I am healthy again! Suck it, Covid-19! And thank you to my wonderful East Village neighbors, who took care of me and my family while we were all sweaty and hallucinating. Since writing this Tablet piece, I have learned another way in which we were lucky. My husband Jonathan’s doctor was MIA when he got sick (RUDE) so we got health advice from my doctor and from my brother-in-law. The latter is a brilliant genius person who is a professor at Albert Einstein and has managed school-based health clinics in the Bronx and Montefiore Hospital’s Adolescent AIDS clinic and he is a mensch and a half.
As it turned out, Jonathan’s doctor was MIA because he himself was very sick with Covid-19. Had he not been, he would have told Jonathan to go to the hospital when his temperature hit 103 and his blood oxygen level hit 83 percent. (Of course we have a pulse oximeter. What kind of Jews would we be without a home pulse oximeter?) And, Jonathan’s doctor said, if Jonathan had gone to the hospital he would have been admitted. And as we know now, a hospital is a really bad place to be.
So we all lay around the living room wilting like clocks in a Dali painting and now we are better and I am coping with a massive Tablet redesign and feeling like the STUPIDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD for my inability to learn the new content management system. Maybe this brain fog is Covid-19 related, maybe it is perimenopause (fuck you, you sexist spellcheck, you should fucking KNOW THAT WORD), or maybe, as I mentioned, I’m just THE STUPIDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD.
Regardless, please enjoy this fine specimen of NYC firefighterdom, posing with a box of masks we found in our shed and donated.
I’m so glad you’re better!
I am, however, utterly bewildered as to how people have a pulse ox machine at home, and good masks! I have paper dust masks from the craft store and an old electronic blood pressure cuff? That was my grandma’s and I think we threw it out because it wasn’t calibrated right? But, that’s it. I clearly need to up my Useful game.
This is such good news! (The health part, not the spellcheck or content management bits.) You’ve all earned smooth sailing throughout the rest of 2020 — enjoy!
thank you, Chris!
husband is superb at early crisis thinking! he started feeling sick around march 16 and immediately ordered the pulse oximeter online. when hurricane sandy took out the electricity he ran out and bought dry ice and started smashing it with a mallet in the apartment yard so everyone in the building could put some in their freezers and not lose too much food. when the second plane hit the WTC, he started making a giant vat of pasta salad because he said that people who needed a place to be would wind up at our place, which they did. (and thank you.)