healthcare – The Voracious Bibliophile

How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?

For most of the world, COVID is a distant memory. A bad one, with recollections of mobile morgues on wheels, lockdowns, and mask mandates in all public places.

This is an interesting prompt, to be sure. For most of the world, COVID is a distant memory. A bad one, with recollections of mobile morgues on wheels, lockdowns, and mask mandates in all public places. The urge to “return to normal”, spurred on by the restless cog in the machine of capitalism, was too strong for most to resist. Governments, local, state, and federal (I’m speaking in the context of the United States, which is the only context I feel comfortable speaking in), at the urging of powerful business interests, were quick to drop even the most rudimentary of precautions.

The normalcy bias spread faster than even COVID-19 itself, for people don’t like to confront or accept changes to the established design, especially not for extended periods of time.

The normalcy bias spread faster than even COVID-19 itself, for people don’t like to confront or accept changes to the established design, especially not for extended periods of time. But here’s the harsh truth: Nothing will ever be the same. Most people have not made the connection between the return (resurgence?) of illnesses like tuberculosis and measles and the immune dysregulation that can result from just one COVID infection, let alone multiple infections. Almost everyone I know is sick now multiple times a year, often multiple times a month. And this constant illness has been normalized. People think it’s totally normal now for their kids to have COVID, RSV, flu, and colds right back-to-back. Someone I know in my own family has three elementary school age children who had all four of the above mentioned in January and February of this year alone.

Almost everyone I know is sick now multiple times a year, often multiple times a month. And this constant illness has been normalized.

I personally have only been sick one time with a communicable disease caused by airborne pathogens since 2020. In 2022, I became sick with COVID and proceeded to have an onslaught of new medical conditions in the aftermath of the initial infection. Asthma, which I never had before. High blood pressure, which I had never had before. In fact, prior to my COVID infection, my blood pressure always stayed within 5 points of normal. After COVID, my blood pressure got so high that I was in danger of having a stroke. A lot of people, in fact I would venture to guess that the majority of people, don’t know that COVID is a vascular disease. It’s also oncogenic, meaning that it can cause people who get it to develop various cancers later down the road. It’s not just a cold. It’s a BSL (Biosafety Level) 3 pathogen, which means that it is classified, along with tuberculosis, Yellow fever virus, and others, as a microorganism capable of causing serious and potentially lethal disease in human beings.

After COVID, my blood pressure got so high that I was in danger of having a stroke.

So what have I done to avoid becoming sick? Masking. N95 masks don’t fit the shape of my face well, so even though those are among the best particulate respirators, I wear KN95 masks whenever I’m in public settings. I work in the public, and as a bookseller, not in the medical field, so this means I am masked almost all of the time. I also use antiviral nose sprays and CPC mouthwashes.

Now, I’m not perfect. For almost four years, I went largely without dining indoors or socializing any at all. I did it to keep myself and my family safe, to keep from becoming further disabled by another infection. I can’t tell you the mental toll it takes or that it took being the only person willing to do something as simple as covering my face for that long, and I’m still doing it most of the time. I occasionally eat out with friends now, in lower risk situations where it’s not as busy and I’m fairly certain they’ve not been exposed to any airborne illnesses.

Some people might judge me for that, and that’s okay. I know that with the world we live in now, every time I go unmasked in a public place is a risk I’m taking. I hate that I have to frame it that way. I hate that to people who gave up any and all precautions years ago, I’m seen as hysterical and a hypochondriac. I hate that to people who haven’t taken any risks at all, who have remained completely steadfast in their anti-infection controls, I am seen as a hypocrite and a coward for making the decision to occasionally go unmasked now. As a pathological people pleaser, there’s no way for me to win. And that’s okay.

For my part, I’m going to continue to mask 99% of the time, but I’m going to try not to judge myself for that 1% when I don’t. I’m going to continue using antiviral nose sprays and CPC mouthwashes when I do have possible exposures. When at all possible, I’m going to avoid large indoor gatherings even when I am masked because one-way masking, while it has been effective for me, is not completely foolproof if there’s a high enough viral load in the air.

The life we had prior to 2020 isn’t coming back, and if some people would mask at least some of the time, at the very least in healthcare settings and in grocery stores, I believe we would see far fewer people being constantly sick. What I guess I’m saying is we need more participation from the general public, because the number of people who are still taking COVID seriously are fewer and fewer as time goes on. It would also help if businesses and governments would commit resources to cleaner indoor air, with next-generation filtration and ventilation systems that would reduce the amount of respiratory droplets and pathogens in the air.

Your health is a precious thing, and so much more fragile than people realize.

Everything we do or don’t do has consequences, and I can only hope that my efforts have made a difference. I know they have in my own life, because no one in my household has had a viral infection of any kind, at least to my knowledge, in more than three years. Your health is a precious thing, and so much more fragile than people realize. Take care of yourselves. You only get one life.

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Well, dear readers, despite all my efforts to stay safe for the past two years during this global pandemic, I am sad to say that I have been infected with COVID-19.

I am still processing this fact. I started feeling poorly around 7:00 PM on Friday, January 14th. Extreme fatigue, tiredness, shortness of breath, etc. All of which I at first attributed to the week I’d had. My store’s Regional Vice President visited on Wednesday, January 12th, and I had spent more than twelve hours the day prior prepping for her visit, which was my first as General Manager. I knew she liked me already from prior visits she made when I was my store’s Assistant General Manager. I am just about as Type A as a person can be. I leave nothing to chance and always make sure my ducks are in a row.

Tuesday, January 11th was a perfect storm. As anyone who’s worked in a bookstore knows, Tuesday is the day most major publishers release their hot titles so those days are always busy with updating bestseller features, putting new product on the floor, and changing out in-store marketing. On top of that, we’ve been bombarded with after-holiday resets, sales sets, and overstock scans (oh my!). I didn’t have the manpower I’ve been enjoying because sales and foot traffic have slowed (though only marginally, following this unprecedented sales year). When I got to work, our truck shipment had arrived. The receiving area in the back of my store is chock-full of voided and overstock titles awaiting their journey back to our warehouse. And this truck was huge. So I had to play quite a few rounds of Totes Tetris to even be able to process my truck shipment.

Then, in the evening, I found out that my fellow (and only other) closer had been in a car accident early that morning and had stayed at school the rest of the day because she wasn’t having any complications or soreness. When she got to work, though, she started having shoulder pain and I made her go to the ER and closed by myself. No biggie, I’ve done it before. More than once or twice, in fact. One of my other managers volunteered to come in after her dentist’s appointment to help me get the store ready for our RVP visit. We were there until after 11:00 at night.

Had I known then what I know now…but I couldn’t have, could I? Sometime during that day, we were both exposed. She had opened that morning and came in after closing with me that night. We are both vaccinated but haven’t gotten our boosters yet, and we wore our masks at work at all times. But we still got infected.

I suppose one could call my case “mild” because I didn’t need to go to the hospital or require a ventilator, but in the world we live in, “mild” as a descriptor really doesn’t cover the hell I’ve lived in.

I started writing this post after I left urgent care on Saturday, January 15th. It is Friday, January 21st. It’s only been in the past couple of days that I’ve been able to string more than one cogent thought together and even now I’m aware of the haphazard and jumbled state of my mind. Whether that’s COVID-19 itself wreaking havoc on my mental faculties or simply the by-product of being deathly ill for days on end, the effect is the same. I suppose one could call my case “mild” because I didn’t need to go to the hospital or require a ventilator, but in the world we live in, “mild” as a descriptor really doesn’t cover the hell I’ve lived in.

Wearing a mask for up to twelve hours a day wasn’t enough. Washing my hands and disinfecting things constantly wasn’t enough. Social distancing, as much as one can social distance while working in a retail store, wasn’t enough. Nothing I did was enough. I still put the two people I love most in the entire world in grave danger, and we’re still not out of the woods.

You see, I live in a small two-bedroom apartment with my disabled parents. My first thought when I got my test results was of their welfare, and my second thought was pure unadulterated rage at the fact that despite my best efforts at protecting them and myself, I had failed. Miserably. Wearing a mask for up to twelve hours a day wasn’t enough. Washing my hands and disinfecting things constantly wasn’t enough. Social distancing, as much as one can social distance while working in a retail store, wasn’t enough. Nothing I did was enough. I still put the two people I love most in the entire world in grave danger, and we’re still not out of the woods.

I should be staying home recuperating and caring for my parents but the god of capitalism demands a sacrifice and thus on the heap my body goes.

How do I reconcile all of that? How do I cope with my anger at the fact that I am supposed to return to work tomorrow when work is the farthest thing from my mind, the thing which concerns me the least? I should be staying home recuperating and caring for my parents but the god of capitalism demands a sacrifice and thus on the heap my body goes.

My personal experiences have reiterated to me the urgent need we have here in America for universal healthcare, for a single-payer system.

I forgot to mention that I discovered during all of this that my health insurance had been switched without my knowledge, so I went into urgent care thinking I’d have to pay out of pocket because I was dropped by my previous provider. I’m still working all of that out and unfortunately it’s just been one more unnecessary piece of bureaucratic red tape I’ve had to navigate to get basic care. My personal experiences have reiterated to me the urgent need we have here in America for universal healthcare, for a single-payer system. It’s unfortunate that something so essential is so politicized, with right-wingers decrying “SoCiAlIzeD mEdIcInE” every time someone mentions single-payer healthcare. Never mind the fact that Medicare is socialized medicine lite, but the Faux News pundits won’t say that. It’s okay to hold contradictions when they serve your interests, i.e. further enriching the top 1% of the top 1% while the rest of us are left with scraps, if anything at all.

Never mind the fact that Medicare is socialized medicine lite, but the Faux News pundits won’t say that. It’s okay to hold contradictions when they serve your interests, i.e. further enriching the top 1% of the top 1% while the rest of us are left with scraps, if anything at all.

I’d like to end this post on a positive (or at least lighter) note, so please enjoy the following memes I’ve saved from Twitter in the past week. Note that I am unable to provide attributions to their original creators.