Dr Cat Hicks: Covid Data Log

[SNT Gatchaman]

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/covid-data-log

I debated long and hard about sharing this piece. But I was inspired by Giorgia Lupi's incredible piece on her experience. I'm not an artist or a designer, but I have this -- writing has always been one of the ways I have to make sense of the world. And truly looking at human experience is to me the highest duty of care that a psychologist has. Maybe someone has been where I was and needs to hear that someone cares. I care a lot. I am lucky to be alive and even more to be loved while I am alive. May you have the same.

It is July, 2022, I catch covid for the first and only time. It feels mild. I get my first negative test after six days. On this same day for the first time I feel a peculiar tightness in my chest. I write it down in a shared document that my wife and I have started to track symptoms just in case. I plan to never look at this doc again

It is September, 2022, and I am better, I'm totally better, until I'm not.

It is September, 2022, the beginning of the waiting rooms. I'm glad I don't know what's coming. The very first doctor that I see says the pain I feel is anxiety.

I lay on our couch so much that I lose track of time. My wife looks at me from across the living room. Our beautiful little home we worked so hard for and now the pain has become our landlord. Sometimes we text papers across to each other, like a tennis match, cellular measures she’s skeptical about. A measurement expert may be a bad patient but a neuroscientist is a harsh critic. Together we try to fix the world with the ferocity of our accuracy even though we know we can’t. I hate their statistics and she hates their uneven hands, their wild insertion of the word inflammation, their reductive single-cell vision, like the brain is just a far-away satellite image to these people. She is a scientist of the brain in motion and this is so much harder. She goes to work and teaches people to fire electricity through cells and we both try not to think about my frayed electrical heart. I suppose we are all still trying to figure out what we believe in.

It is March 2023. A second cardiologist says: “Why are you here?” I am only here because the new and better pulmonologist told me to go. I, personally, would be on the beach.

He tells me in a warm and rehearsed way that his wife worries about her heart, like we are colluding. I suppose that cardiologists must spend some part of their job calming people down. I can imagine that this could feel like empathy.

I have my citations but I have brought the wrong data in–stupid, thinking it should be mine–because for the majority of the appointment, he tells me about patients that aren’t me: sixty-something white men who smoked, like my dad who has cancer. But I know statistics: I have to stop myself from telling every woman in the waiting room we are at the mercy of these doctors' gamblers fallacies and their inability to parse odds ratios.

Carefully, I do not use the word “fix,” or “cure,” or even “treat,” especially with specialists, who have a holy horror of treating anything. They are like the cell scientists of this rigmarole, observations only. I am experimenting with saying "manage.” I also use the phrases my hospital family recommends like “interferes with quality of life” and “significantly different from what I have experienced before,” the semaphore of the medical office, SOS. You can't act like you care, you have to step back and hold your breath and see if they will.

It is December, 2023.

I am well enough to go to the ocean and drive to a hiking trail. I have not sat in the middle of a sidewalk since June.

I take my dog for a very long walk. I look forward to going home and seeing my wife. I call my dad despite everything because sometimes you're not a cowboy, you're just scared and you want to call your dad. I tell him for the first time that this is happening to me. Against all the odds, he believes me.

 

[SNT Gatchaman]

Author's post on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/111743669178687164

Fuck it. This was my 2023: getting married, almost dying, learning that the thing about almost dying is that nobody cares except for the people who care so much that it rewrites the world around you, the way that scientists love, the fact that at the end of the day we are our cells, what it means to get caught up inside of #LongCovid while everyone talks about it but nobody listens, the cruelty of doctors, how much we try not to see it all.