I Need Folks Who Refuse To Wear A Mask To Hear My COVID-19 Story

Day 65. Temp is over 103, still coughing nonstop, blood pressure is still a mess from vascular damage to my veins and inflammation in the arteries (I sometimes have hypertension in one arm and hypotension in the other due to the artery inflammation), still requiring constant oxygen with sats still only in the upper 80s on oxygen, still too exhausted and short of breath to do more than walk across a room, and still feel awful.

Does anyone know when the “asymptomatic” or “just a flu” parts of COVID-19 kick in? I’m looking forward to those.

I still see so many people who think this is no big deal. People who refuse to wear a mask to protect other people, despite scientific proof it helps. So, maybe you need to see what the virus does to someone who isn’t asymptomatic, but gets a severe case and doesn’t die. I’m the high-risk group everyone is willing to lock away in their houses forever and let fend for themselves, or die, for convenience.

So many say, “It’s only the elderly or those with underlying conditions who get really sick and die.” First, that’s not true. A lot of young and “healthy” people have died and a lot more have been severely ill and now have long-term effects (so no longer “healthy”). Second, even it weren’t false, why are you okay with risking their lives just so you don’t have to wear a mask? Elderly and people with underlying conditions are fellow humans — your friends, your family, your colleagues, your bosses, your kids’ teachers, your neighbors, your fellow church members…

This is what COVID-19 looks like in someone with underlying conditions — aside from the severe diarrhea with the most horrific cramping you can’t even imagine (coming from someone with Crohn’s, this is saying a lot), the severe eye pain, the excruciating headaches, the terrifying shortness of breath where you don’t want to go to sleep because you don’t know if you’ll stop breathing or your oxygen will drop too low and you won’t wake, the nausea and vomiting, the loss of smell and taste, the loss of appetite, the horrible bone and muscle pain, the broken ribs from coughing so much, coughing so hard it makes you vomit, the shortness of breath that is so bad you can’t talk or do anything, the weakness and incredible fatigue that makes it so you can barely walk across a room and sometimes can’t even make yourself pick up your phone because it’s too heavy…

Aside from all that, here is the visible stuff — when your lips turn purple from lack of oxygen, rashes all over your body from the virus attacking your organs and vascular system, scary-high blood pressures alternating with too-low blood pressures from vascular and artery damage from the virus, your fingers and toes turning colors and being numb from vascular inflammation and blood clots, vein inflammation and limbs changing colors from more vascular inflammation, irregular heartbeat from tachycardia (too fast) to bradycardia (too slow), high temperatures and too-low temperatures, eye inflammation, low oxygen levels that drop even lower every time you do any activity or remove the oxygen at all… These are pictures from over the past 65 days of having the virus.

When you refuse to wear a mask in public, when you refuse to practice social distancing, when you think it’s no big deal or just a flu or it doesn’t matter because it’s not as likely to be you… maybe remember that I was a person who worked full-time, lived independently, was restoring a historic house, and a fellow human, but have spent 65 days in bed/on the couch in “solitary confinement” (isolation) and am incredibly lucky to be one of the people who survived to tell about it. Those “underlying conditions” are humans with lives just as important and worthy as yours. Those “elderly people” are our parents and grandparents and friends and family.

When you refuse to wear a mask, you are saying you are okay with doing this to everyone you encounter or anyone who is in the same area after you and you are okay with them not being lucky to just suffer through hell, but to also die a horrible death in isolation.

65 days of being this sick. In isolation.

This is the reality of the horror that is COVID-19. Not the asymptomatic people or mild cases. Worry about the ones so many are willing to sacrifice for convenience. This is what will happen to them. Or they will die. Like the 200,000+ U.S. citizens who already have.