Corona Post 2

Everyone mentions the tickle in the back of your throat as a sign you are getting sick but no one ever talks about the rush of heat. It is the feeling in your face as you lay down for just one second and the warmth from the back of your head creeps forward. And it centers on the tip of your nose until the first wave ends and another begins. Again from the edge of your scalp and looping over the arches of your ears as it moves in a rose blob across your forehead.

The sickest I have ever been is a tie. Once in the 7th grade when Mami diagnosed me as having "Monga"which is closest PR approximation to the flu. Albeit how no one in PR says "monga" anymore save for viejitas sitting in muu-muus shucking pigeon peas. These ladies grow rescued poinsetta plans stolen from the city hall Christmas display in rusting cans of export soda crackers. Now people say "la influenza" or "gripe." But my mother shuttered the windows in my room and made me take a combination of several Nyquils, antibiotics (Which have no effect on a virus like the flu but also maybe the Monga is not the flu. Its a "bug") and probably some fish oil pills. And she cranked the window AC until I dizzy dropped into my water bed and awoke hours later. I thought it was Sunday evening and panicked because I had to write a paper about the Greek god Poseidon. And I FREAKED out. Running to Mami in my tight whitey underwear and babbling about my paper to her and her boyfriend Julio, the newspaper courier. "Its still Saturday," Mami said and I calmed and still knocked out that paper ( 8 pages double spaced) because that how powerful her concoction was.

The other one (the tie sealer) was when I was 21 and got a cold that became an upper respiratory infection that exacerbated my asthma. Without insurance all I could take was Nyquil and over the counter asthma inhalers. These were ugly bulbous beige monsters filled with pure adrenaline. That's not stylization. It really was adrenaline. And relief was intense but so brief. It made me a wheezing junkie on the floor of our Swiss chalet apartment. "I don't want to die." I told my then fiancee now wife who took me to an urgent care. And they prescribed albuterol and Advair but without insurance I had no option but to beg the pharmacist at the Lakewood Marc's. Who, in the kindest gesture I have ever received, clipped a coupon and got me the meds for free.

The best description of dying I've ever read is from Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. In it there is a global plague that stutters civilization and a protagonist dies on a Thai beach filled with the snot and aspiration of no breath.

All this we will survive but only if you are privileged. Blessed with days off. I'll give my people extra days. No one notices. I hold the keys to time. I can't offer  insurance. Care givers. Guys in wheel chairs who need their home health aides to scrub down their ventilator tubes? They will knife fight for sanitizer and alcohol prep pads.

Pexels, Anna Shvets