I woke up a few weeks ago with a gross litany of possible COVID-19 symptoms — congestion, headache, a runny nose and cough pronounced enough to track my location in my house near a box of tissues and bag of honey lemon cough drops.
So I got with the program and took a home test. The good news? I didn’t have COVID. The bad news? I still felt crappy but fully intended to work the next day, chalking it up to allergies and my body’s reaction to the previous evening’s drastic drop in temperature. Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror looking like a “before” shot in a NyQuil ad and realized that pre-COVID, all this coughing and grossness would easily have been enough for me to take a sick day. So I did.
With apologies to Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City,” I couldn’t help but wonder: Are we too quick to suffer through our illnesses if we don’t have COVID-19, even if we’re really sick?
“Nothing went away when COVID came. Nobody left the party, sickness-wise. Everybody else is still here,” said registered nurse Randi Woods, executive director of Sisters Together and Reaching, Inc., a Baltimore-based community health advocacy organization, and a board member for Health Care for the Homeless. “We have to be reminded that it [an illness] doesn’t have to be COVID for us to stop. We are all defaulting to COVID. It’s like ‘If I don’t have COVID, everything else can be managed.’ You might not have COVID, but you can still get people sick.”
The avoidance of medical help unless it’s something that you think is literally going to kill you isn’t new. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, over 40% of respondents avoided medical care during the early part of the pandemic, including preventative appointments — which includes things such as mammograms and colonoscopies — and even scheduled surgeries, many to avoid COVID-19 exposure. And that attitude that the coronavirus trumped all made us downplay everything else.
Recently, a friend of Woods felt poorly immediately after returning from a trip to Ghana, assuming she must have contracted COVID-19 while traveling. But she tested negative, and “thought ‘Maybe I just have the flu.’ But she still felt really bad,” Woods said. Only when that friend remembered that a relative had previously contracted malaria on a similar trip did she seek treatment and discover that she did, too. “She got to the hospital in time, but had she waited it out, it would have been worse.”
Dr. Kathryn Boling, a primary care physician at Mercy Medical Center’s Mercy Personal Physicians in Lutherville, said that as a culture, we’re generally so bad at resting that she has actually included orders for her patients to binge watch TV, “stick their butts on the couch and stay there.” The initial messaging about COVID-19, before vaccines, was so grim, “that if you gave it to someone else, they could die. I do think there was a feeling that if it wasn’t COVID, it wasn’t as serious. It’s not true. There were people who had things like bronchitis but didn’t take care of themselves.”
Obviously, we’re in a different place now than we were in 2020. It was hard to even find regular folks willing to talk about COVID-19 for this story, perhaps because we’re weary of the politics surrounding it, or we’re just over it. We were stuck inside and now, unless we absolutely have to, we’re not going back in. Vaccines and boosters exist, pretty much everything is open and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shortened its recommendations about how long you have to isolate. Some of us can still work from home. We’re living with COVID, even if we don’t like it.
Still, the number of confirmed cases in Maryland is up, according to the Maryland Department of Health’s COVID-19 data dashboard as of Wednesday. Boling thinks some are just resigned to getting it, so they’re hoarding their sick days just in case. Some “are less likely to want to stay home [for other reasons] in case they might get COVID, because they don’t want to use those days for something that is not deadly, and they’d rather go to work sick than not get paid” for a longer COVID-19 leave.
Even as we try to move on from COVID, it can still freak us out. We might not be as worried about dying, but if we can avoid having to quarantine and miss all the stuff that’s now reopened, we will. My friend Anne Brockett, who lives in Bethesda and works for the District of Columbia, recalls being “at the grocery store the other night, and there was a guy who coughed, and immediately I did a sort of a semicircle around him to avoid him. It’s ingrained in me now. It could just have been an allergy. But if you cough, you’re a pariah.”
Whether we stay home, our continued reemergence into some sort of normalcy is expected to increase our exposure to flu and cold. The suggestions seem simple, Boling and Woods said: Get a flu shot. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Stay home from work to not infect others. Rest when you can.
That last one is the hardest, particularly for women, Boling said — and certainly for me. It was not easy to make myself sit on that couch, binge a particular stupid streaming reality show over delivered tofu bao and do nothing else of substance. But I did. It was better for me, better for my co-workers and for my family. And wouldn’t you know it? I felt better and returned to the newsroom. I was probably a little dumber for having watched all that “FBOY Island.” But at least I wasn’t coughing anymore.
