...in the bedroom you had painted the color of a Veuve Clicquot champagne label. The bright marigold walls bring you … What’s the word?
They bring you — joy. The walls bring you joy, that’s the word, and you need to find joy in something.
Maybe you haven’t slept at all. Or maybe it’s the morning after your insomnia culminated in a 4 a.m. panic attack so severe that your mother thought you couldn’t breathe when she raced downstairs and grabbed a Sunny D to spike your blood sugar, which had dropped to dangerous levels. You cried, I can’t take this anymore, I can’t take this anymore.
You have been taking it for two and a half years.
When your 11-year-old son goes to school in a green sweatshirt that matches his green kickball. Your mother, who lives with you because you can’t do life on your own, will drive him. Your son is used to this. You hate that your son is …
Pause. Exhale. He is used to this.
To take him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert at Minute Maid Park on May 25. (His first, if you don’t count the Incubus concert he went to in the womb, which he does.) Even if someone has to roll your corpse into the arena and arrange it on a seat, you will be there.
(Your sense of humor is not for everyone.)
Before you got COVID in the fall of 2020, you were a different Christine Coglaiti. That Christine was an ER nurse who never got tired and could make life-or-death decisions in an instant. That Christine had no trouble managing her Type 1 diabetes. That Christine had a photographic memory.
Is one of as many as 23 million people in the U.S. with long COVID. People who, like you, went to doctor after doctor before finding one who said, Yes, I believe you.
The voice isn’t … it just isn’t yours.
Surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, photos of your son, bright plastic dragonflies, and a curlicue Winston Churchill quote: “I could not live without champagne. In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.”
Where you go to ease your physical pain and emotional depression. You check a box on an intake form that says: “I feel sad more than half the time.”
Even before you got sick, when you used Coors Light and Grey Goose mixed with V8 Splash to numb the pain of treating patients who came into your care only to die.
You keep positivity journals and self-care handbooks. But you also keep Ziploc bags of wristbands from your hospital admissions and plastic boxes stuffed with dozens of orange prescription bottles. You have lain in your bed and waited for death.
Groggy from the drugs. You stretch, turn off your music, sigh, make yourself stand. Some days, standing is easy. Other days, it’s nearly impossible.
To see another of your many doctors. He says you’re doing well, which means today is a day you can get out of bed and walk further than the bathroom.
Once, you asked him to describe a typical day with you. He gave a non-answer. If he were being honest, he would have said: You sleep 90 percent of the time.
...on what you call his “rounds.” Sometimes he flops into bed with you and you talk about everything from his school day to your health.
You turn off your overhead light. The only illumination in the champagne room comes from the soft sepia glow of the square lamp you keep on your bedside table. You rest your head on a green-and-white zigzag pillow. You put on your music: Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan. You close your eyes.
Maybe tonight, you will fall asleep.
