Dear Uncle Joe...
A series of letters, a story, and a plea
Dear Uncle Joe—
I hope you don’t mind if I call you that. I suspect you know the term “wonk” originated on the Northwest campus of my alma mater, American University; I carry that label proudly, sir, and your career spans the time I’ve been aware of capitol-P Politics (don’t @ me, fellow editors—I wrote what I wrote).
You weren’t my first choice for the office, Mr. President, and I don’t think you’ll hold it against me. Last week, marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to deny my full personhood, you referred to yourself as “Kamala’s running mate.” As classic and clever a political phrasing as it was, it’s also true. And I think you know it.
I think you know, sir, that your role right now is to hold the line. I voted for you, because…of course I did. I know your record and the dozen years I lived in and around DC gave me a front-row view of how a man of your generation and background is still capable of so much growth and learning and service.
Your old boss used to really mess up my ‘hood when he took the girls out for frozen custard, though. But you know what? I’m a mom now and if it meant stopping some traffic for 30 minutes so my boys could experience the wonder that was The Dairy Godmother… Yeah. We good.
I’m dropping my DC and educational bona fides here, Uncle Joe, because I need you to think what I say is important. I’d send you to my LinkedIn profile, but it probably won’t help my case anymore. Turns out? SARS-CoV2 found my professional credentials more appealing than my muscle mass.
There’s just no accounting for taste, sir.
April is when I first thought of writing this to you, specifically. That’s when I had my first Shared Medical Appointment for Long Covid, about six weeks after my general practitioner wrote me a referral. I was waiting on the last specialist to chime in, but we knew by then. For the purposes of state disability, we called it on February 15.
I mean, technically? I probably started thinking about how to talk about this in March. Kind of. That’s when I Made An Announcement on social media about my actual condition. Someone somewhere re-christened the Ides of March “Long/Covid Awareness Day,” so it seemed like a useful thing to share.
Announcing anywhere, at any time, that you have a disease that’s incurable and barely under control in spite of your immense privilege (and bona fides—have I mentioned I’m also a competitive rower?) and reasonable success is a trauma I did not anticipate. I thought I’d come to terms with things, at least enough to write something in my own voice again.
After I clicked “Post” on March 15, though, I looked at my kids and thought, “I just told my little world that they could lose their mother any old time if this doesn’t get better. And it doesn’t seem to be getting better past a certain point. Will I get to see them grow up?”
Beware, indeed.
One of the most critical parts of living with Long Covid is drastically reducing your stress level. You probably already know this, because…well, it’s known. I learned it when I had to research my own condition (we’ll get to that) and an MD with board certification in integrative medicine validated that for me. So if she knows it, and I know it, and I can grok from countless medical research papers that folks who know things about the human body certainly seem pretty sure of it, then…
Surely you know, too, right? If I can find it on Twitter, it can’t honestly be a secret, right?
(Twitter, though, Joe? Honestly. Twitter?! But we make do with what we have.)
Anyway, publicly dealing with your own mortality when you’ve already been swimming upstream to raise two kind-hearted small humans through a pandemic in a world that rarely rewards kind hearts is stressful, is what I’m saying, and doing that on March 15 put me back in bed for a while.
To return to our A plot, Uncle Joe, that first Shared Medical Appointment (via Zoom) on April 24, 2023, is when I felt betrayed.
On the one hand, I’m an inveterate know-it-all and I should like to feel proud that I cobbled together some useful treatments and protocols. I’m not a doctor and I figured out a way to help my body get better, at least to some extent. Go, me!
On the other hand, here was this doctor finally offering a literal checklist of clinically proven protocols after two years and 800 patients. I didn’t have to do all that work from my bed and my couch and the swing in my yard.
At this point, ChatGPT could do that work.
If she’d have handed that sucker off to my PCP, my kids might’ve had their favorite cookies for Christmas. My husband and I might’ve been able to swing the move to Tacoma we were trying to engineer when I started to realize my condition was not getting better enough. I might’ve finished my manuscript with a hopeful, inspirational ending…or maybe I’d have parlayed that really great restart of my consulting practice into Something Bigger by now.
Who’s to say what was lost in those months of horizontal misery and research? (My kids probably have some ideas, though, and my husband would like a word.)
Anyway, my LC doctor can give you the percentage of her patients—again! out of 800!—helped by each of the pathway protocols, all while explaining pretty succinctly how each treatment works, and what to do if it doesn’t.
“We’re all biochemists now,” she says. She was speaking on the subject of the recommended dosages for each of the over-the-counter substances that help relieve most Long Covid symptoms for most of her patients, most of the time.
Oh, did I forget to mention that? My mistake—I was trained to be a journalist (not a biochemist, just to reiterate) and I can spot a buried lede at 50 paces, but this isn’t a news article and I’m comfortable letting the lede choose its own moment to emerge. This does seem worth bolding, though, so let me make it clear:
Everything that is already known to help Long Covid is available without a prescription.
Those of us with cognitive dysfunction might need to access prescription dementia drugs, but there are a lot of OTC options before we get there. I’m writing this today instead of lying on the sofa, watching my 6yo beat Goat Simulator 3 for the umpteenth time, because of apoplectic medical practitioners on Twitter, researchers who amplify medical studies, and the exacting standards of certain adjuncts at the Johns Hopkins University Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences in 2010ish. (Tick! There’s another bona fide, if we’re keeping track. I’m built for research.)
“No one knows how to treat this!” we keep hearing.
But we do.
“It’s still so new!” I heard from my primary care practitioner just last week. “We’re only just learning what’s going on…we don’t understand…”
That last bit, at least, is true.
In the year of our lord and savior, Miss Dolly Parton, 2023, the rest just ain’t it. That became clear from my own research, and my LC doctor showed me on April 24 that I was a goddamned genius to have figured out so much of the puzzle with my foggy brain half-tied behind my back.
On April 25, Uncle Joe, you asked me for money.
You announced your re-election campaign, and I heard that news the day after that Shared Medical Appointment. That’s when I received a text asking me to kick in $20 for another round in the Oval.
That’s some nerve, I thought, but of course, you can’t possibly know that you asked me for money while I was filing a state disability insurance claim—I can’t work full time, you see, and I’m the primary provider for my family of four. We’re fortunate to live in a state that has the resources to help us stay safe in our home while I focus on rest and recovery.
I’ve paid into that system, I believe wholeheartedly in social safety nets, and I carry exactly zero shame about needing “welfare.” My bootstrap bona fides are also ironclad and my grandmothers would haunt my dreams with their wooden spoons if I didn’t make best use of the stores I’ve laid in, one way or another.
But that’s one more level of scaffolding I have, Uncle Joe, that millions don’t. When our household finally went through a round of SARS-CoV2 infection, I was riding out a severance package because it was 2022 and I work(ed) in tech. My husband, who’s legally blind, had savings from his parents’ estate, which provided a cushion we desperately needed. And now, I’m lucky to live where there is at least some care for the uncertainty of life built into the legislative budget. Because of prior work, my recovery is deemed valuable enough to access enough money to live well enough within our means. (California state disability insurance, as Madame Vice President can explain, is a percentage of your average income over time.)
We don’t live extravagantly, honestly. We just live in the Bay Area. If I hadn’t caught 12 years of tech money, my calendar informs me I’d have paid off my school loans last Saturday, but every bonus went to pay down the cost of getting to and living at this level of…whatever it is we’re doing. So the loans were paid off years ago.
Anyway, about that text.
Last year, post-layoff, I had reason to work on my perception of people’s behavior. It came out of understanding the neurotypes in our household and how to meet our actual needs instead of Good Housekeeping-approved needs, but the upshot is that I truly believe people do well when they can; when they can’t, there’s probably a reason. (With kids, we Olds are on the hook for working with them on that reason.)
If I keep that lens on—and between you and me, I don’t think it’s healthy to look any other way at folks, not until they give you cause—it may be that I need to be very clear about my expectations for you in your second term.
I expect you to fall on your sword, sir.
I won’t even pretend that I’m not going to vote for you. The stakes are too high and the grind you’re laying down right now is historic. Even if you never say the word “Covid” again, I would swallow my betrayal and resentment and cast that vote, because I have children and I want them to have clean air to breathe and enough water to live.
I think you do, too. That’s why I’m writing to you this way, Uncle Joe—not just because I will henceforth be referring to all credentialed professionals by their first names until they give me a reason to add a qualifier—but because you often remind me of my uncles, who are awesome. Stand-up, solid, deeply loving and thoughtful men, to a one.
My uncle Steve would pick up on my use of “stand-up” here and remind me that I used to tell him he could only come with us to Burlington (I grew up in Vermont) if he promised to be funny. Dude had to learn new kinds of funny when our family became more diverse in a few ways…so he did. Make a racist joke in front of that man, or use the R-word, and see what happens when his fear for his loved ones’ hearts needs an Anger Shield. He’s [redacted] years old and still puts up concrete foundation forms for a living—in his eyes, my late mother’s Mean-It look takes on a violently protective glow, but I can still remember the jokes he told before he knew better.
And “knowing better” didn’t make him less of anything he was before. It gave him a framework to better align the kindness he carries to the laughter he shares.
Uncle Joe, I know you get a lot of shit for “flip-flopping.” I just don’t know anyone who, having lived 80 years, hasn’t had the opportunity to think something, learn more, and change their view. If my Memere, may she rest in eternal peace, can lovingly welcome her granddaughter’s wife to our family while sewing up altar linens for St. Mary’s Catholic and Apostolic Church (my mom always said of her mother-in-law that there was Roman Catholic, French Catholic, and “Yvonne’s Catholic”), you, too, are allowed to have grown in your understanding of our human condition.
(Magnanimous of me, I know.)
Naive as I know it will seem, I really do think you care. I think you care because I would care, in your shoes. I’ve been trying to make a practice for a while of giving myself permission to act on kind impulses…and you wouldn’t believe how weird it feels to have to do it.
Or perhaps you can', Uncle Joe. Your career tells me you’re here, as Brene Brown says it, to get it right, not to be right, and there’s a lot that’s not right about the current state of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic and the systems straining under it, Uncle Joe.
But if it isn’t naivete, it might be because I see something in you that tells me… If this man lived where I grew up, my uncles would respect him. Uncle Steve would call Joe Biden The Neighbor “a good shit,” and that’s a good sign. He’d read you for filth over beers by the ninth frame of your second game, but that’s just good fun.
On the morning of July 4, instead of listening to a recorded reading of the Declaration, I put on the first episode of Little House of the Prairie before my sons got out of bed. I’ve been slowly re-exploring things filed under “comforting” in my memories and I’ve always said that moving from Cornwall, Vermont, to the Bay Area was like going from Little House to 90210, so I figured I’d put on an old ep and see what came of it.
(I did this when I was in a bad first marriage, too. I went back to the Catholic church looking for comfort, but the dogma was still right where I’d left it—I tripped over it and stumbled into genuflection. Kneeling to power never did set right, though, so back to the ranks of the “Vaguely Pagan, Probably” I went.)
If you don’t remember that first episode of Little House (and I’ll understand if you don’t—I sure didn’t), let me sum it up:
The Ingalls family arrives in Walnut Grove and Pa Ingalls makes arrangements to trade his labor for the goods and cash he needs to build his family a home and start planting a crop. This is common but the townsfolk are cautious—it’s dangerous to extend credit to a person who hasn’t built any trust with you. My parents built on land gifted to them from my grandfather’s pasture and do you know what the bank charged on their home loan? Eighteen percent! On farmers’ kids with solid jobs in town!
Usury, I tell you… Anyway. There are three examples set by the town’s economic leaders:
Mr. Hansen, who owns the mill, has capital to spare and is a good judge of character—he takes the chance on his new neighbor and lets Pa work off the cost of the lumber for his house. After the debt is paid, he happily offers Pa a job working part-time, if he can spare the hours from his farm.
Mr. Oleson, an earnest browbeaten husband trope from “Annnd, ACTION” feels terrible about refusing to extend credit to the new farmer in town. Before Mrs. Oleson (The Shrew) steps in, he gets close to making an exception, and it’s no surprise why. Michael Landon is most known by my generation for playing the best dad TV had to offer until Bill Cosby put on his Cliff Huxtable costume, and you can’t not trust that man’s open face and wind- and work-swept hair.
Likely, my mom saw a lot of my dad in Pa Ingalls. We meet Doc Baker in this episode when Pa finds him stranded on the way to town; he fixes the good doctor’s wheel because it needs fixing and he’s a person who knows how to fix a wheel.
“Let me pay you for your time,” Doc says to Pa.
“Oh, it’s no trouble,” Pa says, because Pa is a wise man who knows someone always needs a hand, and everyone gets turns being that someone. “Just drop me in Walnut Grove on your way.” And so we meet the learned elder of the township, and he gets the measure of Pa at the same time that we do—a neighbor who can fix a wagon wheel is great, but a neighbor who will, and cheerfully, before you’ve even asked, is a whole other thing.
Watching Pa Ingalls fix that wagon wheel felt exactly like watching my dad reach into a chicken coop at Little Farm up in the Oakland Hills to retrieve the keys a mom with a new baby had just watched slip from her grasp. Being a fairly new grandparent himself likely slowed his reflexes; I’ve known my dad for 46 entire years and it would not have surprised me if he’d caught them before they landed. It just wouldn’t have. The middle child of seven on a Vermont dairy farm trains their quick-twitch muscles early.
Instead, though, he reached into a giant box of lamp-warmed chicken shit (definitely breaking a rule) to help out a neighbor who didn’t happen to share his zip code. Just like his brothers would, and just like my uncles on my mom’s side would.
That old story, sir? The one about Senator Biden turning up in a senior living facility’s laundry room for the Mourner’s Kaddish for the lady who sent you a small but meaningful donation every time you ran for office? A man who can honor Mrs. Greenhouse, may her memory be for a blessing, for the $18 she sent every six years, is a man who does understand the world and really does try to be a good person.
We may not get it right every time, Uncle Joe, but we are committed to doing better.
Back to Walnut Grove…
Mr. O’Neil, owner of the town’s Feed and Seed warehouse, has a plow to sell and a roof that needs fixing. Pa needs a plow and can’t get credit from the Olesons, so he offers to fix the roof in exchange for the plow.
“Who’ll buy the materials?” asks O’Neil, and Pa says the owner will, of course.
“Ah,” says the racistly written Irish settler, “then I’ll be needing more to sweeten the deal.” With Pa over a barrel, O’Neil gets him to agree to finish in three weeks and stack loads of grain sacks as they come in, plus mortgage his team of oxen against the deadline.
Well, our hero throws himself into his work and proves himself over and over and over again to the community he has joined. Still, when he sustains an injury and Doc Baker makes him stay in bed, he still tries to meet his commitments until his very clever wife smacks him down.
“If God understands farmers, he understands farmers’ wives.”
MmHM. And STAY down.
Alas, Mr. O’Neil brings some muscle to the Ingallses’ field, where he shows Ma Ingalls the agreement and takes away the very last means they have to sustain their survival—without oxen, there’s no harrowing, no planting…no harvest.
Pa hears the news and walks his busted ribs into town, followed by Laura and Mary, who know that Pa is not supposed to be out of bed. O’Neil tells this good citizen that a deal’s a deal. It’s only business, you understand. In fact, he stopped and got the oxen while he was out to save Mrs. Ingalls the unfortunate trip to town.
Pa points out that a few more days to finish his contract would have been a better favor, but O’Neil says word’s gotten around that he’s not likely to be able to work that hard in a few days, so it wouldn’t even have mattered, would it? (HIPAA, am I right? Jeez.)
Mr. O’Neil gets Pa’s Mean-It look before Charles Ingalls says, “I have until midnight,” and damned if that sweaty, broken human doesn’t start trying stack grain sacks higher than his own stupid head until he falls and can’t get up again.
The menfolk have all come out of their buildings during the scene, watching from a distance as their wives watch from inside; I grew up rural, sir, and if you put a window in a rural house, folks will watch their neighbors through it, especially when there’s no cable TV. The show’s music tells you here that they all know what’s happening is Wrong, yet…there they all stand, waiting for the worst of the episode’s tropes to gratefully grasp a quick redemption arc.
It’s Laura who cuts the tension and gets her sister to help her with sack-stacking. “We’ll do it, Pa!” she cries, instantly shaming every neighbor in earshot (which is all of them, because Laura Ingalls is no shrinking violet).
Silently, the men of Walnut Grove file past Mr. O’Neil and carry their new neighbor’s load, not because he can’t, but because he can’t right now, and that’s when humans have the chance at what’s kept us alive this whole time: Community and care.
And though we would call it “shaming,” all Laura did was stand up to help, bring a friend, and empower the people around her to act on their impulse to witness and then right the wrong in front of them.
In the end, it’s the community that puts O’Neil into a shame spiral—not because he wasn’t acting according to his values in taking advantage of his neighbor, but because he was, and the townsfolk gave him to understand that a “value” that hurts a neighbor isn’t one worth holding onto.
I have to be honest Uncle Joe—I don’t really know you. For all of my time in DC, I never worked on the Hill or even met you in person; often Senate-adjacent in my friendships, I was on the nonprofit side of the table and didn’t bump into too many principles outside the Secret Service perimeter around a frozen custard shop.
But I think you’re a good shit, sir. Watching you embody this office after your long career is a little like watching my Uncle Steve find a woodworking project that takes his design and craftsmanship to countries our little town’s school never taught us about. You’re worthy of the level of success you’ve attained, and it’s a ticklish sort of joy to watch you do so well with it. (Condescending as fuck, I know, but Uncle Steve will tell you—it’s part of my charm.)
Mr. President? I think you’re much more Hansen than O’Neil. But the O’Neil Trope is gaining on us, sir.
Last week, I had to go to the pharmacy. I make a habit, now, of looking at the supplement section to see…patterns, really. Is there turmeric available if someone asks me where to start? What kind of ginseng are they carrying? Does my local CVS have the right type of magnesium? Because I tried the wrong one first and it didn’t do any harm, but the right one was a game-changer. If I tell someone to take Vitamin D3 (because folks do ask, when I say I’ve found some relief), is there a shortage I don’t know about…? It’s just a walk down an aisle, but my focus has shifted.
Uncle Joe, every last supplement I’ve used or heard about in my quest to manage Long Covid is now eligible for purchase with pre-tax HSA funds.
That tells me something, sir, because, as a rule, pediatricians and shrinks will tell you about melatonin (for example), but the government doesn’t typically care if you can afford it. Insurance companies sure don’t—over-the-counter supplements are out of scope for Real Medicine.
But they’re what’s keeping most of us upright, and now, somehow, they are broadly included under a new HSA-eligible shelf sticker.
I don’t much believe in conspiracies, sir, because I spent a lot of time in school and survived too many group projects. But even though I can’t currently provide for my family as a content strategist or content designer, my brain, when supported, looks for information gaps and strives to bridge them.
As an aside, that’s all we content strategists really do. I mean, we’re good at lots of things, but what we really do is take the business goal (profit from product) and use words to align the customer’s goal (accomplish task) with the business goal. Most of us are very good writers and can argue the paint off a wall, but from my experience? We’re only exceptional at it when we believe in the goals we’re strategizing to support.
It’s now July 6, Uncle Joe. I meant to publish this yesterday, on the anniversary of my first positive Covid test. The truth of Long Covid, though, no matter what narrative I spin here, is that control over my energy and focus is so much smoke in the breeze.
As I was trying to note, I’ve been thinking about how to write this all out for some time, not because I have concerns about the topic or my writing, or even what anyone says about how I’ve had to change my life to treat this disease. I’ve been sitting with it because…all I really have left right now are my own words. I do want to get this right-ish, because after 40+ years of writing my way through things, I would like for someone else to read this and feel seen, because disability is isolating in the best of times.
(We’re currently operating under the assumption that we may have already lived through the best of times, and if our times were a Broadway show, our “best” would’ve been justly panned outright by half the country or better.)
If something I write here helps someone find the groove in their own biochemical journey, then I’ll be over the moon. I’m only this much better because of the patients who shared their findings and stories.
And although I’m writing this to you as the Every Human, But With Power, because it fits my needs and perspective, there’s always a non-zero chance that these words can influence you, too.
I hope they do, because I need you to get all FDR up in that next term. I need you and Dr. Biden and MVP and the Second Gentlemen to kick this into fifth gear no matter how the clutch or the Speaker screams.
I need you to save my life, sir. Plain and simple.
I’m doing everything I can within my considerable and vastly privileged means to be well and present for my small children, who are growing up so fast I’ve started using my dad’s stupid “I’mma strap a brick to your head to slow you down.” I’ve got one kid who knows Mama’s crew nicknames—he’s worn still-sunwarmed gold medals around this house and he yelled, “Go, East Bay!” before he knew his own middle name.
And I have one kid who’s only been alive long enough to see two grandparents and a dog die, then settle into the knowledge that Mama Forgets Literally Everything And Naps A Lot. My youngest son regularly stops telling me something if I have to ask him to slow down or repeat it, but is very upset if I don’t remember it. Much of this is a phase, but as a person who can still belt full scores of popular musicals written before he was born, I find his view of my abilities terribly distressing.
And so I need you to save their lives, too, not just by making sure they have clean air in schools and treatments for their illnesses, but by saving their memories of their mama, who used to hike them over hills and paddle them out to Bird Island on the Berkeley Lagoon. I need to be the mama they need and between us, sir, raising them to be exactly who they are is really taking it out of me now.
I need you to save my friends and neighbors, Uncle Joe. We’ve made Oakland our home because Oakland is all the mess I love about human life and a hefty bag of chips. We stumbled into it still carrying our Tri-Valley expectations, but there’s a grit and a care here that feels like my Pepere’s farm in Weybridge. Here, I re-learned old ways with new faces. Here, we say, “I got you” and it sounds like grain sacks settling into their stacks. It looks like community refrigerators and free breakfast as a Black Panther legacy. And it feels for all the world like a dance down at the VFW with a 50/50 raffle in support of a neighbor on hard times.
And do not get me started on the lady I saw come out in her housecoat and slippers, step into a preschool drop-off argument, and say to an agitated mama, “We aren’t gonna do this. These are our babies and we’re gonna show them how to act.” I will take her lesson to my grave, sir. The Town is dear to me, and though it has always taken care of its own (and you wouldn’t believe how fast it will claim you), I need you to help me give back to it somehow. I have neighbors suffering and I can grow a lot of tomatoes at them right now, but I can’t help keep them safe.
I need you to save my husband, Joe, and the love story we finally get to live out. It’s a long story, sir, but it involves British comedy, high scores for low brass, and a 6-day engagement after 25 years of never being out of love, regardless of how we handled it. I don’t just need you to take some action to keep him from dying from SARS-CoV2—although, yes, please—I also need you to let us have the time to savor what we love about each other, which means I’d very much like to not need the same supplements in my mid-40s that his mom took for her aging brain before we lost her in 2017.
And I think you might be the only person in this moment who might restore some of his naturally overwhelming faith in public service, which is but one of his many redeeming qualities.
This is no time for half-measures, sir. The same content strategy brain that noticed the HSA stickers in the Woo-woo Pills aisle can also see that the scope of this whole pandemic has crept up diabolically, and we are past the point of gentle nudges back within bounds.
In the last few weeks, sir, my condition has been stable enough to try to be around other people. To be brief, we’ve always been the ones to host events and gatherings and Wookiee Life Day. (I hope you were too busy in the 1980s to watch the first Star Wars Holiday Special. It’s a Special kind of terrible.) Our house isn’t fancy, but it’s big enough.
But slowly bringing people back into the loop also means explaining. A lot. A friend who gave me a box of red pens at high school graduation to thank me for editing their essays is naturally going to have a hard time imagining me un-worded.
It happens every day, though.
It’s a lot easier to see when I try to People for more than 90 minutes to two hours, because the words stop and the tears come and my playdate is over.
Every time I demonstrate my condition in a way that makes it clear how much help I need, whether I manage to ask for something specific or really just need someone else to handle a thing from soup to nuts because I can’t, it hurts. It hurts a lot.
I don’t hold any malice about it, although I know from experience that the words I’m using now are not comfortable for my dearest ones to hear, because no one who wants to understand what’s going on with me would ever actively try to cause me pain. They just wouldn’t. I can spin a story to make anyone out to be an asshole, but it just ain’t true.
Even so, every time I do a bit of show and tell, I spend another few days back on my ass, trying to reset my body from the trauma of hitting that wall…and from the emotional effect of admitting this much weakness after a lifetime of Handling Shit.
Can't pretend a petty word is never heard in this house, but I don’t spend time sitting in judgment of the people who need to see it or read it to believe it, Uncle Joe—doctoral theses will be written for generations on the communication failures of this and the previous administration during this pandemic. But it comes with a deeply painful cost to my inner child, who only ever wanted to be smart and kind and helpful, and has difficulty with all three right now. It comes at a cost to my kids, who need me as present as I can be.
Lost time with my children is something I’ll never get back, Uncle Joe, and their health and hearts are my only real priority. In the long run, if I write or say this wrong and folks feel called out for being some kind of way instead of called in to be part of desperately needed healing, well beyond my own needs, then I’ve failed.
But my kids need new memories with me more than anyone else on this miraculous blue rock, and so I’ve made my peace with that in advance. I’m no stranger to disability, but the isolation popped faster than I expected.
So be it.
The thing is, though, SARS-CoV2 and Long Covid are “confusing” because all y’all dropped the ball and…you’re it. There’s no second string here. The buck, as it were, stops with you.
And so I’m going to go ahead and write this out with less of a plan than my pre-Covid brain would like, because you can’t read it if I don’t, and you might if I do. I’m going to write this because every time I’ve blogged or posted about Doing Hard Things, someone’s told me it helped to read it.
I’ll also set this as a paid subscription, because this—my story, my research, the conclusions I’ve reached, and how I write it—this is really what I have left that’s of most use to the world into which I was born.
It’s the labor I have left to trade.
I can also knit socks, still, but the rate of return is crap. Those, I think, must remain gifts of the heart.
So here’s how this is going to work. I’ll use this pain to shore up my family’s resources as best I can and hope the words I share here hold value beyond my own worldview and physical condition. There’s a lot to cover, actually, and it’s a stupidly funny in its sequencing sometimes…and anyone reading this first post via my invitation is probably wondering where I’ve hidden all the f-bombs.
I’ve used my company manners here out of respect, Uncle Joe, but I am who I am, and who I am right now is an honest, foul-mouthed mess. I didn’t have a lot of use for shame before the pandemic and I still don’t, so I’m going to do my best to avoid unnecessary pity. You can take the girl off the farm, but…
The ground rules: Every post about meds, treatments, or protocols that I can back up with data or a doctor’s note will be public. I have Very Big Feelings about the O’Neils among us right now, charging gym-level fees for the guidance I pulled from research papers and Twitter. (Again, Joe, you don’t want to let that stand, right? Certainly, the CDC and my doctor should be more useful than freaking Twitter.) That guidance should be easily accessible in the public domain.
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But if you do want to hear the rest of it as well as I can get it written, I’d be honored if you’d subscribe. (You, too, Madame Vice President.)
All my best,
Jen