van, loaded it with stage components and 55 folding chairs and driven it to the site of the ‘Backyard Invasion’ show scheduled for Saturday 7/6. I was fully invested, as was my partner in these shows, Alexia. The two of us had been promoting the event for three weeks, and as I chopped away at the produce, a text from her told me that we had RSVPs for 75 guests.

The day was already heating up. At about 10:30 am, I poured myself a Diet Coke, and took a good cold swig.

And I tasted nothing. No sweetness. No tartness. Just cold, bubbly water. Wait a minute … that’s a COVID-19 symptom isn’t it? I got on the horn to Alexia wondering if she had COVID tests at her place. She did, and brought them by on her morning bike-ride. And sure enough. I had me a case of the ‘rona.

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I won’t try to explain the sort of disappointment that I felt the rest of that day as I slammed on the brakes and fish-tailed three weeks of momentum into the curb. Fortunately for us, this event was to be at a private residence, and all of the RSVPs had come in via email in order to get the location details. So we could effectively notify everybody, and Alexia took on that task.

I canceled the Facebook event. I contacted the young performer scheduled to open the show, and sent her full payment via Venmo. (that’s the way we roll)

By late afternoon, I had come to terms with canceling a concert - first time ever - and gotten my head into fighting off the virus that has left such a deep scar on our country and economy … but which I had heretofore magically eluded.

Not surprisingly, among the many well-wishes that poured into my social-media, I got one smart-ass comment implying that now I knew how worthless ‘the jab’ was. Primarily based on a supposed promise that the vaccines would prevent infection. Let’s visit that for a minute.

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I have heard this gambit thousands of times as the anti-vaxxers tried to convince me to spurn the vaccines that would have been a crowning achievement of Donald Trump’s first term, had the Democrats only failed to oust him in November of 2020. There is zero doubt in my mind, that if Trump had sailed to victory, his minions would have swamped every drug-store in the country, sleeves rolled up past their Gadsden flag tattoos. “Gimme that sweet MAGA juice, Darlin’! Just like Don an’ Melania got!”

I’m somewhat less certain, but still pretty effing sure that had Trump won an indisputable second term, the anti-vax movement would still have happened. Only now its political element would be rooted on the other side of the fence.

As it played out, though, the astonishing effort put in by American scientists to get these vaccines to market, bore fruit just at the time that DJT became a lame-duck president. And even as he childishly denied his loss, fattening exponentially the MAGA brain-worm of conspiracy-thought … the newly forming Biden administration took over the vaccine roll-out efforts. And the rest is history.

Now, did Anthony Fauci ever claim that the vaccines would prevent infection? I can’t find evidence of that. He did say, on innumerable occasions, that the shots would protect a person from the virus. Meaning, I presume, that the types of symptoms that landed people in ICUs with tubes down their windpipes, would be effectively prevented by being vaccinated. Meaning that we’d be safe from serious illness.

Each of the hundreds of times that I’ve argued with an antivaxxer over the last few years, I’ve asked if they knew how a vaccine works. Almost never did I get the simple response that I’d thought every half-bright American could give.

Vaccines work by priming our immune systems to fight a particular pathogen. In a sense training our immune cells to recognize and attack a given virus, right from jump street. Thereby enabling the elimination of interloper-cells before the infection had spread too far and the body become too overwhelmed.

I’ve asked anti-vaxxers if they knew this basic tenet of vaccine science. Some did, some didn’t. But once I’d gotten us both grounded to the concept of an antigen-specific heads-up for our immune cells, I’d then ask them this:

Where exactly did they think the battle would take place? Did they think that a good and effective vaccination would enable the now-prepared immune cells to fly from our orifices like a swarm of TIE-Fighters protecting The Death Star? To wrestle the Coronavirus in mid-air?

Is that what they thought? Because how otherwise could a vaccine completely prevent infection?

The battle could only take place in my bloodstream. Because that’s where my souped-up immune system lives. Therefore, in order for my Ninjafied cells to whoop some ass, I had to first become infected. Duh!

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I seem to have misplaced the little paper card I’d gotten at the Pharmacy where I first got one Pfizer shot and another shortly after. It was a year of so later that I got a single booster shot at that same Pasadena drugstore.

I’ve never been notified again, but my experience this week with the coronavirus and the disease it spawns, indicates to me that I still have solid immune capacity. The damn thing went through me like a freight train. Which is to say that my immune responses went through like that barreling train. Because that is what the symptoms are. They are immune responses.

Along with the sore throat and the cobbling of my taste buds, I had a persistent headache. All three of these symptoms were gone by late Saturday afternoon, when I should have been setting up a stage and sound-system as Alexia created the pop-up freebie restaurant that accompanies each of our shows.

By what should have been showtime, I felt almost normal. Which, given the shame I felt at canceling such a fun event for so many good people … made me feel worse.

In a way, I felt like I needed to be more miserable. Bedridden, hollowed out. Drained of energy with every joint swollen and aching. Lapsing in and out of fever-driven hallucinations. That, it seemed, would better justify having pulled the plug on the weekend-plan for dozens of people I care about.

Instead, I’d had almost exactly what I was promised. A short bout with a weird little flu-like illness that never once made me frightened for my life.

I went out for a hike that night, just a couple miles in my hilly neighborhood. I didn’t push too hard. No shortness of breath. No tightness in my chest.

I came home to a message from one of my dearest friends, John Z, who sensed that I’d be torturing myself.

”You did the only thing.”

Thanks, Brother John.

Last night, Sunday evening, I did my usual 3-mile loop. I pushed hard on the up-hills. I challenged myself. No noticeable energy deficit. No negative feedback at all from the lungs that will be required to keep me oxygenated for another couple of decades. All in all a good outcome.

Not everybody has done so well.

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I had a Facebook friend. I’ll call her Cindy. She lived in a largely rural western state with her husband. I’ll call him Bill. The two of them seemed like nice folks, and their affection for one another was obvious in her many posts. She was among those who - as the stolen election mythos ran out of gas - took up her place in the anti-vaccination movement. And she became markedly less nice.

In the early fall of 2021 she was posting memes like this one: This is a direct copy/paste from her FB wall.

You get the picture. This was not a woman content to simply decline the vaccines taken by the entire Trump family and every notable Republican in US government. No, she found it necessary to evangelize against these inoculations, even when literally billions had taken the shots with no ill effects and mountains of evidence was showing that serious COVID illness, happened overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated.

But soon the fates would play havoc with her narrative.

She posted this in mid-December:

“Thank you everyone who sent birthday wishes last Monday. A few days before then, Billy & I had a great time hanging out with a bunch of fully vaccinated people. Unfortunately, shortly after that, they started testing positive, and long story short, we have now joined the ranks of those with superior natural immunity. Thanks again for all the well wishes.”

In other words, they too had tested positive.

Shortly thereafter Bill was hospitalized and soon he was fighting for his life. The following is her report from December 26, 2021:

“Merry belated Christmas everyone. Due to the craziness of the last few weeks, obviously no cards went out, but I do have some positive news to report.

“Over the last several days, Billy’s bloodwork is continuing to improve and his immune system is starting to respond to the drugs. He sounds much stronger and his oxygen levels are also increasing. And best of all, the CT Scans shows NO blood clots in the lungs. He’s also started complaining about the quality of the hospital food so that can only be good. lol

“I hate that he’s in isolation so no visitors, but am hopeful that he can come home by New Years. Thanks again for all the caring & prayers.”

But things continued to decline. Bill was still in ICU, and by early January, Cindy’s posts had taken on a fair amount of medical jargon:

“Today was Day 3 at 15 liters of O2/minute which is very concerning, but he can stay in the mid to high 80s as long as he remains perfectly still. Thank you all for caring. Please keep praying. I feel like we might finally be making some progress in the right direction! God is good!”

I picture this active adventurous man trying to remain ‘perfectly still’ just so that his damaged lungs could oxygenate enough blood to keep his body alive. How terrified he must have been. That’s what serious COVID-19 illness looks like.

Another excruciating month passed of hospitalization on a ventilator. To think of the resources absorbed because two otherwise bright and rational people had decided that they’d sooner risk a virus that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, than to cooperate with a vaccination program they feared would be credited to Joe Biden.

And then …

”It’s with a breaking heart that I write this post, (especially since I still can’t believe it myself), but my beloved husband Bill passed away yesterday, on February 2, 2022 surrounded by tons of love and with me by his side.

I am broken beyond words, but thank God for the blessing of having this wonderful man in my life for over 31 years. 65 years of life was not near enough! We still had so many adventures in our future. Please pray for me. I miss him so much already!”

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I hope that me using Cindy’s story and her loss doesn’t come off as mean. I was deeply engaged in a fight against anti-vaxxers on social media and YouTube while her posts popped up in my Facebook feed. It was a real-time example of the horrors that result when a people determines that they cannot trust one another.

She was rigidly dug in on one side of an imaginary war, and it cost her husband his actual life and left her actually alone. Their story has haunted me for a couple of years now, and I just had to use it here.

Another pandemic could happen at any time.

I’m not suggesting that I would have been in real danger had I not been vaccinated. I don’t drink or smoke or let myself carry more than a few extra pounds around my middle. I walk seven to eight hundred brisk miles a year, at minimum. I put the work in to stay fit. But if I was out of shape or had an underlying condition that put me at real risk, like Bill did, and I was offered free safe vaccines that would give me an edge over a dangerous virus? I’d have been in line on Day 1.

I’ve traveled in MAGA country. You can’t swing a cat without hitting exactly the kind of high-risk people who - during the pandemic - wasted their community’s resources and sacrificed their own lives, for no reason other than shallow partisan obstinance.

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A few months after my FB friend’s husband died a likely-preventable death, a number of universities and agencies collaborated on a big study, finding that approximately 318,000 Americans, at that point, had died for having refused the vaccinations that Donald Trump could rightfully have been proud of. Should rightfully have been proud of.

For God’s sake … they were Trump’s vaccines! He’s the guy who pushed the pharmaceutical companies to do the impossible. His whole family took the shots before they left The White House.

But he was too weak and cowardly a man to stand up to his own fans when they went rogue about the vaccines. He chose to let them die by the tens of thousands rather than risk losing his hold on them, if he were to demand that they shut the fuck up and take the goddamn shots.

If he should in prison for anything, it’s for that monstrous dereliction of duty.

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Tuesday 7/9/24

Anyway, I was down for a few days, but I’m back on my feet.

Sorry for the overlong nature of this post.

I want to take a minute to fully acknowledge my dear friend Alexia who is always there for me. The show that we had to cancel was to fall on her birthday weekend. So my COVID misadventure cost her a celebration she more than deserves.

Let me just say publicly that nobody I know, better embodies the largess of spirit that we’ll all need to locate within ourselves, if we are to get past the ideological hatred responsible for the tragedies I’ve mentioned here.

We simply cannot afford to keep using our governing bodies and shared institutions as a hunger-games battlefield for the full-contact sport we’ve made of civic life. Alexia and I disagree on a lot of issues. But by the trust and faith and deep listening that she’s always brought to the table we share, she’s helped me gradually shed my defensiveness and innate tendency toward rhetorical brute force.

I’m still quarantined for another day or so, but when I’m allowed again to bridge the social-distance, hers is the first embrace I’ll seek.

While I spent my Monday coaxing this rambling missive from my slightly addled brain, Alexia spent hers performing her many duties as both professor and dean. Still, during her breaks, she managed to pull together all the scattered pieces of the gathering that couldn’t be, and to get a do-over scheduled for later in the summer. September 14.

Raising things from their ashes. That’s kind of her super-power.

For all of our differences, we share a mission. And I couldn’t imagine a better braver partner than Alexia.

Thanks for reading -Dave