I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while. To explain that abrupt disappearance and cease fire of publications in 2020 and 2021.
If you live on earth, you already know about COVID-19. In the most Generation X way I never wanted to be, I caught COVID in March 2020. Before it was discovered. Threw me flat on my back incoherent through fevers for a month.
I’d rather not go too far into the dissolution of my second gay marriage. Leaving me to die in the back room with no medical care and barely a plate of pizza rolls? Was not a good move on her part. That all I’m going to say. By July 2020 I was divorced.
Since COVID 1: It has begun, I experienced the delightfully soul crushing symptoms of Long COVID. As of this writing, the American medical system does not recognize it. Nevada is a medical desert compared to L.A. Both the urgent care nurse. and EMTs concluded one or another of my mental illnesses was at fault.
I am almost 45. I have been mentally ill since I was born, diagnosed in 1995. My mind and body had decades before to make the call to crap out, while I was living much harder and could have used the bed rest even more.
I don’t want to recap my tragic life story, but you may consult volumes 1-6 that I self published while lying prone. Except for a few interviews, that’s all I’ve been able to do in the last few years.
Releasing the back catalogue worked out better then I thought. Readership has improved. I finally don’t have to re-edit those manuscript further and face the brutal truth of the past. They’re each .99 cents on Amazon, so what have you got to lose? They are written to be read in a series like tic tacs.
I spent most of 2021 angry. Hardly able to move with no energy, post exertional malaise and strange brain injury symptoms. The symptoms matched ME /CFS. Why the desire to journal and write disappeared while my French language skills improved? I will never have an explanation.
American medical schools do not teach about ME/CFS. It is considéred hysteria. Other countries had other views. Many nights of wee hours European Twitter, a regular favorite, became infiltrating and connecting with international long COVID/ME patients and medical professionals. A wonderful ME writer in Amsterdam was kind enough to reply to my question. What can I do about this? From home, on my own.
Various pricy Amazon experiments later, and a serious realization that I should have paid more attention in “Science for Poets,” at Reed, finally yielded results. A Home Oxygen Bar from China (nonreturnable, broke after two weeks) gave me an incredible period of near complete recovery. To dance alone in my living room again? Walk strongly and steadily without a cane? If I believed in miracles that would be one.
However, reality. After the magical mystery machine began spewing water instead of oxygen out of the nose canula? A truly alarming experience when it first happened. I cast about for a cheaper, easier to understand and use alternative.
This afternoon, three cans of this “Boost, Pure Recreational Oxygen,” showed up. The same basic setup as EX Cheeze. I had been waiting for at least four days, maybe a week, for this stuff. Cursing my physical relapse into bedbound staggering around somnolence.
I’m so used to writing about trauma and tragedy that I almost lack the words to explain. I squirted some oxygen into my mouth, let it filter tingling through my bloodstream, and got out of bed. Sacré criss du tabernak! I could walk again! Do athletic yoga! Walk down the hall with steady steps not bumping into things and knocking things over, unlike all of last year.
That was a few hours ago.
An interview with me comes out August 8 on jscottcoatsworth.com and I finally feel celebratory instead of numb. Is this hope? Over the last five years of Trump I thought I had lost the capacity. Perhaps not.
Andrea Lambert 