Gave up seeing Bieber for this?!

I'm back again, but not for the reasons you might think

Mar 31

Hey friends,

It’s been a while since you last heard from me, and all I can say is I am busy living life even as my long gallery of archived experiences stack up. Also, there are a few fresh faces here. I am thrilled to have y’all on the list, so consider this newsletter a warm welcome!

I am sorry I don’t have better news to share today though. I am covid positive. Sigh.

I know. I am just as surprised by how long it took covid to get me. I felt horrible when the symptoms first hit, but things only improved from there. As I am writing this newsletter, even my sore throat has more or less cleared up. Fingers crossed that recovery continues in this trajectory because it is too beautiful outside to stay isolated.

I also had to relinquish my Justin Bieber ticket, and I need a moment to wallow in my misery. I dreamt of screaming the lyrics to Baby at the top of my lungs at Bell Centre, but I could barely manage a croak that day.

On the bright side, I suddenly find myself with all the time in the world to write. Well, at least for a couple of days. It is funny how covid is almost always the reason for brief spurts of productivity in my writing. For instance, I started writing on Medium in the summer of 2020. And how about January 2022 when I landed in a city on lockdown?

By a stroke of luck, none of my friends I had over for dinner tested positive. The vaccines worked amazingly well in our case!

These few days got me thinking about how we treat people with covid

As far as empathy goes, we can never truly understand some experiences until they happen to us. I realize now that covid is one of these experiences. In the earlier days when much was unknown, and we were all unvaccinated against the virus, covid patients were shunned. In some cases, people were avoided like the plague even after they recovered from covid.

With subsequent waves when we finally had the vaccines, home isolation became the norm. We turned our homes into warzones with masks and a whole lot of disinfectants. The amount of caution we took—or at least I did—was hyperbolic in retrospect.

Now that it is my turn to test positive, I am more acutely aware of how we behave around people with covid.

1. People who freak out and go on about how we need to sanitize EVERYTHING

I mean, yes. We need to disinfect contact surfaces to keep everyone else safe. However, as a note to myself and everyone else, request nicely. Isolation is stressful enough without people constantly telling us to disinfect surfaces. Besides, disinfecting no longer carries many benefits for people who already have covid. It is not as if disinfectants would help us magically test negative the next day. More often than not, we disinfect religiously because we want to protect you from us. So, be nice.

2. People who declare that they are unafraid of covid

One of my housemates is completely comfortable with me cooking and dining in the same room with more than two meters between us. Whenever I feel a cough coming, I grab my mask, dash to my room, and shut the doors. While I appreciate the bravery and the thought that not everyone flees for the hills when I enter the room, I still worry about passing the virus to someone else. Not that I am complaining though, it was nice to finally have some company at mealtimes. Our socially distanced dinner came several days after I first experienced symptoms and was already well on the road to full recovery.

And the vaccine must be doing its job because we dined together, side by side, several times when I felt sick but had tested negative on two rapid tests. Till today, my housemate is still fit as a fiddle, but dear lord, was I worried.

3. People who chide us for excessively apologizing

Maybe I should have a greater sense of self-preservation, or it is because reports suggest that young people do not have it quite as bad, but I have never feared getting covid. On the contrary, it felt like a matter of when not if. Instead, I was afraid of infecting someone else with the virus.

When I finally tested positive on the second day, I got on the phone and informed the friends I had recently met. And of course, I apologized multiple times. Once the message was out, I thought people would panic and begin isolating themselves as if they had already gotten covid. However, almost everyone was surprisingly nice, and they reassured me that I had nothing to be sorry about.

4. People who volunteer to run errands, buy groceries, prepare meals for us

Finally, some people generously ask if we need help getting anything from the stores. Fortunately, we can get anything delivered these days, and there is no need to trouble anyone. It was still a nice gesture that I appreciate!

I am also forever grateful to my housemate who prepares almost every meal while I am in isolation. On the first day when all I did was lie in bed nursing a headache, he declared it was porridge time. Once I tested positive, he sent me a text with the day’s ‘menu,’ and what he called a lineup of very healthy hospital food. That day, we had ginseng chicken soup for lunch and corn soup for dinner. I could not have been in better hands.

Now what?

In places where contact tracing is no longer implemented, it is when friends and acquaintances inform us about a positive test that we begin to take precautions. But what happens when people are too scared to come forward with their positive test results? Remember the stigmatization of covid patients even after they recovered in 2020? Well, it’s 2022. Many of us are vaccinated AND boosted.

I understand why people may overreact and become over-the-top cautious. If not for my experience with family members testing positive before, I would have jumped if someone told me they caught the virus. However, when overdone, caution comes across as if we are cutting the patient loose by physically AND mentally isolating them. Perhaps, we should slow down, take a breath, and consider that the chances of us catching the virus are just as high. If so, maybe we would be more humane in our responses to people with covid.

In the bad times, we tend to remember both the kind and not-as-kind deeds that people do unto us. For instance, I will always remember the people who generously offered to make isolation better just as I would remember the microaggressions. As Ellen Degeneres says at the end of every talk show, “be kind to one another,” and I would add that it could be you—or I could get covid again—one day.

Ming's Memo