The Big Sick
March of 2020, the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, found me hyperventilating in my car. I sat outside the home of the married professors emeriti for whom I served as “Household Assistant.” I was in charge of such menial tasks as laundry, dishes, and errands, the sorts of responsibilities that, while hardly lofty, were critical—so, pandemic notwithstanding, Jerry and Krista had asked me to come in to work. I called Jerry from my car: “I can barely breathe,” I croaked, painfully, “I think I have it.” Jerry, who had by then known me for five years, was unperturbed. “Take your mask off,” he suggested. I did. My breath came easier. “Is that better?” It was better. “Alrighty, well, take a couple deep breaths, mask back up, and come on in.”
***
In my family, the hours between dinner and 9 pm or so were generally spent watching light, family-friendly shows, like Gilmore Girls and American Idol. But after my mother retired to bed, the programming shifted to “those horrible shows your father likes”—thrillers and sci-fi. My father would mix up a pitcher of lemonade from one of the many tubes of frozen Minute Maid concentrate occupying our freezer, pour himself a tall glass (often paired with a Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar or three), and enjoy a few episodes of Lost, Smallville, or Alias. Though I was at no point in my childhood expressly forbidden from watching shows and movies inappropriate for my age group, I was de facto barred by my bedtime from joining my father in this indulgence. The hours following my bedtime, were, however, often spent staring at my ceiling, wallpapered with horse posters (in lieu of the real live horse I so often pleaded for, to no avail). I struggled with insomnia for most of my life and when I couldn’t sleep, I snuck downstairs to join my father in front of the TV, which often resulted in my learning such things as new swear words and the function of a condom.
One of my father’s favorite shows was 24, an edge-of-your-seat thriller about counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer’s heroic efforts to thwart bomb threats and presidential assassinations. One sleepless night, I found myself parked on the couch watching season three of 24 with my father, putting away Häagen-Dazs bars like my life depended on it. I was eight years old at the time and highly impressionable, watching with growing horror as the bioterrorist threat mounted, eventually culminating in the release of a deadly virus in the ventilation system of a Los Angeles hotel. As victim after victim developed nosebleeds, the hallmark symptom of the fictional disease, and proceeded onward to painful and protracted deaths, the seeds of hypochondria were planted.
My sick fascination with deadly diseases and unrestricted access to the internet led me to develop, at an early age, an impressively detailed knowledge of all manner of lethal pathogens. But when it became clear to me that nobody on the playground was interested in listening to my panicked ramblings about smallpox and rabies, I retreated to the computer room to play my favorite game, “Plague Inc.” In this morbid game, the player assumes the role of a deadly virus, mutating to develop increasingly lethal and contagious attributes with the goal of killing every last person in the world. It is a race against the clock—the player must strategize so that the virus, which spawns in a random global location, is introduced into each country before effective vaccinations are developed and, worse yet, ports are closed, shielding entire populations from the raging outbreak and ruining the game entirely. (The trick is to refresh the page until the virus spawns in New Zealand, which has only one port and a robust pandemic response strategy.) Amusingly, when downloads of Plague Inc. surged in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the developers felt it was necessary to remind the public that Plague Inc. is a game and “not a scientific model.”
My tendency to assume the worst when it comes to my own health has, time and again, been my undoing. In the fifth grade, on an exchange trip to Taiwan, I fell ill, spending several days in bed with a low-grade fever. In this fevered delirium, aided by my persistent inability to perform mathematical operations correctly, I became convinced that given the 127 mosquito bites I had by that point incurred, it was mathematically assured that I was suffering from dengue fever (a disease I had learned about in the only pages of my Taiwan guidebook that I had bothered to read—“Endemic Diseases.”) A trip to the local doctor revealed that I was suffering, instead, from some common bug, the cure for which turned out to be daily servings of a terribly bitter homeopathic soup, easily the most foul-tasting substance I have ever had the misfortune of sampling.
A year or two after my return from Taiwan, I became afflicted with the nastiest illness of all: puberty. The most alarming symptom resulted in my sprouting unsightly hairs in all sorts of embarrassing places and I grew determined to eradicate them. However, my first inartful attempt to hack off my pubic hairs with my mother’s razor resulted in painful red bumps and blisters—uh-oh, I thought. I had learned about this disease in my sex ed class, and it was with great shame that I discretely informed my mother I was in urgent need of medication for my genital herpes.
Over the ensuing years, my paranoia has, if anything, ballooned: One evening during my sophomore year of college, I became entranced by The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story (a supremely frightening book about Ebola), which I read from cover to cover between bedtime and around 4 in the morning, ignoring my growing need to urinate. But upon finishing the book, I could not bring myself to brave the dark hall, terrified that some kind of Ebola monster might leap out from the shadows to infect me. So I awakened my poor slumbering then-boyfriend, Zac, and forced him to accompany me to the bathroom and stand guard while I peed.
What others may call “total irrationality,” I call “sagacious vigilance.” It is, after all, only a matter of time until the melting polar ice caps unleash zombie diseases upon the world. And you better bet that while all my doubters are eating each other’s brains, I’ll be safe and sound in the $1300 hazmat suit I intend to purchase as soon as finances permit, laughing all the way to my biohazard bunker.
