Ignore Your Symptoms. The World is Temporarily Closed.
My left elbow feels heavy. Is that a thing? I’m laying bed. It’s after midnight so it’s my birthday. I’m officially closer to the age that puts me more at risk of health risks than one that lets me run around without a care in the world. My left elbow feels heavy, and my hands are tingling. Combined with some easily explained away symptoms from earlier in the night, a bit of dizziness, a burning inflammation in my back, a nose bleed and the absence of any distractions as I lay in the dark listening to the fan it feels like something I should be worried about.
It feels like something I should consider a trip to the walk-in or emergency room. At the least I should schedule that pesky physical that I’ve been putting off for a few months or a year. As I’m gauging whether the tingle is getting worse or better, and the minutes tick away, I’m struck by a horrifying realization. I’m more afraid to go to the doctor than I am of my symptoms. Symptoms are just symptoms, but with COVID-19 still wrecking shop around the country, around the state, and my county going to the doctor feels like a risk I’m not sure I’m willing to take.
The insidiousness of the coronavirus is its ability to sneak around in the shadows enveloping our every movement, every decision and every choice with fear. I’m not willing to go to a medical facility because it seems logical that there would be a higher risk of contracting the virus there. I also don’t want to be the reason someone with the virus doesn’t get helped. I really don’t want to be the reason someone doesn’t get help if my symptoms don’t add up to anything. The dizziness could be from getting up too quickly and being dehydrated. The inflammation from a chronic injury due to a decades old car accident. The bloody nose from dry air. The heavy elbow from…well, I’m not sure about that one.
I’m not sure, but that leaves only one odd symptom instead of several and no reason to risk leaving the house. At any other time I would have gone. We have good health insurance through my wife’s work. After years of being uninsured in our twenties and early thirties we don’t take it for granted, but now, what good is it if we’re not willing to use it, if we feel we can’t use it because of the risks of the coronavirus? I don’t even know what emergency rooms are open, and which are dedicated to the virus.
How many other people are in the same boat? Ignoring warning signs or shaking off pains because the fear of the this virus is so real? How many heart attacks or mini-strokes go undiagnosed? How many physicals get skipped, and diseases caught later than they might have? How many names should get added to the ever growing mountain of death beneath this fire-spitting monster virus’s clawed feet, but don’t because they didn’t pass on directly due to the virus?
As I lay there, a hand on my wife’s hip these thoughts kept swirling, growing into a tornado in my head. I could feel my anxiety level rising, and imagined my heart rate increasing. It’s a feeling I’m familiar with. A few years ago an accidental poisoning left me with the irrational fear that every cup of coffee, every restaurant dinner, every pint of beer from the tap could be poisoned. Before every sip or bite I’d feel that heart rate spike, my skin go hot, my stomach start to tighten. It got worse, and worse until one day I was only eating meals that I made myself, drinking from glasses that never left my line of sight, and avoiding any social interactions involving food or drink. Let’s be honest that’s most of them.
I finally went to a therapist. It helped. It was helping, but I was still at the beginning trying to recover my old self when the first coronavirus lockdown occurred in March. I was blanketed in a calmness I hadn’t felt in a long time. I had been under the impression that anything could be poisoned, and if I ingested it I could die. I thought everything was trying to kill me. It turned out I was right about that, just wrong about the method! It wasn’t food or drink it was the virus on a package, delivery or on the mailbox. It was going into an office or restaurant. It could come from pick-up hoops at the park or a high-five from a friend.
The coronavirus could be anywhere and that was a comfort. I was right, and it was too big for me to control. So big in fact I could relax. I could only do what I could do. Wear my D.I.Y. mask, wash my hands, stay home as much as possible, disinfect, disinfect, disinfect, and if I did all that I could be happy knowing I had done my best.
Until last night when the weight of my elbow skyrocketed, my back hurt, my heart raced, and I could still remember the dizziness I felt. Then I became afraid. Not of COVID-19, but of the tentacles of fear it has wrapped itself around our society preventing us from properly taking care of everything else. I was afraid my elbow meant something more than just falling asleep on it funny, and that I would never know because the the hospital is where the coronavirus is building its fortress of fear keeping us out, keeping us home, and creating a society more afraid of it than the symptoms they feel. Then if a real symptom comes we’ll shake it off, ignore it and turn on a TV letting ourselves be distracted just long enough until an elbow feels just a bit heavier than before.