Has Covid Become A Game of Chicken? — Thoughts of a 72-year-old woman —with dog
After many months of observing the world around us, and several weeks’ absence from Medium, I think it might be time to add to my little journal of thoughts. The health storm is proceeding along as planned, somewhere. Maybe in a lab, maybe in a politician’s ambitions, maybe in a viral soup. But whatever is steering the course of the disease pandemic that began in 2019, the journey appears endlessly challenging, just right for a game of chicken. Americans love this game, men especially. And being an old woman with her loyal dog, it seems I’ve lost the game already.
So that’s when it becomes right to add a few words — to push the throttle so to speak. Because chicken is mostly based on timing, isn’t it? He who waits longest before the big swerve wins. Hence, she who says the least at the last minute might actually have something worthy to add.
I wouldn’t have come to this conclusion without an occurrence of my own, recent and uncomfortable. Over the course of this last summer pushing/pulling hoses and wheelbarrows back and forth across five acres of drought-hardened land was enough to cause my spine to twist like a corkscrew. Imagine those hardened low-spine bones of 72 years turning just a few degrees to the right, then jammed until I can figure out how to release them. Enter a doctor, then physical therapy. So far no relief since early August. Playing chicken with my own bones.
It has occurred to me several times that this is not the time to get Covid. Coughing, sneezing, retching, losing strength, losing appetite, losing hope. I am not a virus enticer in any form and don’t plan to be, mostly because of an already well-entrenched game of chicken with breast cancer. After five years of fighting the disease with a mastectomy and two different medications meant to keep things in check, for several months I couldn’t stay awake long enough in one stretch to accomplish much of anything. So after some debate with myself, I went to my surgeon and told her my choice to give up cancer meds altogether. She didn’t raise one argument but said, “Anything can happen, but ultimately the fight is your choice. All your choice.” By the time Covid struck, I’d been fighting what remains of breast cancer, if it still resided in my body at all, with attitude and small curative supplements for a couple of years. So far, so good. I’m still driving toward the opposing force in the game of “cancer-chicken,” and may until I die from some other malady perhaps day after tomorrow. Whatever is going on is working. “Balance, Danielson.”
So. . . getting back to the back strain. The littlest thing. Most everybody gets a back strain in their life, right? The longer you live, the more likely it will happen. I’ve been told strains of this kind often germinate in the sacrum, for women — an aftereffect of child bearing, which sets them up for this kind of twisting injury at any point along their life’s journey. Now I know I’m not alone, by far. And I consider what this means to older women who get Covid and older men unlucky enough to have this complication arrive at the same time as a full-body attack by a respiratory virus of any sort, particularly a rough one. Chicken, the game of giants, has turned to desperate breathing and inability to sit up, let alone stand. The mind is weakened by high temps, and sometimes alone these folks fall into long days and nights of restless, labored breathing. They are softening for the fall, lingering too long in the supine position (face up). They might be better off prone (face down). But whatever the course, the illness has been with us many times before.
What I’m realizing is that the smallest side event, one even as small as a back strain can predispose someone toward death in a large-scale respiratory illness. It doesn’t take Covid to die in your own mucus. The 1918 flu, inflamed by immune systems all over the world in full-on mode, ravaged the core breathing apparatus in every human under siege and turned it inside out, sometimes within minutes. My grandmother survived this great influenza but not without help from a soldier husband who was allowed to come home early from WWI to nurse her. On the other hand, a short-lived cold abused by lack of care and rest can turn into deadly walking pneumonia we’ve all been programmed to watch for during long winters. We’re going into that season right now. Chicken is about to begin. . . again. Vaccinated or not.
Finally, we hear constantly about the relationship between Covid and selfish ideology. One can wear a mask and blank out the concern of nearby strangers or one can question masks and raise the ire of those vaccinated, boosted, enlightened and constantly under the nervous rules of the game — the vague boundaries of a hunting virus. Dr. Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist from the University of Minnesota, has reiterated that this virus, this particular one, will find you, especially if you remain non-vaccinated. He hints at a viral specialty. . . to seek out the weak. Yet, from where I stand, there are many steps I can take to ensure my own safety — social isolation being perhaps the measure I most agree with — and recognizing my own immunological strength affects the immunity of others. I’m not perfect, but I’m not playing chicken with vaccinated crowds nor am I regularly engaging in uneasy “adaptations” that have become commonplace, like entering/leaving an eatery under a mask, eating and conversing without one in the same breathing space, and feeling confident that an “animal-hunting virus” is off duty because I’m under a depleting vaccine, now being boosted until it depletes again. Nothing ends a game of chicken until the players are willing to risk all. And nothing grants the winner over a deadly virus like recognizing the truth.
Moral: You can’t water down the game of chicken. Play it to the end, rules say. Don’t believe the naysayers. Both sides believe the same thing. But in this case there’s a third passenger, a virus. And that little bugger doesn’t care who wins. For that reason I will continue to observe the injured or dying players, and while I too may become one, at that very moment I’ll pull out all the stops, the first being I took care of myself all along the way. Too late, you say. Not at all. Having lived a life in knowledge of my own space, virus be damned, sometimes with just my dog beside me. May you do the same. Vaccinated, boosted, legitimized. . . or not.
