Catching up with myself: mid-late September: The Covid Experience

 

Covid-19 is weird. Don't let anybody tell you it's not, because this thing plays mind games, as well as knocking you flat with symptoms that can oscillate back and forth from a heavy cold to something that feels like full-on pleurisy or pneumonia, inside the same day. One day you think you're getting better; the next, you feel like death is imminent. 

The only thing you can do is play it by ear, take each day as it comes, handle it on its own terms. When you feel bloody awful, take it easy ... when you feel a bit better, try try try to get some exercise and fresh air, because as for getting over this thing in 7 - 14 days and putting it behind you? Ha! That's a lousy joke.

So, as things warmed up, and/or brightened up, while I was in the throes of ploughing through this, I would grab the camera and stagger out into the backyard, where everything was in bloom and the birds, bees and butterflies were a-frolicking among the flowers and plum blossom. This is all you can do: get out there, sit on the bench or on the top step leading down into what Dave calls "the plum pit," sit with the camera on your lap and wait for a bird to come, or for inspiration to strike. 

As it happens, they both came along.

If you miss the garden at this time of year, it's such a loss, because by Christmas it'll be bare, right down to woodchips and sand. Scorched earth. As I write this, it's February 1 (I still have four months to catch up), and almost nothing is blooming, there's just ... woodchips. It's all been weeded, pruned, cut back. The occasional flower here and there is not enough to woo the eye or lure the birds back, so ...

In retrospect, I'm so glad I got these photos. Checking through the archive, I see dates corresponding with the time when I almost headed for the ER on a couple of occasions! Hard to think, this was happening thirty yards away, and outside, while I would be huddled in a blanket, struggling for the next breath, and worrying that those pains in my chest needed professional help. At the same time, one knew what was going on at the hospital -- 

I told Doctor Tim, the GP, the story a few months later, and said how I hadn't wanted to "die in a car park." He didn't pooh-pooh the concept, contradict or admonish. There is is. And at least I got into the fresh air often enough to have something pretty to look back on from these days. Miss them, and you won't see them again for a year --