Schroedinger's Infection

I got tested for covid-19 seven days ago. That part was easy: I’ve had a cough for a few months, owing to Austin’s current brutal, interminable allergy season and my constitutional weakness to every form of pollen known to man, so I called my doctor’s office to request a refill on a prescription for a cough medicine that’s proven effective at managing the thing. They denied the refill, said if I was still coughing, I should schedule an appointment. I did a video call with the doctor, who asked if I was experiencing any of a handful of other symptoms, all of which I had been—fever, diarrhea, muscle aches, extreme fatigue. She asked if I had been exposed to anyone with the coronavirus, which had also happened—a friend who dropped a few things off at the house a week earlier had notified me that he’d gotten it a few days after we chatted briefly, from opposite sides of my fence, while he wore an n95 mask. My doctor shook her head and made a face, and said, “It could still be allergies—even the fever, we call it ‘hayfever’ for a reason—but I’d like to see if you’re open to being tested, just to be sure.”

The last I had heard, tests were scarce, so I was surprised it was that easy. But they did testing in their parking lot, and 45 minutes later, I masked up and drove to the office. I texted when I got there, and a tech in what looked like a full hazmat suit came out and stuck a swab that looked like a q-tip all the way through my nose, then again on the other nostril, then down the back of my throat till I gagged a little. She was a pro. About 30 seconds later, she trotted back inside, and I went to the pharmacy to pick up more of my cough medicine.

That was a week ago. I still don’t know if I have the covid or not. At the time, my doctor had assured me that it could take a while. “I’ve gotten results as quickly as the next day, and I had one patient who it took eight days. Most of the time, they come in around 3-5 days later.”

In the meantime, while I wait for those results, every symptom is magnified. My cough, which has—and I have to remember this every time I panic—been persistent since January now feels like it might be a mark of doom. Is it tighter? Has it become a dry cough? Is my chest tight? Do I actually find myself short of breath? What does that even mean? My fever is gone, that’s a quantifiable number, those are great—but the little app on my phone that measures my pulse when I put my finger over the camera says my pulse is higher than normal, sometimes much higher. Is that the anxiety of living in a pandemic, and of not knowing whether I’ve caught the damn thing, or is it because I’m experiencing the early stages of respiratory distress that I’ve read so much about, that the doctors and experts I’ve interviewed over the past few weeks describe as the thing that leads to ventilators and medically-induced comas?

None of this is unique to me, of course. A lot of people, I suspect, goes to sleep at night terrified that whatever tickle in the back of their throat they’re experiencing is a rapidly multiplying series of virions, making their way slowly down toward their lungs—until they wake up in the morning, and the morning sun has vanquished the horrible night, and they feel healthy again, at least until night falls.

But there’s this test just floating out there, something a doctor told me I should take, because she made that face when I described my symptoms, and I don’t have any more information than that. I might have the virus, or it might be allergies or stress or something else entirely (bronchitis?), but right now, all I know is that there is a baggie full of q-tips with my name on it, maybe on a shelf in a lab somewhere, waiting for someone to apply a reagent to it. When literally everything in everyone’s life has been disrupted by the spread of a virus, waiting to find out if you have it feels interminable—but then, so does everything else.

I’m fine, mostly. My primary symptom of whatever I’m experiencing is fatigue—normally I am awake and content to start my day after about 7 hours of sleep, but these days, I feel fuzzy and exhausted and need to lie down a lot if I haven’t slept at least 10 or 11 hours the night before. That’s a symptom of both covid and stress, so who knows. You have it and you don’t, all at the same time, until you know.

That’s something that everyone is dealing with, not just people whose tests are somewhere in the mail, so I’m just doing what everyone else is doing—stay home, rest, and hope to learn something that makes sense of this, sooner than later.