The writer Emiliano Monge poses for a photo in Mexico City, in September 2020.Gladys Serrano
It started like any other cough: in the chest, then in the throat, and finally in the mouth.
During the last year and a half, like most people - to the extent of the possibilities, the practical reality and the economy of each one - I have taken extreme care of my health and abandoned or put on pause a lot of customs, habits and behaviors .
One of the customs that I did not abandon, although I started to leave earlier so as not to run into other people, was to go out for a run accompanied by my dogs, something that I carry out for the mental health of the pack as well as for my own - five dogs locked up they can turn into wolves, ready to destroy whatever is put in front of them: an armchair, a table, a bookcase with their books.
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The cough went away, as it had come before, suddenly, after bothering me for no more than a couple of hours.
Then I thought it had been something allergic, although in my chest, as I remember, I had a strange burning.
During one of those races without a finish line, on Monday June 28, around 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning, a Belgian shepherd ran away from his owners and attacked one of my dogs, a 10-month-old puppy, biting its neck and ripping it off. a piece of an ear — it didn't end any worse, because another of my dogs, Hule, an animal weighing almost 60 kilos, reacted instantly, defending Alambre and putting the Belgian shepherd on the run in terror.
Hearing the screeching of an animal is scary, but it scares more, of course, blood.
So, because Wire was bleeding profusely, I came home really scared.
And this, that I was scared, it is important to clarify because this state led me to commit the first of the carelessness that I would chain in the following hours: instead of putting on a medical mask, fear, worry, in reality, led me to get high. what I found before hand: one of those cloth masks that, we know, although they are more comfortable, they are of little use.
The burning in my chest, a burning that seemed to have nothing to do with my inhalations or exhalations, as had happened before with the cough, withdrew as it had arrived: suddenly, after having crawled under my breastbone one day and after sowing a curious pain at the base, in the muscles of my tongue.
I became aware of the second of my oversights much later, when the bug had already invaded my system: when I arrived at the veterinary clinic, while leaving Alambre on a metal plate, the doctor told me: “You are going to have to help me, because I'm just ... the boys are sick ”. I am sure that, in any other situation, that is, anyone in which I did not think 100% of my dog's neck, that phrase would have set off an alarm. This is how neglect works, however: one moves — out of concern, but also out of exhaustion or the need to escape — from the center of self-care.
And when one has moved from that center - that of caring for oneself in Greco-Latin terms, that is, as a practice of freedom that imposes, in order to take care of others, caring for oneself - the perfect storm of self-care is unleashed. oversights: for an hour and a half I stayed in a three-by-three room, without much ventilation, accompanying the vet who saved Alambre, but who had contracted the bug, something that I would not know until after I had started to feel bad and had done the proof. Half an hour before receiving my results, when I was wondering how it was possible if I was taking care of myself and I was vaccinated, I received the message from the vet: "the whole clinic came out with covid, I'll tell you so you can take your measurements."
The pain at the base, at the root, to put it another way, of my tongue - that was where the discomfort had nested, at the origin of his muscles - did not go away as the cough and the burning of the chest had gone before. .
And it was that pain, which hurt me when I swallowed, but also when I spoke, the symptom that would lead me to think, for the first time, that that was the bug.
These measures, unfortunately, should have been taken before - they had been, in fact, as I said: I changed customs, habits and behaviors, I took conscientious care of myself and others and I was vaccinated.
In the face of a virus, however —more in the face of a new one, as Miguel Pita says in
A day in the life of a virus
(from DNA to pandemic)
-, almost nothing is enough: vaccines - without which my disease, like that of so many others, would have been worse - do not guarantee absolute immunity, but they mitigate - this is the essential thing - serious disease - just see how it grows again the wave of contagion, but not the wave of death—; Almost nothing is enough and, I insist, the slightest carelessness is enough for the wall that one has erected to crack in the least expected corner and its bricks to vanish — as if they had really been solid — into the air.
But he said that the message from the vet came when the bug's symptoms had appeared — I am counting those symptoms and those discomforts here, hoping that my experience will serve as another warning to anyone who reads these words, especially now that we see them climbing again. pending-; I do not intend to teach, perhaps to invert the sense of fear: that the fear that led me to neglect myself serves so that someone else takes better and better care of himself, so that he does not abandon caring for himself or forget that health is a collective matter, that The well-being of one is, above all, the well-being of others: those who have not yet been vaccinated, those who cannot take extreme precautions or change habits, those who are always more vulnerable to disease.
It all started with any cough, almost that of an allergy, a cough that left behind a strange burning in my chest, a burning in my chest that sowed a sharp pain at the base of my tongue. Then, after a couple of days, the coughing and burning in my chest returned, while the pain in my tongue spread to my extremities. In pain, I went to sleep, after receiving, in addition, the positive result of my exams and the message from the vet. The next day, when I woke up, the pains of the previous night had become unbearable and had taken over the rest of my body, every piece of my being, without exaggerating a word.
For years I have suffered from an autoimmune disease that generates, among other problems, intense pain -this is another reason why I run every morning-, well, never, none of those pains, even in my worst crises, took me to experience what I suffered during the days that followed, in which, literally, the bug led me to regret - this was exactly what I felt - that my muscles were being separated from my bones, while my head exploded, I had certainty of each one of my viscera and every inch of my skin itched.
What would it be without a vaccine, I thought over and over again for the next six or seven days - here I want to take advantage, by the way, to explain that I have decided not to say which vaccine I got, so as not to generate misunderstandings: there is no perfect vaccine, but Nor is it the one that does not help, the one that does not allow the disease to go through better and with greater chances of recovery — during which, of course, the pain would not be the only symptom that would bring me down.
After those, there appeared, one after another, the symptoms we have heard so much about: fever, lapidary fatigue - as if I had not slept in years - dull head and burning throat, but also these others, about those that have been heard less: a discomfort in the kidneys that made me urinate fire, an unbearable itching in the eyes and a horrible congestion devoid of fluids.
These new symptoms, although they are also due to systemic inflammation, result from mutations - "the dynamics of coexistence with a species have been established, the virus has more clashes with its defenses and mutations become common (...) because novel viral particles they escape more easily than the original virions to such confrontations ”, writes Miguel Pita—.
In the end, because I was able to take care of myself as I should and because I had been vaccinated, the days reached me when the pain stopped being constant, like the rest of the symptoms.
These are the days when one thinks that one is cured, but no: the bug amuses itself with our despair, just as it did before infecting us.
These are the days when one believes, then, that there is no infection, although the infection is still there: the untimely return of discomfort reminds us, a discomfort that, suddenly, is the same as at the beginning.
This is how the virus seeks to deceive us, to ensure its own survival, that is, to infect another organism.
And this is how we are left again at the expense of carelessness.
And it is that we must be clear that it is not easy to know at what moment we have been cured, that we must not, then, give in again to exhaustion.
Because the only thing a sick person can do is make sure they don't infect anyone else, keep their distance from others as long as possible.
Make ethics revolve, as Michel Foucault said, taking up the Greco-Latin tradition, around caring for oneself and others.
Faced with the mutations of the virus, we must oppose this other mutation: that of our ethics.
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