My Covid-19

An unwelcome visit … April 10, 2020 … New York City in quarantine …

Transcription:

My name is Tony Lopresti and not too long ago I exercised. For the first time in two months.

Prior to that, the last time I’d gone through one of my intense exercise routines was the day before Covid-19 paid me a very unwelcome visit. The exercises I did more recently were about 20 percent of what I’d been able to do a few months ago. That 20 percent was a really big step for me. 

I awoke in the very early morning hours of Friday, April 10 – Good Friday, the morning after the beginning of Passover. In New York City we were about twenty days into the pandemic stay-at-home orders.

I felt feverish and chilly. My legs dragged. I was mildly nauseous. My left eye was dark pink and painfully irritated. I took my temperature – a hundred and one. Hmmm…. 

Then the tremors began. I started shaking so intensely that when I got to the couch I struggled to use my phone to leave a message for the on-call physician at my doctor’s office. For the next twenty minutes until I got a call back, I shivered with extreme chills and tremors. My heart pounded and my pulse raced. 

When the doctor called, the tremors had gotten so bad that I found it difficult to speak. My voice shook. He asked a lot of questions, especially about my breathing – my breathing was OK. He asked if I was coughing – no. He asked if I felt a weight on my chest – again, no. 

He told me to keep close track of my symptoms and to seek emergency help if I developed any of the breathing-related symptoms he had asked about. Then he gave me a simple lung function test to do. He told me to take in a deep breath and as I released it to count out loud quickly – like this: (deep breath, one, two, three, four…) and so on. If I could get to thirty I was fine. If I only could get to ten I was in trouble. I got to fifty.

He told me that my symptoms were consistent with Covid-19. 

Those words reverberated like an echo in a canyon – consistent with Covid-19. Covid-19. Covid-19. Was I really awake or was this the beginning of a nightmare?

The doctor told me to drink a lot of fluids and to try to relax. Right… Fluids made me nauseous. Relaxing – that just wasn’t happening… Covid-19 … Covid-19 …

By the time my primary care doctor called later in the morning, I had a brow-splitting headache and numbing fatigue. My fever was higher. He confirmed that all my symptoms did indeed conform to Covid-19. He reminded me that I normally have a high tolerance for pain and discomfort but that now I should have a very low tolerance for symptoms because, he said, this can get really bad really fast. 

He told me that if I began coughing, if I felt short of breath, if I felt like I had a weight on my chest or any pain there that I should go immediately to an emergency room. 

Whoa…

He also said that the virus seemed to inflame all the body’s mucous membranes – which is basically everything beginning from your mouth and nose all the way … well, all the way through. So sore throats, irritated noses, dry coughs, and stomach, intestinal and urinary discomfort could all happen, and during the next few weeks, they all did.

Then my doctor said the words that scared me more than anything. “Remember,” he said, “you are in the age range that is most vulnerable.”

What?! Me?! Age range?! Most vulnerable?! What?!

I remembered a story about my Grandfather. 

My grandfather came to America alone at the age of thirteen in the early years of the nineteen hundreds from a small mountaintop village on the northeast coast of Sicily overlooking the Aeolian Islands. When he got to Philadelphia, where I grew up, he got a job in a shoe factory and vowed that he would bring his parents to America to join him. In just two years he had saved enough money to do just that. 

My grandfather was the center of our family and of a closely-knit community of Sicilian Americans. At family occasions large and small, my grandfather would regale everyone with funny stories of the old country, humorous and wise folk tales, and touching stories about his comparis and commares and their attempts to assimilate. Everyone hung on his every word. They always asked him to tell more stories, to repeat their favorites. And he always obliged. 

At one big family dinner at my parents’ home, my Uncle Gaston came. He wasn’t really my uncle. He was married to my mother’s cousin, Josephine. But my mother’s many brothers and sisters had all died at birth. And my father had only one brother who was killed during World War Two at the Battle of the Bulge. So my parents’ cousins filled the void of aunts and uncles. 

Uncle Gaston arrived with the first commercially available home video recorder. It was a clumsy device with a recording box housing black-and-white reel-to-reel videotape and a large camera tethered to the recorder by a long, thick cable. 

Now, I know some people listening may not know what “reel-to-reel video tape” means. So, take your device and do a quick search. You’ll discover what it was like in the primitive days of video imaging.

So, after the meal, when everyone was having coffee, dessert and after-dinner drinks, my grandfather started his stories. And Uncle Gaston started the video recorder. In a very old Sicilian dialect, my grandfather told one tale after another. People gasped from laughing so hard but they kept asking for more. 

After a long while, Uncle Gaston turned off the recorder and went to our living room. He attached the recorder to the back of our television. Then he invited everyone to come and watch. He put an armchair in the center of the room for my grandfather. The adults squeezed onto the couch and the living room chairs, or stood at the back. The kids sat on the floor. Then Uncle Gaston started playing the videotape. And there was my grandfather front and center telling his stories all over again. And everyone laughed again and again, and commented on themselves and each other.

“Oh, my God, my hair looks awful!”

“Gaston, why didn’t you tell me my tie was crooked?”

“That dress looks cute - even on TV.”

Everyone was having a great time. Except for my grandfather. At first he just sat there perfectly still staring at the TV with his mouth slightly open. Then he began shifting from side-to-side in his chair. “Oh-oh,” I thought, “here it comes.”

Suddenly and with a big thud, my grandfather planted his feet firmly on the floor. Everyone froze and fell silent looking at him. Sitting bolt upright on the edge of his chair my grandfather pointed emphatically at the TV and said, “Thatsa no me! Thatsa ole man!”

That’s not me. That’s an old man. Now I got it. Now I understood my grandfather! 

On the inside he always felt youthful, strong, durable. He worked hard, played hard, and enjoyed every minute of his life despite many hardships, heartbreaks and setbacks. He was a rock, a bull. And a lovable teddy bear at the same time. 

Nothing in his life told him he was old. Nothing until that video. Video is different than a mirror. We’re accustomed to the image in the mirror. The changes in the mirror happen slowly, imperceptibly, over many years. We look in the mirror and see the person we feel we are.

But video – video is brutally honest. You see yourself as others see you. You hear yourself as others hear you. That’s shocking the first time, unnerving. You are meeting a stranger and the stranger is you.

The novel corornavirus is shocking and unnerving. It shakes all your preconceived notions of yourself as a physical being. It brazenly threatens you and dares your immune system to come out and fight it. It bobs and weaves inside you, attacking here, feigning there, coming back a bit harder – like it’s messing with you. Like it’s setting you up. Just when you feel you’ve turned a corner, wham!

I dutifully monitored my symptoms – temperature, pulse, food tolerance, the minute workings of my innards, my lung function … Lung function 45 – oh-oh … still much higher than 30 but lower than 50. Was this the beginning of a downward slide? This morning my temperature was near normal, but now it’s up again … Is this a sign that the virus is getting a firmer grip? How can I be so tired? Why don’t I have any attention span? Why can’t I tolerate reading a book or looking at small screens – my phone, my tablet, my computer? … And why is there blood in my nose? 

I am in the age bracket that is “vulnerable”. How did “vulnerable” happen? I’ve never felt “vulnerable”… 

My exercise programs were always intense. I need to maintain a high level of fitness to continue as a silent actor – otherwise known as a mime – and as a teacher and as a director. I have to be able to lead hours of physically demanding classes and rehearsals and be fresh at the end and ready for more even as younger participants are bent over panting, sweating and aching.

Now, for the first time, I felt vulnerable. I’ve faced illnesses and surgeries before but never from vulnerability. Always from a profound conviction that I would prevail, that I would overcome, that I would heal. And I always did. And, thank God, I seemed to again with the virus. But with a constant, anxious vigilance to stay aware of any signs of a possible relapse. Vulnerable… 

I have exercised again – several times. Now up to about thirty percent. It feels like a stronger thirty percent… Fingers crossed…

The virus also uncovers another symptom – fear. Fear makes us aware of our aloneness – that dark hole at the center of our being, that place that is one step away from death. We often try to cover up that fear by clinging to fragile hopes that mask the fact that every day is one day closer to the grave. We cling to family and friendships even long after they may have become stale, empty and sad – even toxic. We throw ourselves into ideologies, religions, careers, money, drugs, alcohol, sex. All to try to stave off our primordial aloneness and paralyzing fear. All in an attempt to keep things constant. We don’t want to disrupt our lives, even though the very essence of being alive is constant disruption. 

An old friend – a great writer and editor – who died too young of lung cancer – he had never smoked and his idea of a decadent snack was carrot sticks and celery slices – said that life is a constant struggle against putrefaction. And putrefaction always wins. The most fragrant rose, the most elaborately marked butterfly, the most luminous smile, the most alluring eyes, the most beguiling body – all eventually rot. 

And the virus wants to shove our faces into it.

I still have some off days, so the tiresome task of constant self-monitoring persists. But for some reason, deep down, I feel the faint re-awakening of hope. I feel again a new surge of youthfulness. Am I experiencing the early glimmers of a new joy? I don’t know. And I don’t know why. 

Am I getting an answer to an unconscious prayer? Maybe. And maybe … just maybe … the answer … is you.

Originally published by The Prismatist, an online magazine.