5 Reasons Getting A Breakthrough Case SUCKS

Like a lot of people in education, I’m used to being around germs. It’s literally my job to gather several dozen grubby teenagers in a small room, shut the door, and encourage everyone to get close to each other and open their mouths.

So as a teacher, I probably get sick more often than the average person. This used to mean a few colds a year. That’s about it.

Until the pandemic.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of being in a room full of people any number of whom may be carrying a deadly disease. It’s scary, icky, and there is this overwhelming cloud of stupid that covers the whole enterprise, like, why are we doing this at all? Why aren’t we on Zoom still? Why is it so hard for these kids to wear their masks properly? Why have I agreed to teach part time at a university for less than 1k a paycheck when they won’t even give me the health benefits I’d need if I contracted the deadly disease that the school is actively, consciously proliferating?

I’d call these “aspirational” questions. On October 6th, I was confronted by a very real question: “I just tested positive for COVID19. What do I do now?”

It Finally Happened

It finally happened. After a year and a half of avoiding the disease, I finally got it. So far, it’s just common cold symptoms: running, raw nose, general malaise. Could be way worse. I probably have Moderna to thank for the mildness (although sometimes I wonder if I’d had Pfizer, if I’d have gotten sick at all).

If anything, at first I felt a sense of relief. I finally had a respite from the fear of running from the coronavirus.

Like any responsible person who contracts the disease, I took a few immediate steps:

1) I contacted the people I’d spent time around recently to let them know, 2) contacted my place of work to discuss how the next 10 days would look, 3) told my roommates and my family.

So what I’m going to do now is turn my experience with the disease into a listicle. This shows you where I’m at in my life. Please judge me, I mean, there’s no way you can judge me more than I judge me. But also please read on, because I want you to know what to expect if you also get a breakthrough case. I’m going to finish this listicle with a piece of tangible, solid advice that can make your experience less shitty than mine.

Top 5 Shittiest Parts of A Breakthrough Case

5) Telling people you got a breakthrough case.

The first thing you do after you figure out you got COVID is contact everyone you’ve been around for the last handful of days. It’s basically a walk of shame. My strategy was to compose one template email and reuse it for all the people I had to contact.

I understood that I had nothing to apologize for, and that the whole insidious nature of the novel coronavirus is its ability to conceal its presence for those first few days. But nevertheless you feel responsible. You have to use the phrase “I got COVID,” which kind of makes it sound as if you did it on purpose.

4) Eating poorly

When you can’t use your kitchen, and you don’t live with a family who can bring you meals (my roommates offered to bring me pots of hot water so I could make tea in my room and that was about the extent of their help), then you’re pretty much gonna eat only delivery for 10 days.

That’s right: nary a leafy green for 240 hours. By the end of it I could feel myself getting unhealthier. By around day 6 I committed to Wildflower as the only restaurant that didn’t make me feel like I was eating my way to a heart attack. But even Wildflower’s dishes are loaded with sodium. All in all

3) Isolation

If you live with other people, as I do, then isolation doesn’t just mean staying home; it means staying in your bedroom.

Luckily I have the master bedroom and that means I didn’t have to share a bathroom with anyone else. But the very presence of the bathroom combined with my small, north-facing window, made me feel as if I were in a jail cell.

Isolation is one of my worst fears. I think it’s a great fear of a lot of us. Social media was a lifeline, my cats were constant companions, but not interacting in person with anyone for 10 days sent me into a downward spiral of loneliness. I tried my best to remind myself that it was only for a short period. I wasn’t literally incarcerated, in indefinite solitary confinement. Soon I’d be out and about again.

But the simultaneous illness I was dealing with made this kind of cognitive therapy difficult. Not only was I alone, I was sick alone. My cold symptoms got worse, and on the third day I became feverish, staying in bed with the chills. It felt like the whole world shrunk down to the size of my bedroom.

One of the worst things about illness is that it separates you from people. You’re sick; they aren’t.

246 million people across the globe have gotten COVID19. It is, nevertheless, a terribly lonely experience.

2) Loss of smell

Everyone seems to experience smell loss uniquely. For some, only certain odors are lost. Others lose their smell entirely. Some cases present only short term loss and severe cases still haven’t regained their smell a year on from recovery.

Personally, I experienced complete smell loss for about a week. By the second week, I was at about 25% capacity. Now, around three weeks later, I’d say I’m at 80%. I can smell just about everything, with only a slight sense of odors being muted.

Before I got COVID19, I had a kind of blase attitude toward the loss of smell that accompanies the majority of cases. It seemed like more of a curiosity, a strange little twist to add to the worse symptoms like shortness of breath, high fever, brain fog, neuropathic pain, etc.

But I am here to tell you that losing your smell is a terrible and frightening experience. Smell is, after all, one of our five senses. It’s extremely important. It increases our enjoyment of food and drink, helps us to avoid dangerous chemicals and substances, to practice good hygiene, and, in general, to navigate the world. Losing it is like losing a limb.

1) Your roommate dramatically lunging away from you.

Okay, this one sounds a little specific, but hear me out.

Isolating when you have roommates is a balancing act. It’s simply not possible to literally never leave your room during the ten day isolation period, even if you do have your own bathroom. I’d have to grab delivery, take out my garbage, go for walks to retain sanity, etc. My roommates gave themselves freer reign of the house, but they mostly stayed in their rooms as well.

Nevertheless there were times when we’d nearly pass each other in the hallway. For my two cool roommates, they would keep walking and allow me to adjust my pacing so as to avoid close contact. We were wearing masks and contact in the hallway would be limited to barely a few seconds, but it’s still worth avoiding if possible.

My uncool roommate, on the other hand…

Well, when he saw me coming he would dramatically lunge backward, with a facial expression bearing a strange mix of guiltiness and shiftiness. Guilty because he clearly knew he was being offensive, and shifty because he’s a fucking weirdo. I don’t know.

It started out with stepping backward awkwardly. This was both annoying and upsetting. But one day, I was coming inside from having gone through the Starbucks drive-thru. Uncool Roommate had been sitting in a living room chair maybe ten feet from the front door, talking on the phone. When I came in, he saw me, suddenly rose with a clear expression of fear, and began to move backward.

Now how long does it take to pass through a living room? Four seconds? I walked through, never coming within ten feet of Dickhead. Both of us were wearing masks. Then, as his gymnastics became more elaborate, I had to stop and watch. He backed up, still trying to juggle the phone call while glancing at me as if I was spewing globs of ebola everywhere. The piano and piano bench as well as a few stray boxes on the messy living room floor interrupted his path and almost made him fall. I couldn’t help but laugh, but along with the laugh was an intense desire—and really it was the closest I’ve come to doing this since I was in middle school—to punch him in the face.

I somehow restrained myself, issued a derisive laugh, and went to my living room feeling just about as shitty as I ever had in my whole life.

Have you ever had the experience of your mere presence causing people to back away in fear? Justified or unjustified, it’s horrible. And let me be clear: backing fearfully away from someone who has coronavirus is NOT going to help anything. Lunging is not a quarantine technique. The only thing it accomplishes is hurting the person you’re lunging away from.

As humans, we have a primordial, hardwired need to be socially accepted, and anything that threatens that is unpleasant. But when it’s as literal as a close friend and cohabitant lunging away from you in fear, all of your higher cognitive faculties are bypassed and you go into fight or flight mode.

Luckily I was able to restrain myself from fighting this jerk. But I learned the lesson that COVID19 has been trying to teach us all this time.

We need each other.

The Tangible Advice

If you live with people, and one of you gets COVID19, there is one simple thing you need to do.

Have a meeting.

Hash out the simple details of what you expect from each other. Will the person enter/leave the house by a certain door? Will they spend x hours in their room and be allowed outside their room during other periods? Will the roommates help them out with food, coffee, etc? What's protocol for passing each other in the highway?

If my roommates and I had done this simple task, we would have been able to avoid the conflict that has driven a real wedge between me and my friend. It's both of our fault that we didn't have the presence of mind for a roommate meeting.

So avoid our mistake. Oh, and also...

GET VACCINATED