I’ve never had any delusion that I’m special. In fact, considering that there are roughly eight billion of us humans, I’m of the mind that nobody is special.
But I did hope, for a wonderful, fleeting moment, that perhaps there was something special about me. Specifically, after three and a half years of COVID-19 being a thing, and having been in close proximity to infected folks on a number of occasions but still never contracting it myself, I hoped that I might have a natural immunity to the virus.
And then last week I caught it.
Thankfully, I didn’t end up in an iron lung or anything. It’s actually been fairly bearable -not nearly as dire as it was made out to be in those early days (which could be because I’m a generally healthy person, and/or caught a weaker variant). That’s not to say it’s been fun! No, sir! For a week now, I’ve been almost completely without energy, essentially glued to the couch and wishing that I could sleep for more than two hours at a time. Add to that a cocktail of cold and flu symptoms that seem to come and go as they please, and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty miserable Ryan.
Well, I mean, my physical self has been miserable. I like to think that I’ve been in reasonably good spirits, considering all the horrible things happening inside my body. It also probably doesn’t help that I haven’t been sick at all since before the whole pandemic thing started, so I likely perceived it as being worse than it actually was. Also also, you know that stereotype of how men aren’t very good at handling being sick? Yeah, I embody that trope. Hell, I probably caused it.
Which is all to say: I’m good. I got knocked down for a while but I feel like I’ll be back to 100% before too long. There’s honestly not much else I feel like I need to write about the experience; it was basically a kaiju-scaled cold that hung around longer than usual. I just wanted to make sure that I recorded that it happened. I need to write about something, after all.