Post 467 - June 18, 2022

June 18, 2022 (Day 837)

The first time I had COVID-19, I wasn’t fully aware of what it was. It was early enough in March of 2020 that it was next to impossible to find a test.  It wasn’t until April, long after I had recovered that we found a place to get tested. The results confirmed that yes, it had been COVID. I wasn’t surprised. I had been sick before but never quite like that.

For the next two years or so, I went from feeling as if I were completely protected against it to feeling as if even if I did get it, I would be asymptomatic. It seemed to me that if I had lasted this long, I wasn’t going to contract it again.

Fast forward to this past Wednesday, In the morning, I developed a low-grade headache. I was going to take something for it, but I decided not to so that I could see what was going to happen. I had eaten two dinners over the days previously with a friend of mine who had arrived in St. Louis with a cough. While we were eating, I didn’t think about it twice, but when the headache started, I thought, “oh-oh.”

We had two shows on Wednesday and by the end of the first show, I had a cough, myself. During the second show, I said to one of the other stage managers, “I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I am not feeling well at all.” I took home an extra test packet, but it showed negative. The next morning, even though I tested negative again, I decided to go to an urgent care center and get tested properly. After waiting for about two hours in my car, I finally got to the head of the line. Sure enough, the test came back positive.

I have COVID-19 again. I am now in the third day of a five-day quarantine. Thursday into Friday is a blur. I mostly slept. Yesterday, by the afternoon, I felt a little bit more like a human being and, today, I feel as if I have a cold, but nothing worse than that. The at-home rapid test finally showed that I had it.

When I go back to work on Tuesday, I will need to wear a mask for the rest of the week. That won’t be any different from what I have been doing. I have long since gotten used to calling a show in a mask.

I am the eleventh or twelfth person in the company to have gotten the virus in the time that we’ve been here. Most of the people who got it, who weren’t local, seem to have picked it up at the same time in the same place. I don’t know for sure that I got it from the friend I ate with, but it seems to me to be the most logical explanation. Even if that is where I got it, I would still blame myself for not keeping my distance.

As with AIDS, we are all charged with personal responsibility to take care of ourselves as well as each other. Knowingly spreading anything is criminal. Unknowingly spreading something is another story. Every time we choose to interact with a new person, it is up to us to take the appropriate precautionary measures. The safest way to have sex now is to assume that your partner has the AIDS virus and take steps to protect yourself from it. The safest way to interact with people, in general, is to assume that they have the coronavirus and react accordingly. I chose not to do that with my friend. I chose to socially “bare-back” and here I am coughing on the couch. At the end of the day, it was my choice. The blame lies squarely on me.

The choices we make do not happen in a vacuum. I am working with over a hundred people and my being out forced my associate to have to call the show for the first time without my being there to oversee her. As far as musicals go, The Karate Kid is not a particularly difficult show to call, but it isn’t exactly easy, either. Our other associate had to switch positions and run the other side of the deck without being able to trail first. We needed to get two subs in to cover her - one who had done it before, and one who was new, who learned the show so that she could take over last night.

All because I gave my friend with the cough, a hug.

By all accounts, everything at the show went well. Very well. Everyone there is more than capable of running the thing without me, so I didn’t worry about it too much. When we were filming the run of Jersey Boys in Cleveland last summer, however, it was a very different story. There wasn’t anyone there who could have called the show with the needed precision had I come down with the virus. There was a lot of money on the line and a lot of pressure on everyone to stay healthy to be able to get through the shoot without delay. The stress of getting tested every few days mounted the closer we got to the filming week. Waiting for those results was excruciating. I wasn’t the only person who felt that. There were many people on that streaming production whose skills were not immediately replaceable.

I feel very fortunate that I don’t feel any worse than I do. Michael left a freezer full of food when he went back home that I teased him about for days. Now, I am working my way through it. Talk about eating crow. I am not a cook. Yesterday for the first time in my six-decades long life, I made rice. It was pretty good if I do say so myself. I have defrosted some chicken thing for dinner tonight.

That this coronavirus is such an omnipresent part of our lives nearly two and a half years after we locked down seems hard to believe. Hard to believe, that is until you think about the fact that 40 years later, AIDS is still an omnipresent part of our lives. We haven’t been able to get rid of it, either.

With the easing of mask and vaccine mandates, we are all going to need to assume the responsibility of interacting with each other responsibly. Do I want to sit in a crowded theatre with people who may be unvaccinated and untested and not wearing a mask? I do not. Will I? I might. If I choose to do so, I am going to have to accept the consequences.

We all want our normal lives back and I’m just not so sure that’s going to happen for a very long while.  There are going to be times when we go against our better judgments and act irresponsibly and so be it. None of us are perfect.   

Except for the cat, of course. He’s perfect. He has been curled up on me ever since I started quarantine. He is the ultimate hot-water bottle. The Karate Kid has two performances today and both will happen without me. Call if there’s an emergency, but I have faith that you all will figure out whatever it might be on your own.

I will be here on the couch with said cat, napping.