Not a Germ-Phobe, but...
Normally, sleep comes easily and lasts well for me. However, for no discernable reason, one night recently, I woke up at 2:15am, and didn’t slumber again until after five o’clock. As soon as I was up for that regular nocturnal bathroom trip, I could tell that I was unusually wide awake.
As soon as I returned to bed, there was one sniffly nostril demanding a blow. Also unusual, but, I thought, “ok.” A tissue took care of that, and then it was back to bed. Not a smidgeon of sleepiness tickled the backs of my eyelids. Sigh. Then I sneezed. And sneezed. And sneezed. Five times, and surely I could at that point be no more wide awake. The sigh? It felt unrequited, as if I couldn’t pull in enough air.
Then I was truly awake. Could this...? Could this be...? Not a neurotic or anxious person normally, I nonetheless decided in the next couple of hours that the dark of night is not your friend when it seems possible that something characterized as dreadful, if not deadly, could be hovering much too close by. Me? COVID? No. It couldn’t be. It. Couldn’t. Be.
How is it that the voices in one’s head seem to pipe up when they are least welcome. It was not a restful night. Here’s how some of that insistent inner dialogue went, back and forth:
[Rational mind] You are a healthy, aware, careful person who is fortunate to have a robust immune system. [Yeah, but...] Don’t forget that you are in the over-65 risk category.
[Rational mind] You have been, on a scale of 1-10 (ten being obsessively careful, 1 being someone who joined a protest or rally without a mask), at a respectable 7 or 8 since early March. [Yeah, but...] Lately, you have been increasingly guilty of transgressions. Eating with two friends on two separate occasions, yes, social distancing at home, yes, seated far apart, but present without masks nonetheless. Five days ago, you ate out for the first time in months. Your friend was sitting maybe four feet away from you. And what about that waiter? No gloves, no mask. Remember when he top-grabbed your cup with his fingers to fill it? You drank from that cup.
[Rational mind] OK, let’s assess. You are having no real shortness of breath. No (known) fever, although perhaps having a thermometer in the house would be a good idea. No chills/sweats. No headache. [Yeah, but...] What about that 15 minutes yesterday when you felt a little dizzy? What about the dry cough? [Rational mind] But the dizziness passed and the dry cough is rare, and anyway, the whole picture feels/seems/could be allergies. The pollen here is high, and you’re at 8,000 feet elevation. [Yeah but...] ...and your point is...?
[Rational mind] You’re over-reacting, go to sleep. [Yeah, but...] What if you do get sick? You’re fourteen hundred miles from home, isolated, yes, in a house also called home, but what about the dog? Who will take care of the dog? Who could take care of you? What if you need ventilation? Maybe you should bail out for a lower altitude.
[Rational mind] Relax. Your daughter is arriving in a few days. Think how you’ve been looking forward to hunkering down and doing some work together, maintaining appropriate COVID rules of engagement. [Yeah, but...] Maybe you should wave her off, tell her not to come. You wouldn’t want to knowingly expose her. But what if you need her?
[Rational mind] You don’t want to come off as hysterical here. This is probably nothing. Try some allergy medicine, see if that helps. If not, get a test. [Yeah, but...] Is there a timeframe here? Is this sensation that you’re not getting a full lungful of air really just the altitude? Or are you on some sort of slippery COVID slope? [Rational mind] Can tests really be trusted? There’s so much conflicting information. [Yeah but...] Up to you...
This mental sword of Damocles dangling over the planet swings more ominously in the context of a nocturnal encounter with the possibilities when you’re all alone. This mental conversation lasted longer than I’d like to admit. I couldn’t help but wonder: am I about to pay the price for being daft, for trying to hedge my bets, for redefining what to regard as “normal” over the past 10 days? Are we all about to pay a new price for being less careful than we were for oh-so-many weeks? Who can avoid noticing the resurgence of the numbers, here in early summer?
Worry lingers in the light of day. I feel apologetic to the wider universe. I’m sorry! Mea culpa! Last night’s tortured battle of inner dialogue and dark-of-night logic has left me, even though I’m really not a germ-phobe, ready to err again on the side of caution. It isn’t such a bad idea. Surely at least for my sanity, it seems best to linger awhile longer with the thought of “better safe than sorry”—just in case. One restless night of bargaining with fate was enough.
