An outdoor COVID-19 verification site at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport this summer.
An outdoor COVID-19 verification site at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport this summer.
An outdoor COVID-19 verification site at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport this summer.
An outdoor COVID-19 verification site at Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport this summer.
Although the United States leads the world in COVID-related deaths, Americans still question the truth about coronavirus. It’s as if the coronavirus is the archetype of the postmodern pandemic. Postmodernism, which represents the widespread anguish of a global in which facts are questionable and distorted facts, warns against the prospect of truth about an absurd nightmare.
Coronavirus generates those same anxieties. We already know the animosity towards the mask (in which other people deny the truth of science), conspiracy theories (in which other people invent their own truth) and all the denial that COVID-19 is harmful (in which other people prioritize perception.truth). We attribute this falsehood to the cultural effects of coronavirus, however, what we are just beginning to be informed is that COVID can also subvert neurological truth.
On July 2, my husband woke up with a mild cough and some fatigue. That night, the cough hit me, but much harder. We were checked the next day. Our situations worsened to the point where we didn’t want the effects to verify what we already knew. The night the effects of control came in, I had a hard time staying awake. I felt like my chest wasn’t sucking enough air. My husband woke me up on the couch one night and told me that my daughter had called us an ambulance. I have not yet discovered the memories of the trip, however, in the hospital, the global has become a horror film.
At one point, four nurses surrounded me and told me I had to lie face down or die. No matter how much I wanted, I couldn’t move. My body felt like an extension of the bed, so I had no will of my own. The nurses started beating me, laughing, telling me I was going to die.
“Open your lungs, ” they repeated. I didn’t know if I was being ordered or made laughing because my body couldn’t move.
They may have laughed at me too because my husband and I hadn’t taken coronavirus precautions seriously. We wear masks, but we don’t have social distance. We kept seeing friends and went to the restaurant. Our passenger, a naive southern optimist, entrusted us that we were safe, and that this was a truth preferable to isolation, a concern shared by many of my age.
At some other time, I can also move in spite of everything. I don’t forget to look for my husband, who probably wouldn’t have been in the room. The nurses came in and told me my husband was gone, so they had to tie me to bed, of course. I tried to ask why, but I can’t talk either. In the background, I heard my son, who lives in Connecticut, and who in fact can’t be in the room either, say, “Make sure you tie him up.” Don’t let her move. “
I think I cry, asking my son why he would betray me.
After tying my head, arms and legs to bed, adjusting its extension back, the doctor came in with a giant saw hanging from his shoulder. Also without mask, which, for some reason, I discovered even more disturbing than the bone saw.
“We have a remedy we’d like to try,” he says. “It hasn’t been proven to work, but so far we’ve had wonderful effects.”
One way or another, I already knew what “treatment” was. Fear shook my body. The bed trembled. He saw her right above my knees and worked on both legs at once. I screamed, but it just made the doctor smile.
“You’ll be here in no time.”
I screamed, screamed and screamed.
One morning, all of a sudden, I woke up. I’m really awake. I called my daughter to see my husband. He told me he only had one benign case and that he had been fired. He also told me it was my son’s birthday on July 22. When I called my son, he responded in tears.
“You’re awake, ” he said. “It’s the gift.”
It wasn’t until long after I remembered (did I believe?) Moments described here. To this day, new horrors are being hinted at in the (re) collection, new outbreaks of tears remind me of the terrible unreality we take for granted just for making political comments. We may not know exactly what is causing hallucinations in many COVID-19 patients, just as we may not know why so many other people would threaten their lives to protest anything designed for protesters.
With the help of my son, I express my story as a warning. In this postmodern world of multiple truths, truth is no longer a fact, but that does not mean that truth becomes a decision in our minds through non-public preferences. Sartre, one of the first postmodern thinkers, reminds us that “once thrown into the global, [we are] guilty of everything [we do]”. And here is my warning: beware of the freedom to redefine the truth; such an act would possibly become objectively frightening.
JT Torres is a professor of educational psychology and writing at the University of Quinnipiac. His mother, Evette Torres, lives in Orlando.