On a Thursday, our 9-year-old told us that half his class was absent and that he didn’t know why. By Monday, he was coughing and feverish and had tested positive for covid. 48 hours later, my (vaccinated) wife was coughing too.
We were so careful, we like to say. Not that it means much.
The data says we’re just fine… or about to die. I mean, who knows?
My wife was sicker than I could remember before— cycling headaches and fevers and fatigue. But it’s really the coughing that gets to you. It’s the part that you just. want. to. stop when it’s coming from someone you love. It’s also the part my brain couldn’t stop listening and listening and listening for when I lied down at night.
Still, she was getting better, which means that when they count her in the charts, she gets to be the part of the graph that turns covid into seasonal allergies.
“My nose was runny with it in March” I heard someone say recently. So I guess he can be categorical companions with my partner.
After a few days, my son had a lingering cough too, but he was getting better. Can I say enough that we were lucky? In our house, “I can’t breathe very well” is a sentence that has sent us rushing to the hospital before (more than once). I thought about hearing it a lot.
More listening and listening and listening. Thank god I didn’t hear it again.
But that story just tells you that my son was one of those hey-this-doesn’t-really-impact-kids numbers that people count and show to you when they want you to know that everything is completely fine and there is absolutely nothing wrong with our indoor pizza parties or fighting about masks in school… and if anything, they point to those graphs and wonder aloud if, actually, maybe we’re too worried, because haven’t our kids been through enough, and kids need to be kids after all, and wouldn’t making them wear a piece of cloth over their face be just a little too drastic in light of showing everyone the numbers?
Listen, I have a job because of charts and graphs. Charts and graphs are good at some things. They are still an impoverished representation when you use them to stand in the place of experience.
They are very bad at whatever this is.
Feeling mild.
But then again, what could I possibly have to complain about? We’re okay — isn’t that enough? And write an entire post on it? Come on, hasn’t everyone read enough of these stupid things?
Besides, my daughter and I showed no symptoms. Even better, I’m a professor who is tenured and on sabbatical, which must be among the most privileged positions I can possibly imagine to handle all of this. It wasn’t that long ago in which every wasted moment felt like it chipped away at the precarity of being-productive-enough-to-be-considered-good-enough in academia.
But that isn’t true for me now, either (well, at least not as true).
So telling you that after 10 days I was exhausted, behind-on-everything, stressed, and stretched-thin makes me feel like I’m exploiting our experience for clicks. The charts that show me ‘people in hospitals’ and ‘people on ventilators’ and ‘people in graveyards’ tell me that I’m making too-much-out-of-this too.
They tell me that our experience is mild, like how I step outside and maybe take off my jacket because the weather is mild.
It’s actually a mild day here in Lewisburg. It’s beautiful out.
Why do I keep saying ‘we were so careful’?
Because it’s true. We were so careful.
You know, thinking about it now, the words probably don’t do that much for others, but maybe pretending that this was out of anyone’s control feels easier than interrogating the systems that made my kid terrified for his mom’s ability to breathe. Thinking about that piece fills me with rage and resentment.
But most of the time, I’m just fine.
We’re now almost 40 days later. My wife is still more tired than she should be, and gets headaches more often than I’d like. My son still coughs on occasion. But we’re okay. We’ll be okay.
I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University. I care a lot about the way we communicate data. But for this article, I’m mostly just a partner and dad.
