On October 1, President Trump allegedly experienced his first symptoms of COVID-19. Four days later, he proclaimed, “I feel more than I did 20 years ago!”and “Don’t be afraid of COVID. Don’t let him dominate your life. “
October 1, the 200th day of my COVID disease. This is also the day I started using a central rhythm monitor to help me track my symptoms. I recorded 35 symptomatic episodes in the first seven days. I’m 50 years old.
For those who, like me, don’t have a helicopter to one of the most productive medical services in the country and $100,000 of world-class experimental treatment through a team of doctors engaged 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, let me share a more realistic experience with COVID-19.
After seven months, I no longer have an active virus, but I haven’t “recovered” yet. I am 24 years younger than our president and, although I have multiple sclerosis, before COVID, I was active and physically healthy. week, my oxygen grades dropped so I had to use extra oxygen at home to stabilize, just like I used it 24 hours a day for weeks in the spring.
However, despite COVID’s known unpredictability, a week after his diagnosis, the president declared victory over the fatal virus, refusing to remain quarantined and having his supporters promote his manhood. Trump recently said, “Now you’re getting better, that’s what’s happening, you’re getting better. “He said his infection was “a blessing from God,” even when the virus claimed the lives of more than 215,000 Americans. Even as dozens of other people who contacted him have become infected, adding my former governor, Chris Christie, who was hospitalized for a week.
The president’s words struck a bitter note on me and others who got sick or lost joy. Watching him take a walk of victory through Walter Reed Medical Center (in an airtight vehicle protected by Secret Service agents whose lives he endangered), organize unmasked photo shoots, and organize a crusade at the White House blown us away. We can’t help wonder if the president doesn’t perceive the severity of this disease.
Long distance COVID: I got a coronavirus in March. I have not fully recovered yet.
I am a “long-haul” COVID, a user who has been suffering from the virus and its aftermath for months. I know what Trump tried to hide unsuccessfully last week as he climbed the white house stairs. I’m sorry every time I walk down the stairs of my house, I’ve felt it, and much more, every day since mid-March.
Terror is a hallmark of a COVID diagnosis. When my oxygen levels fell dangerously low a week after my infection, on my 50th birthday, I struggled to maintain my conscience, suffering hard in the face of the wave of darkness that flooded my head to each and every one. When I was taken to the emergency room, my left arm and leg trembled uncontrollably, I had trouble speaking, and my hands and brains were groping at the same time as I tried to keep my nurse practitioner up to date via SMS.
At the hospital that day, at the time of my five emergency room visits, my oxygen saturation rate was reduced to 90 if I took a few steps, but they recovered when I went to bed, and in the New York Metropolitan Domain in Late March, there was no place in any hospital for a solid patient at rest.
I sent home, they took me away with my teenage daughters, they told me to stay in bed. Over the next month, that’s exactly what I did.
From early March, when I had trouble testing my teenage daughter and our long quarantine, when I was short of breath to communicate by phone with my family circle or walk around my home, I felt deeply that COVID patients were on our own. Many of us feared that no one would even know if we were dying locked inside our homes.
In fact, coVID’s deteriorating patient stories are well known now, so when President Trump was aired to the hospital at the beginning of his illness, I think his doctors were worried. This is serious. I thought it was the kind of pleasure that would deeply touch a patient.
However, when President Trump left the hospital, he triumphantly climbed the steps of the White House, the effort sounded empty, but the symbolism was clear, to position himself above the population, which as one with us in our collective suffering.
The destruction of COVID can be mitigated by a collective agreement to protect each other, covering their faces with masks, avoiding meetings, informing contacts if we are in poor health and being quarantined when we have been exposed. the regulations of the social contract, even though it reaps the benefits of ordinary care given to one of its posts, instead brazenly puts itself and others at risk.
When his own home became a viral access point and became ill, President Trump won prohibited experimental remedies for the rest of us, and then told us that our fears were unfounded. Without a doubt, we want the remedies and vaccines that the doctor The network comes to us from COVID-19, but that is only a component of the effort, and other people are in poor health and dying right now.
Since March, Americans have been fighting for fasting and for testing and access to health care. Long-time carriers like me seek the popularity of everyone from our doctors to our bosses to our families that our ailments Extended are real, debilitating, and have long-term consequences. The World Health Organization has found that 35% of COVID patients are in poor health two to 3 weeks after the test, of which 20% of young people aged 18 to 34 are healthy. published in the British Medical Journal in August indicates that 10% of COVID patients have multisystem headaches for 12 weeks or more.
After seven months, I no longer keep a hospital bag near the door like I have for weeks, but I still can’t anticipate when my recovery is over. I aspire to the day when I can resume my full-time assignment as a teacher.
Trump’s COVID forecast: 3 scenarios about scarce facts of an opaque White House
We still don’t know how long-term survivors will do and what medical conditions we might face in the long run. With more than 7. 7 million people in this country already infected, our country’s leaders want to seriously affect fitness care and all other systems in this country in the long run.
It’s hard to sense the pain of others, and it’s even more difficult to publicly acknowledge everything we don’t know as we go through this pandemic, but the country’s eyes were on President Trump when he was diagnosed with COVID, and he let us down.
We, a country in pain and mourning, needed to see a spark of popularity from our president that COVID, disease and death go beyond politics, and that we are together, in the frame and in the mind. We needed a sign of his humanity, and his shared vulnerability to this devastating virus. What President Trump has given us is political theater and a competitive display of individual machismo that is unfortunately disconnected from the wishes of other Americans by 2020.
Ann E. Wallace, a poet and essayist, is an associate professor of English at New Jersey City University and the “Counting through Sevens” poetry collection. Find her online at www. AnnWallacePhD. com and on Twitter at annwlace409.
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