I Finally Got Covid And Was Forced To Take A Month-Long Break

But the lessons are manifold.

I read this article by Brian Abbey When Your Anti-Vaxer Spouse Catches COVID sometime during the last week of January and I chuckled. God was smiling too.

I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am fully vaccinated and was about to get my booster dose. So I thought — what covid?

I know many people are getting the virus even after the vaccination. My daughter’s classmates were also catching Covid. Every week there would be one or two new students falling sick. So I knew it was just a matter of time.

But I didn’t know it could be so disastrous despite the vaccination.

My daughter got the virus from her school (perhaps). She started with a high fever and body ache.

The rest of her classmates, and most people I know, had been having really fewer symptoms or were asymptomatic. I heard that this Omicron variant isn’t that harmful. I expected something like that.

But that wasn’t the case with us, not with my daughter and myself at least.

She tested positive. In a couple of days, I felt feverish too and then had a high fever. I self-tested and it came positive too.

I booked a test at one of the test centers and when I reached there, there were at least a hundred people standing in a queue. I had a very high fever and I wondered how I would wait that long.

I observed the people around me and while they didn’t look overly happy, they didn’t look too sick too. I, on the other hand, was shivering and gaging and had a hard time just standing still without throwing up or fainting.

I don’t know how I managed to walk out without doing either.

The next few days felt like hell. My fever increased, I had extreme body ache, throat pain, cold, dry cough, breathing trouble, and all sorts of discomfort a virus can bring. The good thing was, it wasn’t life-threatening.

When both I and my daughter were down with the virus, my husband didn’t show any symptoms. I still asked him to test and he tested positive too — although he was asymptomatic. He, however, was suffering from shingles at the same time, which was extremely painful.

This is when life as an expat becomes so difficult. I really missed my close family and friends who live far far away.

The only thing I could do was lie on the bed or on my couch.

It took me a long time to recover, and I can’t say I am fully recovered yet. I had to take days off of work, I couldn’t write or read on Medium anymore. Doing nothing was killing me because it was such a waste of time, right?

Well, apparently not. This one month of doing nothing taught me so many valuable life lessons.

Here’s a list of things that I did or didn’t do and what I learned from them:

We Need Regular Breaks

I took a break, even from thinking.

I was sort of forced to do that. Initially, my body resisted doing anything. So I was in the bed or on the couch mostly. But the moment I started feeling a little better, I started reading other articles or jotting down points for my next articles, as I always do.

My mind wanders from one draft to another, one project to another.

I have this constant urge of writing down the thoughts that I have on my mind always, perhaps even during my sleep, and I am worried that if I don’t capture them right now, I will forget.

I do understand the benefit of writing down my anxiety and thoughts, which has indeed helped me manage negative emotions. However, the constant urge to write down my thoughts and ideas lest I forget is overwhelming.

So I asked myself a question: What will happen if I indeed forget? Why is that so important?

The answer that I got was somehow surprising to me— It actually doesn’t matter. There will be a new thought, a new idea, a new day.

This thought liberated me.

So I decided to take a break, even from my thoughts. Whenever a new idea came to mind and I had this urge of writing this down, I stopped and told myself — Now is not the time.

I will come back to it, perhaps later, but not now. This is my break. Let me enjoy my break.

I had important decisions to make. I wrote about the failures in my driving attempt in this article and I had to decide if I want to continue or stop because time is ticking. I had important work decisions. I also had some decisions to make regarding my daughter. But I paused.

I gave myself permission to do just nothing.

It Feels Great To Be Mindful

I am very absent-minded. While on a walk or washing the dishes, I don’t look at the children playing, or at the rays of sunshine, or at the dancing butterflies, and neither at the blooming kalanchoe in the pot on my kitchen windowsill which I forgot to water and almost died.

Because my mind is free from the constant urges of doing this or that, this was the first time in many many years that I noticed all these little things. The cherry blossom tree that I had planted a couple of years ago is already blossoming and I wondered if it is almost spring.

I noticed the new shoots of leaves on the hydrangeas in the front yard right in front of my kitchen window. I also noticed the leaves of the olive tree has turned bright green after we repotted it into a new bigger pot — signs of a green thumb.

I looked at the blue sky from my couch and heard the birds chirping and realized it was indeed almost spring.

These little things (and which were also completely free) brought me so much joy.

This was a beautiful experience in mindfulness that I have barely experienced ever since I grew up and I want to do this more often.

We Don’t Need To Be Productive Always

We have this urge to go, go and go until we deplete all our energy and have a breakdown. We need to stop before we reach that stage.

I had been sick since the end of December, which I wrote about earlier. But I kept on going until I reached a point where I couldn’t do anymore.

After the Covid, I couldn’t even make my daily to-do lists. Even after a month, I still feel so exhausted. A simple chore like doing laundry makes me tired and I have to sit down at least for 30 minutes after a chore.

But I felt guilty of taking a break, of not being productive.

All the productivity gurus make it more complicated when they tell us to create something all the time, even on weekends.

They tell us to not be lazy and doing nothing is being lazy. I hated being lazy.

But let me tell you something important: taking a break is not being lazy, it’s called self-care.

We can’t be productive always and we SHOULDN’T be. It’s not healthy. Period.

No One Really Cares

When I stopped writing or reading on Medium, my initial thought was how people are feeling that I am not responding to their comments or didn’t clap or comment on their articles.

I am aware that many of you have mentioned some of my articles in your posts. I am thankful to you all. I am also thankful to some of the other writers who read my articles regularly and I read theirs.

I was also supposed to write for the Dancing Elephants Book Project initiated by Lady Dr. Gabriella Korosi, which I couldn't yet (but I am working on the draft).

The thought of not writing and not responding was really killing me.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s my people-pleasing behavior that’s kicking in. I know I am a responsible person with empathy and kindness for others.

But that also means I need to show that kindness and empathy to myself.

No one really thinks badly about me if I don’t respond immediately. Yes, some of them, who are your well-wishers may want to know that you are safe and may worry about your well-being, but they won’t be mad at you because you didn’t respond.

So now I know that my well-wishers will understand when I write again and explain.

And those who are mad at you because you are not responding immediately, shouldn’t matter to you anyway.

We Have Only This Moment To Live

This is by far the most important lesson of all the things I learned during my sickness.

Many productivity gurus will tell you to create more today so that you can enjoy your tomorrow. I have heard of people who work extremely hard to accumulate enough wealth so that they can retire at 40 and enjoy life.

But here’s the irony: You don’t know if you have a tomorrow.

I realized this when I was sick. I wondered what would happen if I die today. Would I have regrets that I didn’t live my life yet because I was busy building, creating for tomorrow, which may never come?

While death is a morbid topic but sometimes it gives you perspective. So ask yourself this question: Are you living your life fully or are you only creating for tomorrow?

Remember, today is your one chance to live. So seize the day.

My Final Thoughts

While this sickness wasn’t really something that I looked forward to, it gave me an opportunity to stop and reflect.

I don’t want to fall sick to be doing any of these things. I just want to make these lessons a part of my life to lead a happy and healthy life: take regular breaks, be mindful and notice little things, don’t give a shit about being productive all the time, not try to please people always, and instead focus more on my mental health, and definitely live life to the fullest.

After many days, I started reading on Medium and loved reading this article by my favorite writer KL Simmons. It reminds me that spring is really around the corner.

Thank you for reading.

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