My body is dragged to bed, over and again. I have difficulty breathing. My heart is racing then slowing down. Temperature rising, falling. My arms are too heavy to lift. My gaze is blurry. I can’t focus on anything. I keep singing random passages from Robbie Robertson’s Crazy River.
I was feeling like a stranger in a strange land/You know, where people play games with the night/God, it was too hot to sleep…/You fog the mind, you stir the soul/I can’t find no control…/I been spellbound/Falling in trances/You give the shivers/Chills and fever/I been spellbound/Somewhere down the crazy river.
I went down almost three weeks ago. It wouldn’t go away. Liquids and pills. More tests. Last week the results came out – SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) was detected.
The past three weeks are something of a blur. My hearing shuts down several times a day. I have no cough, just listlessness. Tiredness. I fainted once or twice – or three times. Too scared to drive to the shops for bread because of faint spells. The last time, I walked to the shops for bread. A wild baboon and its family grabbed my shopping bags. The idea of living in my village is better than actually living in my village, lah.
My head will not clear. I have to think harder just to get through to myself. I feared this thing, Covid. My chest is the weakest part of my body. It has been since childhood. Early at the start of the last pandemic, I wrote about my fear of Covid:
“As we hunker down and settle into our nests, we have more time to think about the things that matter to us. I do, too. I think about lost time, of redamancy, and of abandonment – I can’t hide from my own misery – but mostly I am afraid. The coronavirus is the only story that matters today. It is what we hide from, and it is what we fear. I know I do. Although I am not paranoid, nor superstitious, and, for that matter, have yet to be convinced that I have a soul. And yes, I think too often that too much thinking is agonising, and causes pain that is never enough.”
I will go through all that again, now. I have two deadlines that I cannot begin to work towards. My body is sapped. My spirit is broken.
Three weeks ago I visited a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV medical facility. I was wary, paranoid, as I always am around viral diseases. I did not shake hands with patients, as I always do. I breathed into a kerchief. You see, I know, always, ever since childhood, years before doctors cut up my left lung and removed half of it, when I have caught something. I feel a sore throat. I’m the flu season canary in a coalmine. I get it, whatever it is, before anyone else does. Barely two days passed after that visit to the TB clinic, and I felt it in my throat. Another day. Flu. A week. Something like bronchitis. The first doctor found nothing serious.
“You probably feel more sick than you are,” she said. Prescribed ivermectin. The pharmacist was out of stock. I was relieved. Donald Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr are no comfort for Covid.
I entered darkness two days later. I found another doctor. Bills starting to pile up… Then came the SMS message from the pathologist, SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).
I have bills to pay. Deadlines to extend. Laundry. A dirty kitchen. Then my village lost power for a week. I have had to empty the fridge. Covid. This morning I dragged myself to my desk with grand ambitions to write something to put food on the table.
I couldn’t get past Robbie Robertson:
“Go out yonder, peace in the valley/Come downtown, have to rumble in the alley/Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in/Has anybody seen my lady?/This living alone will drive me crazy/Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.”
I write two main columns, this one, in Daily Maverick, and one for Business Day. In the latter I often reflect on the 19th century, the way the crises of that era shaped the crises of the years 1900 to 1945 (and how the latter period has shaped our current era). In the literature of the 19th century that I have read – books I no longer have – people in Europe, ordinary people, notable thinkers and writers suffered severe illnesses, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, haemoptysis – and thoracic surgery. Thoracic surgery is what I had when they removed the lobe of my left lung. There have been significant advances in medicine since the 19th century, much more in medical technology since my chest was cut open. It is the cause of all of that that has remained with me. It is the fear of that which is laying me down, now, more than the dreaded virus. It is an overall sickness that has laid me down. Epidemiologically, Covid is not a vector (that, at least, is what I think: I’m not that type of doctor), but my body has been waiting for it for five years.
More than a decade ago, after a late-afternoon ski in the Tyrolean Mountains, a friend offered me a mug of glühwein. I turned it down. She stared at me and asked, as she had previously: “What is your laste?” (something like; what is your illness ((bad habit/burden/load)). I didn’t smoke and would, much later, surrender all cravings of the flesh (and other stuff). I shrugged my shoulder, then. I can say, now, that my burden has, since childhood, been this chronic chest problem that laid me down when I was three months old, and has done so several times a year… I have been waiting for Covid. As I explained five years ago:
“I have shut myself off from the world, in a small village by the sea. I see no one, I speak to no one. And I try to go nowhere. Even when I do go out to the shops, I have become a monster.” DM
Ismail Lagardien is a writer, columnist and political economist with extensive exposure and experience in global political economic affairs. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy.