Pulled from the Matrix by Covid, maybe everything is possible
It started as a GI thing two weeks ago, an unpleasant night but nothing to keep me from working. But as the shift wore on, chills and body aches started, and by the end of the day I knew something more was up. And so finally, for the first time ever, I rolled two black lines on my Covid card. Ethel felt fine, and we had our 25th-anniversary trip to Montreal coming up in a week, so we figured if I isolated in the basement I might emerge noninfectious in time for the trip (which was naturally focused heavily on eating and walking).
So to the sunless basement I went. Day after day, I shook, shat, slept. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t read. Couldn’t care. This was not the sniffly Covid I’d been expecting. I was winded climbing stairs. On day six I was cramping up and wondering if this was something other than Covid, so Ethel led me to urgent care for testing and IV fluids. Shoes felt foreign, light hurt, my vision was blurry. The fluids felt great, the tests were negative, it was just a gross case of Covid.
With no let up in symptoms, I started to worry maybe this was already long Covid. Maybe I just would feel like this forever. Maybe I would just poop all night, every night, it’s the new me. Maybe I just wouldn’t take pleasure in things anymore. Maybe I was done caring about stuff.
I didn’t take a Red Pill, but I did drink a lot of red Gatorade. And finally something happened.
In the middle of the night of day 6, I squirmed in bed, restless, another crap night, when a thought invaded, like a tracker bug burrowing into my umbilicus:
What would my five-minute standup comedy routine be?!
My friend Dr. Allan Walkey maintains that every adult should have a five-minute standup routine at the ready, not to be used all the time, but there in a pinch, a social calling card, a way of exchanging vulnerability. It’s a scary and beautiful idea. What would MY routine be?
I scrambled in the dark for my phone and started punching in lines. Those aren’t for sharing now, or ever. But for the first time in a week I felt like ME, jotting down stupid shit in the middle of the night.
On the morning of the seventh day I could FEEL things again. I was ready to leave the basement. But who was I?
Everything was broken. My kids were gone for the summer, Montreal trip cancelled, Ethel out of the house. I’d lost all to my touchstones: family, job, city, food, alcohol, music, creating, CARING about things. What ARE all these things?
I stood in the kitchen that first real morning. What do I do in the mornings? I drink coffee. Do I LIKE coffee? Maybe I just THOUGHT I liked coffee. Maybe I’ll have tea.
I listen to music in the mornings. Usually jazz. I flipped though the records like they belonged to a stranger. Not jazz. I stopped at Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain.
Something about that felt right. I put it on loud. It starts with this spoken word intro over an apocalyptic soundscape:
Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y’all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit
Yeah, I can identify with that. Eddie Hazel’s volcanic guitar solo builds up and I’m feeling it, the fuzz, the wah-wah, the pain. Legend has it George Clinton told Eddie to improvise a solo like his mother had just died, and his one ten-minute take became the opening track of Maggot Brain. It felt important, it felt formative that this was the first music Colin 2.0 was hearing. By the time I was on to the molten funk of Super Stupid I was jumping, kicking, air guitaring like a motherfucker between gulps of English Breakfast tea. I LIKE this! I like being ALIVE!
Another week has passed and it’s hit me just how lucky I am to be healthy. This shouldn’t come as news to me, I take care of sick people every day. But in the hospital there isn’t time for self reflection, I just go from room to room assuming I’m bullet proof—it’s what you expect of your emergency doctor, it’s what we expect of ourselves. But after that dark week in the basement where it was an effort to talk, to smile, to care, I’m just thankful to be back, new and improved, Colin 2.0. Now if Tank would just upload the Kung Fu program…
Pain Chart Progress!
Colin Devonshire
Colin is an emergency physician in Boston, Massachusetts. The seeds of his comics project were sown when he took a sabbatical from the ER for creative writing. His creative non-fiction has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.