This is the reality of the latest Covid variants. Dental infection, mastitis, nail infection, mastitis again. And a… Respiratory infection. 👀 All in 2.5 weeks. They have had 9 days of high fevers with sweats, chills, severe headache, muscle spasms, full body shaking, joint pain, black spots in vision, extreme thirst, and a complete sense of unreality. This is how Long Covid starts. These current variants are still dangerous.

A fellow Long Covid friend, is gone. Forever missed. His last post was about 5 weeks ago, calling for paramedics and asking us to wish him luck Now he’s gone. I’m so sick of watching this disease destroy people while nothing real is being done. Year 7. People are still dying. People are still disappearing. And the world acts as if nothing is happening. RIP friend. You deserved better than this.

Most people still do not get that Covid is airborne, and I watched a nurse figure it out mid wipe this morning. I am at my weekly GLP 1 shot appointment before work. It’s 8am, and I am still trying to be awake and so is everyone behind the front desk. The nurse comes to get me and she is already flustered. Shoulders up to her ears, sighing loud enough for the whole waiting room to hear, holding that big canister of Lysol wipes like a weapon. I walk into the exam room and there is this little machine on the counter glowing bright pink, puffing out this thick foggy mist that smells like fake strawberries. Like a tiny rave humidifier. As if scented fog is going to make the whole room germ free. I have no idea what that thing is supposed to do, but it is clearly part of the plan. It was like Bath and Body Works got put in charge of infection control and decided strawberry scent was the answer. She does not even say good morning. She just starts wiping. Hard circles on the exam chair and arm rests. Then the little side table. The door handle. And the back of the door handle. I ask her what happened. "I am SO tired of these people coming up in here sick!!! Why can't people just stay home when they sick?! Ugh and of course it was all that gunky nasty upper respiratory stuff. Coughing and sniffling up in my face!" And she keeps wiping, wiping, wiping, while that pink machine keeps puffing that strawberry fog behind her like it is doing something. It just came out. I said, "It is airborne though." She freezes. Hand mid air over the chair, wipe dripping. She looks at me. Looks at the wipe. Eyes locked still at the handle she just bleached. "Yeah," she says. "Yeah, it is." You could see it land. That split second where her face went from annoyed to OH S*IT. That look of wait, WHAT am I actually doing right now? That WOW, this sucks. Because that is the part most people never digested. They spent years thinking it lives on tables and chairs and doorknobs, so if they just wipe hard and spray enough pretty smelling fog they will be safe. But it does not live on the table. It does not disappear in that pink mist. It lives in the air they just shared in that tiny room with no open window or HEPAS. Until they get that Covid is airborne, and not a surface thing, or a washing hands thing, and not a bad smell you can cover up with strawberry fog, but is an invisible shared air thing, they are going to keep scrubbing surfaces while breathing each others uncleaned air.

I live inside a haunted house where I am the only one who believes in ghosts. In them, it arrives as little more than a whisper, if it arrives at all. So mild it is forgotten by morning. Which is how they can swear it was never really there at all. In me, the ghost stayed. It learned the floor plan of my body until it knew every hallway by heart, and refused to ever leave. When I whisper, please, I do not want to be sick again, the whole world goes silent. And when I finally break over that silence, the world gets mad at me for being upset at all. I came back from the dead with a heart that would not stop hammering against the floorboards, while my boss said it was just a cold and everyone else said there is nothing we can do except keep going. Speaking the haunting out loud can cost you your livelihood. Trying to keep your breath safe gets labeled political. A covered face at the store can mean being followed out past the doors, into the lot, until blood hits concrete. There are two hauntings that arrive at the same hour. The first rises from the Covid aware, who some declare a fraud for trying to stay aware inside a house with nowhere to hide. The second rises from the opposition. A chant repeats on a loop: Covid is not real. The same prewritten lines insist it is vaccine injury, or nothing at all. Endless bots, both literal and human send that script on an endless loop into the darkness. You MUST fit a narrative that was prewritten for you or you will be shunned. You are not allowed to speak your truth. For more than six years the ghosts have haunted while the world walked out of this house, locked me inside, and declared itself free. I remain trapped within it, still living with what they can no longer see or hear. Others do not see the ghosts because they have taught themselves not to look, and are not haunted because they have convinced themselves the haunting is over. But the house never stopped being haunted, and I never stopped living inside it.