Today was the third and final day of my outpatient intravenous steroid infusion, the somewhat delayed result of my most recent follow-up visit to Stanford.
The CT scan a few weeks back was, to quote my doctor, “better and worse” (as well as inconclusive), which meant another bronchoscopy, which found a coronoavirus infection, which is basically a cold, which they don’t normally treat, which did, after a week, basically get better on its own, which didn’t stop Stanford from ordering three days of super-steroids and a doubling of my antiviral medications to really kick this thing’s ass right out of my system.
Honestly, in the grand scheme of things and the slightly-less-grand history of my things, this is practically nothing, and definitely not worth worrying about.
But I am, all the same.
Not, like, constantly, but on and off. This is the second infection I’ve had in the last four months — and only the second infection I’ve had in the last four-and-a-half years — and it bothers me, happening back-to-back like this. There’s a part of me that feels like I’m regressing somehow, like, I don’t know, I had those four good years but all of that’s over now. And what did I do with it? I’m worried that going forward is going to look an awful lot like going backward — a life of intravenous infusions and hospitalizations and surgeries.
Look, I’m like the guy when it comes to shitting all over post-transplant fantasies. My entire brand is basically reminding people that it’s still going to suck, that it really is just trading one disease for another, that the universe is cold and unfeeling, and, to quote The Good Place’s Chidi, “Birth is a curse, and existence is a prison.” But none of that is making this any easier to stomach.
I don’t know. I don’t know how much of this is the virus slowing me down, the drugs running roughshod, the being run-down and tired. I don’t know how much of this is the clinical depression playing tricks on my brain, or how much of all this worrying is justified. Or how much is just a general sadness and malaise lodged in my brain from finishing Red Dead Redemption II last week.
I don’t know. And I think that’s what bothers me the most.