I awoke in the middle of the night and glanced at the clock: 3AM. I was staying in a hotel room in Brooklyn, as we were working on a project with long hours. We had knocked off at 10PM or so the night before and had to be back at 6AM. Tired was going to be table stakes for all of the team, so I would hardly be alone with that feeling. What upped the ante for me was the realization as I turned over that my nose was stuffed and my throat was scratchy. Wishing it was just a bad dream and not anything else, I closed my eyes and hoped by morning it would merely be that.
In times gone by that situation would have been an inconvenience, but not a deal breaker. We have all likely gone to school or work or on about our day not feeling our best. We tuck an extra tissue or two into our pockets, grab a few cough drops, and swap out coffee for hot tea with lemon and honey. But the thought of not showing up never really entered the equation. We might annoy a few of our associates with some hacking, or reduce our group activities, but unless things got worse we would just tough it out.
But that calculus has changed.
Our experiences over the last few years has revised our perspective on what constitutes being sick. Now every slight pain or cough or feeling of malaise is not treated as an isolated incident but viewed in the context of a global pandemic. To be sure, vaccines have lessened the danger of a single infection being life threatening. But while they have minimized the severity in most cases, the virus itself remains highly infectious and transmissible. And having lived through a period when many who did get sick got very sick or even died, our Spidey-sense of potential danger is set to a more sensitive trigger point. In essence, the former default of innocent as opposed to guilty has been flipped on its head. Instead of "just suck it up and stop complaining, you'll feel better tomorrow" the first thought on any random twinge is "Uh Oh. I wonder if this is it. I had better take a test."
When I woke up that next morning, my throat was better but my head was all clogged. I was pretty sure it was just a cold; my on-site workstation was under a giant noisy air handler that had probably last been cleaned when Brooklyn wasn't trendy. And in all of the reports about the virus, sneezing was not a symptom that made the headlines. But as we're working on variant B37-v-53MOUSE or something like that, who knows what the defining marker is for this one? I wouldn't be surprised at some point to find out that my love of Reese's was an early warning sign of infection. In that context, a snootful couldn't just be ignored.
Unfortunately, no test was at easily at hand. And it's not like I felt so bad as to be unable to work, nor that my symptoms were so egregious that people would run when they saw me. A few remarked on my sniffles with equal doses of symphony and alarm, but mostly took it in stride. And so I kept going, keeping my distance from folks as much as I could, putting my focus into the project as opposed to my nose, and just kept on keeping on.
When all was concluded successfully at the end of the day and I could relax, I started to feel a little worse; whether it was just the adrenaline rush wearing off, or an actual worsening of my condition I couldn't tell. But as I got on the subway I dug a mask out of my bag, and when I got home, kept my distance from my wife. I went upstairs and grabbed a test from the closet and went through the by now usual motions. I wandered around for the 20 minutes it took to develop, and walked back into the bathroom, knowing I wouldn't be surprised by either possible result. But the news was good: just one blue control line, no telltale red marker. With apologies to Freud, in this case a cold was indeed just a cold. But that's this time. Next time? Who knows anymore.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford is feeling better, thank you. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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