Instead of Finishing NaNoWriMo This Year, I

Didn’t get COVID-19

Dr. Joseph Varon expects an influx of patients after Thanksgiving: “If we don’t do things right, America is going to see the darkest days in modern American medical history.”

A few days before Thanksgiving, I had an uncomfortable call with my daughter. Her celebration was already pared down. Instead of the usual seventeen to twenty minimum invited to enjoy her husband’s 3-day brined turkey and collection of wines from his celebrated cellar, the gathering would include his two daughters from two different counties in the state and me. He bought two turkeys because that’s my son-in-law even though only three of us eat meat.

My daughter gave me the option of declining when she told me the plans, but at the time it seemed safe enough. Masks, social distancing, of course, and, at the time, relatively few cases in the Bay Area, though they were climbing.

And after almost a year of not seeing each other, it was, after all, my favorite holiday.

And then I got the news from one of my dearest friends that her two grandchildren had C-19. Ages 11 and 13, both Zoom-schooled and sheltering, this news rocked us. Not just for the two kids I’d known-of, though rarely met since birth, but the looming question: how did they get it?

Contact tracing revealed everyone in their universe was negative. They have no idea. The boy touched something or breathed it in from a stranger on one of his few outings to a store when he accompanied his parents on a rare errand. He then passed it on to his sister.

And then the numbers in my county started rising. Then the governor declared a curfew. We were looking at a lockdown again. WTF? We’ve been here before.

I live in San Francisco, the model for doing a sheltering-in-place right. But then we came out of our hovels and did what humans (at least in the US) do. We spread the virus. Now we’ve lost our Special City status. No more us looking down our noses at the rest of you.

Warnings about Thanksgiving loomed, and I realized that as much as I wanted to see my family — I wanted to stay healthy more. But how to tell my daughter?

It turned out she was as nervous about telling me she no longer wanted me to come as I was about sending my regrets. So that conversation went well, and we joined the Zoom Thanksgiving Nation.

But I’ve been thinking about all the other effects of the pandemic on my life, lately my pledge to complete NaNoWriMo. I made that commitment public at the beginning of the month and urged you to come along.

If I have any followers left after my dismal slide from my daily writing marathon for over a year after I joined Medium, you know I like to put a good face on things. I try not to use the platform to whine, or, when I do, to stick my tongue in my cheek.

But yesterday, I wrote a long, rambling piece justifying why I haven’t been writing, why I missed, yet again, a commitment to overcome this kink in my productivity. I gave an unnecessary history of the pandemic, my own solo quarantine, my efforts to exercise indoors and blah, blah, fuckity blah.

Because the truth is, I haven’t been doing so well in the writing department (or others), and that creates massive guilt for me. So, to keep up face, I needed to give you all a reason why I’ve been a bit depressed at staying inside my apartment for nine months; why, at hearing the numbers rise, even though my own beloveds are safe, I experienced renewed grief at losing my sister, my brother, my friends Sheila and Wendy, all long-buried and mourned.

The whole dreadful piece was a plea for forgiveness for being human, for sagging under the weight of this global monster that hit our planet and the specific monster that hit our country and accounted for the upending of life as we know it.

I finally got disgusted with the article and did what I do with my writing these days, I gave up. However, before I turned out the light, I had an important insight.

Instead of focusing on the personal toll the pandemic has taken, which for me has been light considering those who’ve lost loved ones, jobs, homes, or have lingering effects of the virus, I’ve missed my big win.

When the first news of the virus hit, I, too, brushed it off as no more serious than the flu. However, since I do hold with science, I quickly opened my eyes and made a promise to myself.

Not goin’ there. No how, no way.

I vowed I would keep myself safe from the virus, believing that, like smoking, it was a preventable disease. My friend’s grandson proved me wrong. He followed all the rules — as we know them — and he’s stuck at 13 with brain fog when he tries to do his schoolwork. And he’s an ace on the computer.

But I didn’t go to Sturgis. You didn’t find me at any of Trump’s rallies or Rose Garden events. No, no, and no, to 7,000 guest weddings in New York, indoor dining after choir practice, or touch football.

I rarely go out, and when I do, I wear a mask, even to collect the mail in the lobby of my building. No one has entered my apartment since February, even though I need to have my oven repaired and drippy faucet fixed. I finally met with one friend when San Francisco deemed it safe to sit outside, six feet apart, and share a meal. And that was with the grandmother of the children with COVID-19.

What are the odds?

So that ended any contact with humans for the foreseeable future, no matter how much I love them. I cry a little in my heart when I write this because I am so sick of my own company. I don’t know when my isolation will end. I hope nothing untoward afflicts me before this is all over — I am 81, you know, though in otherwise good health.

But I am as determined as ever to avoid this virus. Unlike the flu — which it is not — it is an ugly little bitch, and I’ve had enough brushes with ill health to know I don’t need another.

While I may not be writing a daily article on Medium, while I’m a little pudgy from getting lax about exercise; while it is taking me forever and a day to finish editing my third supernatural suspense novel, and while I didn’t finish NaNoWriMo (though I did outline a new story), instead I did something better.

I didn’t get the virus. Fingers crossed for the future.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading and stay safe.