Survivor Stories

Good morning everyone. I hope you’re all safe and sound. And stuff.

For those of you that don’t follow me on the Facebook, I recently became a COVID-19 survivor. The only reason I mention this is because I tend to document and share almost everything that happens in our lives on my Facebook page.

It drives my wife crazy sometimes…

Seeing how we’ve been living with this pandemic for the last two years, everyone has a COVID survivor story or knows someone that does by now. And yes, I’m going to tell you all about my personal experience with the disease that shut down the planet. So I’m going to apologize in advance for doing that. This is what old people do. We tell everyone about every ache and pain we’ve ever had.

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Survivor, if you do a Google search for that word, will mostly provide information about an American TV show on CBS that I have never watched. Even once. If you’ve seen this show, I don’t need to explain anything about it. If you’re like unto me and you haven’t seen it, you probably don’t care anything about it either.

Survivor is also an American rock band based out of Chicago that hit the top of the charts in the 1980’s. They’re best known song is Eye of the Tiger, the theme song for the 1982 motion picture Rocky III. I’m not sure who Rocky Balboa fought in that movie anymore, but I do remember that song. It’s still a good song.

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I came down with COVID around the middle of June.

It started out with a fever and chills. Generalized malaise — aches and pains. And stuff. Those symptoms lasted about four days. On Day 4, I actually felt great! I thought, That wasn’t so bad, and I thought my bout with COVID was over. I’ve had common colds that made me feel worse.

This is the funny part, at no point in time prior to this did it even occur to me that I had COVID. Global pandemic — forgot all about it. And I used to be a nurse! You’d think it’d be the first thing I thought of, not the last… Another funny thing — COVID was the first thing my lovely supermodel wife thought of when I told her I was feeling ill.

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As an aside, we didn’t do any quarantining. By the time I decided to get tested, four or five days had already elapsed. We figured Lea had already been exposed, so the whole quarantine thing seemed like it would have been too little, too late.

For whatever reason, Lea didn’t come down with COVID. Not so much as a sniffle.

* * * *

On Day 5 I woke up with a headache that wouldn’t go away, and I had absolutely no energy when I woke up in the morning. That was when I realized I had contracted the Coronavirus. I more or less stumbled from our bedroom to the living room, laid down on the couch, and slept almost all day. And that was more or less what I did every day until the end of July.

I didn’t lose my sense of taste or smell, but I did lose anything even remotely resembling an appetite. I lost about 8-10 lbs. in a week. I’ve put it all back on, so I won’t have to replace my wardrobe…

The other symptom I may or may not remember with any clarity is the state of delirium I fell into. And I stayed there for a week or more.

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Delirium is a serious disturbance in mental abilities that results in confused thinking and reduced awareness of the environment. The start of delirium is usually rapid — within hours or a few days. Delirium can often be traced to one or more contributing factors, such as a severe acute or chronic illness, changes in metabolic balance (such as low sodium), medication, infection, surgery, or alcohol or drug intoxication or withdrawal.

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To say I was in a mental fog doesn’t seem to be an adequate description to me, unless it was one of those super thick, London/pea soup fogs that swallows everything in a dense mist. That is a much more apt description. In layman’s terms, I was fuckin’ out there, man.

In my befogged mind, I wandered through my altered awareness, searching for the divinity inherent in all of us. I descended into the darkest depths of my being — searching out places that I normally wouldn’t choose to revisit. I found my demons and freed them from where I had imprisoned them.

Okay, I’m not sure this actually happened. I was delirious. But it sounds cool.

Well, there is this one more thing: there’s a part of me that sometimes feels like a kid again post-COVID. Yeah, it is kind of cool! So there’s a part of me that thinks I may have actually freed some demons. It’s hard to tell with this kind of thing. You’re good one day…

And I dreamed of kit-tens. And yard renovation.

I’m not sure why those two topics popped into my head. I couldn’t intentionally focus on anything, except feeling like hell. Other than kidney stones, I can’t think of another illness that made me feel as miserable as COVID did.

Perhaps God, the Universe, and Everything sent me visions of comfort to ease my misery. Is there anything cuter than a kit-ten? Besides more kit-tens??

But yard renovation? We’ve already done all of the outdoor renovations we are going to do here at our rented resort. There are only so many improvements we’re willing to invest in and take on for a place we don’t own, and don’t ever plan on owning.

The backyard fence is one of those ugly-ass chain link things with three strands of barbed wire running across the top. Anything, including no fence, would look better than our fence. It’s the kind of fence you’d expect to see at a prison for reprobate kindergarteners.

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I’m not sure when I stopped feeling like I was going to die to death, but I’ve been feeling more or less back to normal — whatever that is — for a couple of weeks now. I have resumed my usual duties as Steward of the Realm at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa. I’ve also resumed playing golf, whenever the weather permits. It’s been raining like a bastard down here, and my golf course has a tendency to turn into a river whenever the skies open up…

A couple of weeks ago, I started hearing kit-tens meowing in the gardens of our front yard. That’s not unusual here. Our neighbor has a goddamn herd of cats that hang out in our gardens and crap profusely in our yard. I figured the kit-tens I was hearing were her kit-tens.

On August 2nd, the kit-tens I didn’t want to find decided to find me, and climbed to the windowsill of one of the windows in our dining room. The window they picked is right above the food bowls for Mika and Mollie.

There were two kit-tens. A light tan Siamese mix kit-ten, and a dark gray mottled kit-ten. They had to be littermates because they were clearly bonded to each other. The tan kit-ten mewed pitifully and constantly. The darker kit-ten, the smaller of the two, opened her mouth widely to meow, but not a sound came out of her mouth.

It was the loudest cry for help I have ever heard.

The kit-tens were beyond malnourished; they were starving. If they hadn’t found us on that particular Tuesday morning, I don’t think they would have been alive on Wednesday. When Lea joined me with a packet of soft cat food, we had never seen anything so small eat with so much ferocity.

I didn’t think my heart was capable of being broken anymore.

I was wrong.

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I’m not completely sure I actually wanted more kit-tens. We tried that once. It didn’t turn out well. Actually, it was a total clusterfuck of a disaster. But God, the Universe, and Everything literally dropped two little orphans on our doorstep, and I am not going to oppose the Will of God if I can avoid it. So we adopted the orphans — Gremlin and Pixie — and now we have four kit-tens again.

Because we already have two indoor cats, our veterinarian told us we couldn’t immediately introduce our new kit-tens to our old kit-tens. Fleas, worms, feline leukemia — I’m sure there were other considerations. And we learned one of the kit-tens, Gremlin, is a boy. Pixie, the littlest kit-ten, is a girl.

We went shopping and bought a color coordinated carrier and litter box, and I set up a kit-ten care center on the carport. I told Gremlin and Pixie to stay there until we figured out what we going to do with them. And they did! For a week!!

It’s probably the only time in history that someone said, “Stay.” to a cat, and the cat obeyed.

That’s probably the most compelling reason for me wanting to keep them. They didn’t want to leave us. We moved our little orphans into our guest room a couple of days ago, and they are more than content. The fleas and worms have been eradicated. Both of the kit-tens have fat little bellies and have filled out so much that we can’t count their ribs anymore. They eat and play and sleep and poop. And poop. And, poop some more — they’re acting like kit-tens again.

I check in on them frequently and watch them at play. And my soul purrs with contentment.

Mika and Mollie have been immensely curious about our new kit-tens, but not exactly receptive to them. Any problems we’re going to have with the transition from two to four indoor kit-tens are going to be created by them. Gremlin and Pixie are the most chillinest kit-tens I’ve ever seen. We’re going to take this transition as slowly as we need to. Or, I should say, as slowly as our older kit-tens need.

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I would be content to stop here. I survived COVID. Gremlin and Pixie survived starvation. But there’s one more thing: the ugly-ass fence in the backyard. Two-thirds of the chain link fence still survives, but the other one-third was ripped all to hell and back when the retaining wall separating our yard from the golf course below our yard collapsed in the last major thunderstorm that unloaded on the Lakeside Area exactly one week ago tonight.

Collapsed is the wrong word. Exploded is probably closer to the truth. Our backyard is probably forty feet away from the first fairway. When the wall fell, rocks rolled halfway into the middle of the fairway. There were a few unexpected hazards on the first hole last weekend…

We’ve had a crew of three or four guys reconstructing the retaining wall this week. They spent three days clearing all the debris and vines and shrubs away from the remaining fence. A new foundation for the part of the wall that needs to be rebuilt was set yesterday. All they need to do is pile another seventy-five thousand rocks together, hold them in place with concrete, and they might be done by the end of next week.

Lea and I visit with our construction team several times a day. We fill a cooler with ice and water and Coca-Cola to keep our crew hydrated. And Lea buys them doughnuts every morning. Those guys are all in love with my wife. And they are building a great wall for us.

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In retrospect, if I had known my delirious dreams were going to suddenly come true I would have been a lots more specific with my thoughts. I didn’t want the fence removed. I wanted the vines and bougainvillea bushes growing in the fence removed. Well, they’re gone now. Along with almost everything growing in that part of the garden, too.

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I’m not sure what God, the Universe, and Everything is trying to tell me. Be careful what you wish for comes to mind. The most exciting part about this for me and from my perspective is an open line of communication to the Great Beyond appears to have been opened from within. I’m excited by the future and the things to come — just as long as there are no more kit-tens involved.