His post-Covid mask, the better, N95-quality-type, wraps around his neck like an ascot. And there it lay, around his neck, not is mouth, as he un-delicately coughs. Or chokes. Or mouth vomits.
I can’t tell exactly.
I know my husband might say he coughed up a lung. I can say for sure it’s a sound no human or animal should make in polite company.
And he does it, not once. Not twice. But over and over again.
All the while his mask lay complacently around his neck. Never engaged to carry out the purpose for which I presume it was purchased.
That is unless he thinks the mask is just about his protection. I feel bad he is coughing. But I really don’t want to be in the radius of the particulates he’s forcing into the air.
My seventeen-year-old daughter looks at me with wide eyes and whispers, “If I get seated next to him, I’m going to ask for a different row.”
“Sorry Honey. When you’re flying standby you take what you’re given.”
We are hopefully and humbly awaiting seats on an eleven-hour flight out of Honolulu. I am not about to be anything but gracious to the gate agents if we’re fortunate enough to take advantage of my husband’s airline benefits.
I secretly hope I also will not be seated next to the man.
I realized sometime along this glorious vacation in the Hawaiian Islands–that Covid, and mask wearing has changed the way I think about being sick. And being with others.
Back in the bubble of our home we don’t think about it that much anymore. Now more than three years from the beginning of the epic outbreak, we are vaccinated as much as we can be. We’ve been exposed and have experienced mild episodes of Covid. We weathered these cases with annoying but gratefully, not life-changing symptoms. We don’t live with the worry we all had in the beginning of the epidemic.
In the beginning, I attended an academic conference in late February 2020. I traveled through Boston, Logan Airport, one of the first cities to report a superspreading event that month as the result of a biotech conference. Two days later, sitting in the last hours of my own conference session, I felt the familiar heaviness in my chest. (I was hospitalized for a respiratory infection as a baby—probably RSV before people really knew what RSV was—my lungs remain my Achilles heel). I tried to suppress the tiny cough that came with the heaviness but it ultimately found its way out through my nose in diminutive exhalations.
The morning after my return I went down. The dainty cough had morphed to a deep, guttural monster sounding thing.
Within days I was diagnosed with pneumonia. The hospital wasn’t even testing people for Covid unless you had traveled to China. My blood test came back positive for Influenza A. Toppled me for more than two weeks.
And then the whole world toppled.
To this day, some of my friends still swear I had Covid as well. Either way, what I learned from that experience, Covid or flu, was to wear a mask on an airplane.
(BTW: I am not arguing the science here. I taught research methods classes for years. I get how science works. And I respect the science of mask wearing. But please, you do you. This blog is about something more than masks.)
I swore to my friend I will never not wear a mask on an airplane again. I didn’t want to get that sick no matter what it was.
“Right,” said her skeptical husband.
I did not experience a confirmed case of Covid until February 2023 and I know exactly where I got it from. The maskless young guy on the airplane next to me coughed and sniffled relentlessly. I was wearing my own mask like an ascot.
Too late by the time I put it up over my nose and mouth. I was lucky enough to be fairly vaccinated by then, and rode out the virus with lethargy and a headache. The rest of my symptoms were more like a cold.
Dammit. I knew better. Wear the mask on the airplane.
Only a few months later here we were Hawaii bound and I once again wore my mask, this time dangling on my wrist like a cheap bracelet.
Flash forward six days into our trip. My daughter has sun poisoning. I stay behind in the Kona condo while the rest of our crew chases waterfalls. I attempt to rehydrate her and think nothing of her fever. I write it off as a radiating sunburn.
“Just let me sleep, Mom,” she moans, as I force her to drink water.
A few days later and the six of us (two grown children’s girlfriends in tow) are all back in our hosts’ home on Oahu. My son’s girlfriend has a scratchy throat. My son is a nasal drip factory. He kind of sounds like the gross hacking man getting ready to board the airplane home. My own throat feels a little sore.
It’s the air conditioning. We keep shuffling between hot humidity and cold forced air. We all go to bed.
Hours later I’m awakened with a pounding headache. As a person who rarely suffer headaches, it’s clear when I do get them that something is awry.
So, the other little detail about how this all unfolds is that when I do awake in the middle of the night, I can have tremendously creative revelations. I’ve solved logic problems in this stupor between wakefulness and sleep. I’ve finished arguments in complex papers that I write for work. I’ve planned parties. I’ve written blogs!
But I also enter this Zone of Irrationality.
Maybe there is a fine line between creativity and rationality. In the ZOI, I drum up fears like dragons. They come at me with fire-y tongues. I must fight the dragon as soon as I wake.
Did Chris re-up the life insurance? I can’t afford the house on my own!
Are the brakes on the car worn? We have to change them tomorrow!
Will my son be facing sharks on the planned surf trip in the morning? He shouldn’t go!
Why is my head pounding? It must be Covid!
The only other time my head has felt the same way, I had Covid.
Wait a second, what if my daughter didn’t have sun poisoning but Covid? I mean we were all just on airplanes the week before. She was awfully hot and not that burned. She was so tired. Yes, it must be Covid. Which explains why I have it and not my husband because I stayed with her on Waterfall Day. And we are all spending a lot of time together so my son and his girlfriend’s symptoms must be Covid too. Wait. Didn’t I share airplane seats with my son and his girlfriend? That explains why the three of us are symptomatic.
Try and sleep. Can’t do anything till the morning. I self-soothe.
Brain swirling. No sleep. The dragon grows more powerful.
Oh no, our gracious hosts! My dearest friend and her husband. (Long story. High school graduation trip. Best friend moves forever). Something about an autoimmune thing a few years ago. We can’t be here. We can’t get them sick!
I need to look up last minute VRBOs in the morning.
We’ll need to quarantine away from them.
I think we have enough time to let the virus run its course before we are back on planes.
We can stay on beaches away from other people.
This is doable.
If only I can get rid of this headache. And now the sore throat has been joined by a rumbly cough.
Text to the family group text in the morning: “We all have Covid. Stay out of the kitchen.”
The family is a little irritated.
“We don’t have Covid.”
“It really was sun poisoning.”
My friend finds some Covid tests for me to take. “I don’t think you have Covid,” she encourages. “You can just stay here.”
But she is having knee surgery in a week and I need to know. Not going to risk their health.
“Have you had it?” I text from the bedroom.
“We have not,” she texts back from the kitchen.
I feel more responsibility.
I take the first test. No control line. It’s a dud.
Same with the second. I guess they really do expire.
My friend buys up half a dozen Covid tests from the nearest drug store. But apparently this brand, the one on sale, makes you register online to find out your results through your phone.
What?
My husband has to watch a stupidly long video just to learn that little piece of information because the test doesn’t resemble any of the tests we’ve been taking over the past three years.
Sorry Big Brother.
Not registering my results with your company unless the government tells me I have to. And I don’t have to. So, forget your intrusive Covid test. I can only imagine our scary future where drug companies make us register with them in order to use their products. (This may have to be its own blog.)
My husband goes back to the store for the old-fashioned kind we know how to administer. No registry or smart phone required. My husband has grown accustomed to the ZOI dragons. He is my dragon slayer.
Four tests later–two with proper control lines—I am now satisfied I don’t have Covid.
My friend is gracious. “I’ll just wear a mask around you since I’m having surgery.”
My husband resists saying I told you so.
The point is this. I would not have reacted with such panic if it was just our health and our plans. But since Covid, I am hyper aware of the ways in which we are physically connected to others. A common cold has never plunged me into the ZOI on a vacation with others. In fact, not since the STD unit in college health class– “you sleep with every person your partner sleeps with”–do I feel more aware of how interdependently linked we all are.
And no matter what you think about masks—no judgement here—remember I’m guilty of wearing them as jewelry more often than I should—the whole idea of mask wearing emphasizes our interconnectedness, the smallness of our world, and the intimacy of sharing space with people we love and a few we don’t.
I’m writing from the plane. My daughter does not have to sit next to the man with the phlegmy cough. None of us do, thank goodness, even though we are all dispersed in different rows.
I am grateful for the polite gentlemen sitting next to me. I put my mask on when I think I feel a little cough start to rise up from my chest. It’s not about me. It’s about him.
He raises his own ascot in response.
Mahalo my dear Friends in Honolulu and Kona. Thank you for sharing space with us.
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