When Did Bloodletting Go out of Style?

I write this first blog out of necessity, instead of for fun, as I had originally hoped. I am on day four of a COVID infection, sitting in the squishy pocket created by my two couches that my roommates and I have pushed together. We call it Couch Crib. It’s perfect for cuddling, but right now it’s just me.

I’ve banished my boyfriend for 48 hours. Not because he could get sick – he just had COVID before me – but because I’m too disgusting and miserable to be seen by someone who loves me.

While I have an apartment of my own, relatively comfortable pajamas, and ate leftover pizza for breakfast, much has gone wrong in the last five days.

I returned from a camping trip on Sunday, sans sunburn, but with the in-betweens of my toes dyed purple from the black rhinestone platform flip flops I wore in the Current River (I don’t have water shoes).

What started out as a tickle in my throat I knew not to ignore, became a hulking weight on my shoulders that kept me seated or lying down for most of yesterday. Despite the exhaustion I managed to:

• Drive with my roommate onto my college campus to pick up a prescription. I found out, for the second time, that said prescription does not exist. A man at an unnamed Urgent Care in Columbia prescribed me some kind of topical acid to resolve the warts on my thumbs, aka the most humiliating ailment of all time. This man did not seem to know what he was talking about. It’s never a good sign when a medical professional starts your appointment by asking if you’ve done any of your own research. So step one of our trip – get prescription – failed.

• Buy COVID tests, “just in case.” I’m glad we did. This part was relatively painless, though we waited in line behind some older folks who were confused about the credit card machine.

• Get lunch. We trudged into an all-you-care-to-eat dining hall in our masks, and procured french dip sandwiches and two glasses of cranberry juice each.

• Shower for the first time in forty eight hours. Did not pass out in the steam.

• Order essentials from Target. Target has a flat same-day delivery fee of $9.99, so I ordered an odd mix of kombucha, breakfast sausage, soup, cold medicine, red potatoes, and pita crackers. A lovely employee named Ellen delivered these delicacies promptly. She even texted to tell me my favorite kombucha flavor wasn’t available and to ask what I wanted instead. Bless you, Ellen, truly.

• Take COVID test. Uh oh!

• Make a grilled cheese sandwich. I got stuck in the cycle of too-hungry-to-make-food-can’t-make-food-while-hungry.

• Watch the first twenty minutes of Four Weddings and a Funeral with my two infected roommates and one of their infected boyfriends. I bowed out to go to bed around 8:30.

Today I’ve spent the moment communicating (in a very one-sided manner) with our internet provider. Some things I’ve learned:

1. It’s possible to exceed the limit on internet data usage. Whoops.

2. You can’t change your account password without logging in with your account password (which you don’t have).

3. Sometimes people are less helpful than chatbots.

4. Every second of adult life is unbearably stressful.

This is not what every week is like for me. In fact, most of the time my life is wonderful. But every once in a while I get dealt a crap hand for five days, and this time I needed to write something funny about it. I also needed to remind myself why I’ve gotten a little behind on work. It’s because I have COVID. And I do not consider the 25 minutes it took me to write this blog a waste of time. It was deeply cathartic for me.

So enjoy my very very real recap and prepare for something more normal with the next blog. Have a good rest of your week and take your vitamins.

Image: Detail from Thomas Patch's etching Laurence Sterne, alias Tristram Shandy: "And When Death Himself Knocked at My Door" (1769)