I get a lot of flack from anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and other fuckwits about my words on the COVID-19 Pandemic and in particular the response to it in the US. I pull no punches about it, I believe firmly that the previous administration and ANYONE who enables them and their policies are complicit in the deaths of all of these people. They belong in prison.
I'm not going to fucking apologize for believing that. The fault for all of this belongs directly in the laps of the Republican Party. If you believe otherwise, you're WRONG. I can bring the receipts.
I've been pretty isolated during all of this. I went into lockdown on March 11, 2020 and I'm technically still there. I now work from home, and even though I've been fully vaccinated for two months now I still go out masked. I may never eat at a buffet again. Sorry Sizzler, but I've learned how to make your cheese bread.
I ripped a tendon in my left knee in May of 2020. I had to go to the hospital, but I was out in a few hours with crutches. I would joke with people that I'm now out of hinged joints to break.
But in July my cough returned with an attitude, and I picked up an infection. Not Covid, but it all made me pretty sick. So that you understand, I have what's called "Chronic Cough Syndrome". I've had it since I was 8. No one knows the cause or the cure. Believe me, we've looked. I just start coughing, and after a few months, I stop. It can be treated but I just have to live with it until someone comes up with something we haven't tried before.
Doctors have gotten into fistfights over whether or not I have Asthma. I don't, but sometimes Asthma medications work for a bit. To be honest, I've had this for so long that sometimes I don't even notice when I cough. It's just part of the wonder of being me.
I took the Pandemic seriously. I stayed home, I socially distanced, I got real familiar with teams, bluejeans, and zoom. I did a LOT of cooking. Started making bread. Watched the country fall apart at the seams and commented on it from my own little pocket of safety. I contributed a new song to a fund-raising effort for nurses. I did my part to stay safe, but my cough had other ideas.
Anyway, this time my coughing got pretty severe and I finally agreed to go to the hospital. As stated above, turns out I had picked up an infection. Combine that with my cough and I showed all of the symptoms of a severe case of COVID-19.
I'd been careful, but the hospital staff were all very cross with me. If I had COVID, I just exposed all of them, and the main nurse who tended to me had already been quarantined that same month for a different exposure. When the test came back negative the tension in the emergency ward calmed down immensely and everyone treated me kindly and professionally - I was a patient with something they knew what to do with and didn't bring plague into their house.
I spent 4 days in the hospital but the worst part, scariest part, was the wait to move from the Emergency Room to a private room. I came to the hospital in the late afternoon. I finally got my bed nearly 12 hours later, a good 8 hours after my test for COVID had come back negative.
I needed to be hospitalized, and needed a bed, and there weren't any. I had to wait for someone to either be discharged or to die.
I got my bed at 4 in the morning. Someone had died. Musical chairs was played and I was finally moved out of the Emergency Room.
It's really hard to understand how sobering that is without experiencing it. Many years ago, before we even knew about AIDS, I had the honor of donating blood and seeing it get used in a surgery mere minutes later. I became a regular blood donor at that moment - I felt so happy and alive that my blood had been used to save a life mere minutes after I had donated it (I'm O Negative) that I became a life-long believer. I donated every time I was eligible from that moment forward until a blood infection disqualified me from ever donating again 20 years later.
This was just the opposite. The guy with a cough and a treatable infection had to wait for someone on a ventilator to stop breathing. Someone with COVID died so that I could get a bed. They never knew this had happened, and I never learned who they were. Some random person died so that I could get better.
Try sleeping after that realization hits you. I couldn't. I barely slept the entire time I was there.
Despite the fact that I wasn't in the "COVID Ward" I got to see the effects first-hand. The newly disinfected bed and room I had was previously occupied by someone moved up to the Covid Ward. They in turn had moved up there after a ventilator was taken away from a patient who died. Staff rotated through different wards on different shifts. My first nurse was rotated into the Covid Ward. My next day nurse had just rotated out. I have never in my life seen a group of people look so haunted by their day to day lives.
A well-liked member of their staff was on a ventilator. So was a priest who worked in the hospital. I had never seen in person a "Code Blue". There were six of them my first day. There is also a "Code Black". It's much worse.
My wife and daughters weren't allowed to visit me. When your daily soundtrack is nothing but medical staff talking about the good and the bad, terrible television and the moaning/screaming of your new neighbors getting that visit from family is a huge stress relief. It wasn't available this time. I didn't see my family again until I was discharged. There was no outside world.
I admit that being in hospital during all of this, even though I myself didn't have COVID, shook me. When you're in hospital mostly what you deal with is yourself and your own condition, and getting the hell out of there as soon as you can. This time I was not only aware of the people around me, their conditions, their suffering and their recoveries, but I was also aware that a whole section of the building was dedicated to people who were going to die, and that the people who were treating me were also treating them.
This was as close as I got to the Pandemic. When I got home I fucking STAYED THERE. I went to the grocery store and the pharmacy and that was it. That was life for MONTHS.
Our grocery store was fantastic - they enforced social distancing and masks with gusto. They cleaned EVERYTHING. It had been a 24 hour store but converted to shorter hours so that the down time could be spent cleaning. Aisles were made one-way.
The first time I saw someone in the parking lot without a mask I have to admit that I lost it. I screamed at them (a white couple about my age), "PUT YOUR FUCKING MASKS ON YOU FUCKING MORONS!" Understand, I'm a fairly large man with a deep voice and have been a professional singer for decades and have played sax even longer. I'm loud and imposing. Everyone within 50 feet turned and stared at the couple. Okay, me first then the couple.
It's possible they didn't speak English. They exchanged a few words in Russian to each other and then masked up.
I've been known to let my temper show. I try not to because I know it's there and I know it's terrible. I've worked for decades to keep it in check and I just let it all out, screaming at a couple of rando Karens 20 feet away from anyone else who hadn't put their masks on yet. I had to acknowledge that this affected me profoundly. I'm dealing with that.
I've lost friends to COVID. One of my neighbors spent almost 3 months on a ventilator and survived it. Some of my friends have lost family. It hurts. It all hurts. It has changed me.
Some of you have noticed that I've been pretty productive in 2021 in terms of music, after not releasing material for over a decade. This whole experience has changed me, changed my perspective. I was already an angry liberal but I'm far angrier and much more liberal now than I was. The album I worked on forever essentially no longer exists. The person I am now couldn't make that album. I am excising demons and allowing the new to come in and take its place.
And you know what, so far, I'm okay. I'm still here. I intend to stay. In fact, what I intend to be the first song from my next album in its own way deals with the fact that I don't understand depression - I've never experienced it.
But I have to admit that I'm grateful to have family and friends in my life who accept me as I am, who provide unconditional love and support and I hope I do for them. I have the occasional doubt that I'm as good a friend/family member as I can be. I can be an ass sometimes.
(A couple of my long-time friends have just done spit-takes. "Sometimes????")
Because the scariest thing about what we've all been through - what I've been through - is that we have changed so much that I'm not sure that the people who know me best would be my friends if they met me as the person I am now. I am changed.
And the odds are pretty good that you have too. This is something we're all going to need to deal with, or we're lost.
Please, don't be lost.
And because it still needs doing, because the pandemic is still going strong as ever among the anti-vaxxers, the science deniers and the Republicans, please support our nurses. Here's the album I'm on that is still to this day, long after falling off the charts, raising money for them:
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