[Once again, I've had to dash into town to send an e-mail about a job.]
As this web site has recently observed, Tweeps, there’s
something about trying to squeeze a thought into 250 characters that makes it
easy to misrepresent our own opinions.
People don’t make it clear whether a tweet is addressed to
our followers, as most are, or to the individual to whose thought ours is an
answer. Results can be confusing, funny, or offensive. I stumbled over my own
typing fingers this way, recently.
And people don’t make it clear which aspect of something
they’re calling “a hoax” or “doctrinaire” or “politically motivated” or some
other term of dismissal.
In comments on coronavirus, as in comments on glyphosate
reactions, autism, fibromyalgia, or any disease condition where the symptoms
seem subjective and the causes seem a bit mysterious, I hope we can all avoid
what this web site has tagged as “Virus Karma.”
This is not the Hindu theory of karma accumulating from past
lives; it’s a phenomenon I’ve observed in real life, where someone dismisses
someone else’s reported health concerns and then, possibly because the person’s
own conscience condemns the person, the scoffer somehow winds up feeling worse
than the person scorned.
I first noticed this effect in 1973. A big strong veteran,
just back from Vietnam, was rejoicing in his youth and held forth on the topic
of colds and flu. “I’ve never had a cold. I don’t believe colds are real,” he
told my father. Next day the younger man told Dad over the telephone that the
young man now had the cold that was going around, a bad case. “I believe colds
are real, because I’ve got the grandfather of them all.”
When people really are ill with something that is new or not
fully understood, of course a lot that we hear and read about it will be a hoax, a scam, politically or
otherwise selfishly motivated, etc.
A lot of what we read about coronavirus is ignorant, venal,
greedhead garbage, and the people cranking it out ought to have to take their
own medicine. On television.
“Coronavirus is fatal. Coronavirus is going to kill us all.”
Coronavirus is not making most of us sick enough to spend a day in bed.
“Coronavirus is nothing, does not exist, is not worth
missing work for.” Say whaaat? People
have died. Horribly. Whatever else he was, Herman Cain was a strong, brave man.
With Virus Karma possibly a contributing factor, he died of coronavirus. How
many cases like his will it take to convince some people?
“Formula X will cure coronavirus.” Maybe. Most people need
no cure; they hardly know they’ve had the virus anyway. People who need
treatment for coronavirus are already fragile; hospitalization and treatment
may help, or may only prolong and aggravate suffering.
“Person X could have prevented or cured coronavirus and
didn’t.” Very doubtful. Coronavirus
is not new. The reason why we didn’t hear much about it before this year is
that nearly all humans are immune to nearly all strains of the virus. It’s the
less-common cold virus; most colds are caused by rhinovirus. All virus operate
through a process of constant mutation. Human activity—tampering with DNA, or
changes in diet, or who knows what else—may have some effect on the process.
Reportedly a virologist has been accused of doing laboratory work that might
have caused COVID-19 to be more dangerous to humans than all the other kinds of
coronavirus together, but it’s hard to prove. People other than virologists…
“Well, Person X was in the government and ought to have cut
off all travel from virus-infested areas.” That might have delayed the arrival
of the virus in other areas, or not; it would certainly have made people
unhappy. High risk, no guaranteed benefit? No wonder Person X didn't do that.
“Person X was a doctor and ought to have known more or
warned people in a different way or whatever.” Doctors have warned us about
possibly dangerous virus every year or two. Most of the possibly dangerous
virus mutate into less dangerous forms. Can it really be eleven years since
doctors were banging the alarms about the swine flu, woo-hoo, gonna get you,
getcher shots now, and most of us were saying, “Well, can it be…that cold I
had, that cost me half a day in bed and an extra box or roll of tissue paper,
was the dreaded swine flu!” Doctors cannot warn most people adequately about
virus. If they tell the truth, that most virus may or may not affect most
people’s athletic performance, may or may not produce any noticeable symptoms
whatsoever, depending on our medical condition, who’s going to listen? If they
scream that some virus are going to kill some people, which is true even of the
ones nobody notices (like most strains of coronavirus), then most people will
say the doctors are alarmist fools and the virus are “a hoax,” and/or “The
young are so pampered…” and/or “The
old are so ‘entitled’…imagine the nerve of trying to save the world from a
silly little cold.”
Doctors have been telling us for almost fifty years that
there is a way for most of us to control the way virus affect us. It won’t work
for a minority of people who have more serious diseases already, but most
adults can, and to some extent do, choose to have high resistance to most of
the common virus and other pathogens in the world. This is done by following
all the boring advice our parents and teachers tried to force on us when we
were children:
- Eat fruit and vegetables, as many different ones as possible; try to eat some of them raw.
- Early to bed and early to rise (let the girls go out with the other guys).
- Get exercise, even if you have to repeat boring little moves in a gym instead of walking to work or doing something useful while moving your body.
- Don’t lie out in the sun for hours; shade your face and cover most of your skin in very bright sunlight, but do tend your garden, walk to do errands, and get some of your exercise out in the sun when it is shining.
- Don’t add chemical pollution to the toxins that are naturally in the environment.
- Drink eight glasses of water every day.
- Don’t stand close enough to touch other people.
- Don’t take any drug you could survive without.
- Pray or meditate daily.
- Behave toward other people in ways that won’t make you feel guilty.
- If you have to be around other people, or around fungi (like the ones that produce that nice woodsy scent you notice while walking down country roads after a long hot damp summer), eat a raw garlic clove every morning.
This actually works…for most of us. Not, unfortunately, for
all of us, all the time. Virus resistance is an individual thing but most
people who don’t have to take prescription medication daily can choose to keep
it fairly high.
Then there’s the Great Face Covering Controversy. No, a
layer of cotton, or even a triple layer of cotton, is not 100% virus-proof.
Face coverings reduce the number of individual virus that float out of our
mouths and noses and into other people’s when we breathe. Exposure to a lower
number of virus gives more of us more of a fighting chance to build specific
immunities without going to the trouble of “having a cold.” It’s simple, it’s
effective, and I don’t know about you but I think I look a lot better now that fashion gives me the socially acceptable option
of covering my ugly teeth.
“But you, writer known as Priscilla King, spent several
hours in a crowd, wearing your mask, which clashed with your clothes and with
your complexion, and now you’re thinking you
have the coronavirus. Does that not prove that masks are useless?”
It doesn’t, because, looking back, I believe I was most
likely exposed when I allowed a cashier to press coins into my hand, rather
than counting them out on the counter, as we were taught to do before the 1980s
when too many of us were told that some people
felt offended if we didn’t touch their hands. We should have stood firm and
told those people to get counselling. People feel infected if we do touch
their hands. Infected feels worse than offended. One way we can fight all virus
is to place payments on counters and let idiot cashiers stand there, long
enough that (being young) they want to die of embarrassment, before we snap
“Put it on the counter! That’s what counters are for!” And then wash our own
hands after transferring receipts, money, cards if we’re reckless enough to
mess with cards, that have been in someone else’s hands, back to our pockets.
When virus are in the air, we’re most dangerous to others
during the incubation period in between exposure and the appearance of
symptoms. For anywhere from several hours (in the case of norovirus) to several
months or years (in the case of slower-spreading virus like HIV), we have no
reason to believe we’re infected, and this is when we’re releasing the highest
numbers of virus into the world. If we feel, and it’s not always easy to
notice, that special “fighting the flu” kind of tiredness—that’s when we’re at
the peak of contagiousness, and of vulnerability, and we need to stay away from
other people. What we do that keeps us away from other people may be chopping
wood or even shoveling snow. (“Sweating out” helps many of us boost immunity.)
We may not require bed rest. We do need for other people’s sake to isolate
ourselves while fighting off virus. No matter how many bosses or school
attendance officers might urge, “You’re fit to work! You’re fine! You shouldn’t
slack off just because you feel ‘tired’ or ‘sniffly’!”, that is a selfish
thought. If we don’t know that everyone at work or school has as good
resistance as we have, or better, then we really ought to go into quarantine every time we notice a summer cold.
That mismatched mask I was wearing in the Friday Market had
no chance of keeping me from feeling the effects of coronavirus. It probably did keep about a hundred people, many of
whom live in the retirement project you can see from the marketplace, from
having gone down with it. When I walked into town to return a key on the day
after announcing I was going into quarantine, I saw some of those people,
self-identified for years as old and sick, sitting out on their porch, enjoying
the sun and chatting with their friends. That
is the proof that face covering is a good thing. I was already ill on
Friday morning, and didn’t know it. I may have infected one person who was
obviously very old and ill, to whom I handed an object around a glass pane; I
probably did not infect a whole apartment block full of other people who are
old and ill.
I #WearAMask religiously now, having seen that. No, it’s not
a cure. (Though I don’t find it interferes with breathing…I’m not sure what
people are talking about, with that. Maybe the masks they’re wearing are too
heavy? But paper ones are cheaper
than cloth ones. Maybe they have emphysema? Maybe they just have terrible breath?) I wore one while
walking three miles, briskly, in the afternoon heat. My face felt sweatier but
my ability to breathe was just fine.
All summer, what face covering has been for me has been a
way of nonverbally reassuring people, “I care about you or your fragile
relative,” and also nonverbally telling them, “Back off, and put change and
receipts on the counter.”
People feel shy about this because during the twentieth
century we were exposed to toxic messages suggesting that crowding up to
strangers in public was a way to relieve the emotions some people feel about
not being part of a close-knit family. It’s not. We needed to take a stand a
long time ago. People who feel a need to express affection toward their
parents, children, or spouses need to work on being able to do that. Some of
them may need to find a nice empathetic psychotherapist who can hold them while
they howl, “Mommy, Mommy, I hate that you died and left me alone,” and murmur
soothingly, “It’s all right, Baby, I’m your foster mother and I love you.” They
will not feel better if some spoiled brat of a cashier, with one eye on the
clock and the other on how to cheat the system out of a little money, presses
things into their hand instead of counting them out on the counter. That is sooo stupid…
But I assure you, Gentle Readers…I am Highly
Sensory-Perceptive. I have spent my whole life seeing, hearing, and feeling
things that are hard for 80% of humankind to see, hear, and feel without some
sort of mechanical aids to perception. With those aids you can perceive the
same things, or you can just learn to take my word that they are there. Symptoms of infections are among
those things. You can hear me cough but you have to take my word that it’s an
unusual cough, that my throat is trying to pull up congestion from down in the
chest rather than push it back from the back of the mouth or the nose. But it is an unusual cough. Some of you are
going to wake up with this kind of cough, and it feels very different and
alarming.
If your reaction to coronavirus is typical of people who are
going to need to be hospitalized, the classic symptoms will be present:
- · You might or might not have noticed its happening while you were awake—the surfaces inside your nose and mouth that usually drain water out of your body, fighting off rhinovirus or airborne allergens, don’t gush water but they do dampen in preparation. Your nose doesn’t run much but does lose some or all of its sense of smell.
- · Your temperature shoots way up, suddenly. Those temperature checkers installed in the entryways of some buildings are there to verify that this happens to people who leave home with a temperature of maybe 99 degrees Fahrenheit and get into town with a temperature of 102.
- · Your chest clogs up drastically. That abnormal cough becomes an involuntary reaction. It might be a “dry” uncontrollable cough that might linger for days before the chest clogging. You gasp and wheeze and may collapse. Somebody else may feel obliged to carry you into the hospital, or if you’re lucky the hospital staff will rush out with a wheelchair.
But that only happens to about 6% of humankind. Adults
between ages 20 and 80, who are about as healthy as I am, are reporting
different symptoms when they test positive for coronavirus. The range includes
the symptoms I’ve had during the past five days:
- · Your whole chest feels tight. In addition to the unusual cough, which might be occasional rather than constant or life-threatening, you feel pressure, maybe even burning or stabbing sensations, around the heart. You may never have had “heart disease” or chronic cardiovascular disease before, and the first thing you’re thinking is “Do I have it now?” You don’t, but the virus is attacking tissue around the heart. Doctors are discussing long-range studies to find out how much this will contribute to your risk of “heart disease” later in life. Meanwhile, you can take some comfort from knowing that most people who describe this symptom are describing it in the past tense, although I’m feeling it as I type this. Some say it lasted three to five weeks, for them. Some say less.
- · Your pulse and blood pressure surge, although they’re not normally high. You are reacting to physical stress. If you don’t normally need medication to control your pulse and blood pressure, meditation will work. You can learn to lower your pulse and blood pressure in a minute or less, using simple breathing and maybe visualization, without even having to sit down…but they will zoom back up, from time to time, when you’re not thinking about them. This was the distinctive feature of last winter’s flu and it’s what I’m finding most tiresome about what I believe may be coronavirus. (Not that it matters which virus I have, or whether it’s both, for quarantine purposes. I’d prefer not to infect my friends’ parents with either one. Only virologists would really want to know.)
- · From time to time you might also feel slightly feverish. Your temperature shoots up, but not very far or for very long.
- · Feelings of weakness, fatigue, and fever are most likely to occur during physical exertion. While I’m picking out weeds in the garden I feel fine. When I applied my hand saw to an overgrown shrub, I suddenly got that “blood turned to cold water in the veins” feeling and wanted to go in and lie down.
- · Digestion becomes very irregular. If you look at the contents of the toilet before flushing you might notice that they’re unusually dark one morning and unusually pale the next morning. If you normally use the toilet at 7 a.m., you might find yourself using it at 4 a.m. one morning and 10 a.m. the next morning.
- · Appetite is low. Many healthy people believe in fasting, eating less overall, and/or restricting their diets while fighting off a cold. When I feel like skipping a meal I just do. Sometimes I’ve felt like skipping meals for two or three days. This seems to work for me and especially reduces the misery of norovirus (Norwalk Flu, 24-hour tummybug, etc.). I’ve felt only mild nausea only once; if it had hit right after I’d eaten a full meal I might have lost that meal.
- · Most people don’t seem to be reporting grumpiness as a symptom. I’ve felt that one, too. Like the other positive symptoms that Something Is Definitely Wrong, it comes and goes and remains below the threshold of what others would notice as a symptom that somebody needs to go home from work or school.
- · Sneezing, sniffling, and sore throat may be part of your symptoms, but they’re not nearly as noticeable as they are with a standard rhinovirus cold or bacterial “summer cold.”
- · Muscle cramps and bone and joint aches may also be present, but again, they’re not nearly as noticeable as they are with flu.
- · Mostly it’s a chest cold. The only symptom you notice, most of the time, is that taking a deep breath becomes difficult. If you can still take a deep breath you have to think about it.
All this does make my going into quarantine call to mind a
TV comedy trailer I once saw where the “princess” fell down a ten-foot wall and
gasped, “I broke a nail!” I’ve lived with this guilt during several flu seasons
by now. I’m not sick; I’m walking miles and sawing wood and scrubbing under
furniture just in case there’s any mold down there; why am I hollering before
I’m hurt? Because we know old people and sick patients are dying from these
lame-o little virus infections. That’s all. That’s enough.
I still don’t know whether it’s coronavirus or a rerun of
last year’s flu, or whether last year’s flu was
a COVID-19-like mutation of coronavirus. My untested intuition is that what
I have is to what sicker people have from COVID-19 as “sore-throat flu” was to
swine flu—either a weak form of the same virus, or a healthier person’s
reaction to the same virus—and it means I should stay away from fragile people
and anyone who lives with them.
And wear the flippin’ mask, already. (Yes, it flips; it’s
nice to expose the sweaty side to the air and sun after an hour or so.) Yes, of
course I think there are prettier, dressier, more flattering face-covering
looks, but it’s still high summer and the other looks are still sweatier. Yes,
I plan to design and sell a whole collection of stylish, versatile knitted
cowls this fall. And no, the mask doesn’t make my chest feel one bit better.
But it makes my conscience
feel vastly better.
That one person who saw my bare face through that glass
pane… that person, and I’m not specifying a gender partly out of respect for
the person’s privacy but also because the body was so bent and the voice was so
wheezy I’m not sure, was already
obviously not a healthy individual. When healthier the person would have been
as tall as I am or taller. When I saw person leaning on the door, person’s head
was somewhere around my shirt-pocket level. That is the kind of person we most
want to avoid when we have any kind of infectious condition. It is also the
kind of person whose going to answer the door suggests that person had only
just come down with person’s current infection.
When I resume normal social life, which I plan to do in
September, I should be safe for people to be around at a distance. The Grouch, who’s been retested and definitely had
coronavirus in May, says there is some confusion about how safe it is to be
around those who have built up immunity to a disease. People with immunity are
breathing out killed virus, which
could have a vaccine-like effect for those around them. Our blood is likely to
be the source of vaccines. On the other hand, like the animals who are fully
immune to diseases they can carry, people with immunity can be carriers of live
virus. Live virus can linger on any surface, which is why you want to wash your
hands after picking up objects off a counter, or opening a door, or touching
anything in town during an epidemic. So, don’t be afraid of people who’ve
recovered from coronavirus (or from flu), but don’t go around touching anybody if you want to avoid any
infectious disease.
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