COVID
1
“Gallagher?”
“Yes, Michael Gallagher…”
“Your Covid test came back positive.”
“Fuck!” I said it out loud, but apologized right away. Not sure what that means… I guess it’s just part of the story. Days later, in a hospital bed, I saw a doctor. He looked like something out of “Back to the Future,” in protective gear, gloves and a plastic shield over the mask on his face. I asked him “I’m going to be okay, right? I mean this is going to go away?” His answer did not fill me with hope.
“We’re doing all we can…”
There was something that used to happen to me when I was very young, maybe 4 or 5 years old, that used to terrify me. It was a feeling I would have when I went to bed sometimes. The circumstances of it are not quite there, in my mind, of when these feelings occurred or how often. There were times when I remember the room kind of growing, becoming massive, or me just becoming tiny, I’m not sure which. I remember my fingers would then become huge. I remember a kind of ringing, or whining in my ears. My most vivid memory of it was when my family was visiting Ireland (we eventually moved there), I was four, and I was in the “back bedroom,” which had been added on to the ancient cottage of my maternal Grandfather, many years before. I remember the cream colored wallpaper with vertical lines of tiny pink flowers strung together, it was cold and the room began to get bigger. I felt like I was shrinking away. When I think of that feeling now, after having experimented (well, more than experimented) with many legal and illegal drugs, it’s like I was on something. In retrospect, I think my Mother or Father may have given me a drug. It couldn’t have been a kid drug like cough mixture, it was all too weird. It was almost out-of-body, and it was right when I went to bed, that’s why I think one or both of my parents were slipping me a mickey. They probably just wanted me to go to sleep. My Father was a pharmaceutical salesman, then a regional manager, of a pharmaceutical company. He always had access to all kinds of prescription drugs. My uncle Tommy, my Mother’s brother, once accused my Father of getting my Mother hooked on some kind of prescription drugs. My Uncle Tommy was a weird guy. I used to like him, then I didn’t. He was one of those alcoholics who manages to get by with his job and family and slows down as he gets older, but there was a time when I would get those 2 AM drunk calls from him. The thing about uncle Tommy is that he was the first person that I actually knew, who died of Covid.
I remember the feeling though, going to sleep, four years old, it was scary and it felt like I was in a dark place. A wicked place. I also remember not being able to get out of bed or walk around, a super kind of paranoia would engulf me… That’s pretty wild for a kid who is not old enough to understand what paranoia is.
I really don’t think those feelings were dreams, but they should have been nightmares. Nightmarish reality, scared of the dark. Keep the lights on. I’m too scared to go to sleep. Then, when I was so much older, I was in a hospital room, and I was scared of the dark again. For the first time in 50 some-odd years I had that weird feeling, just like when I was four in that “back bedroom.” It slowly began to creep into my reality. From out of nowhere, I was getting smaller, the room was getting bigger, and it was just as scary.
I kept finding myself at a house, it was a small house. The first time I remember it, it was on some grounds, maybe a playground. I was standing outside. It wasn’t a house I had seen before, but I had the feeling I lived there. There was something familiar about it. I walked down a small hill to another small house in the same park. It was as if both places were part of the same rental. Somehow I knew they were rentals. This other apartment, or house, was very open. It was like one of those indoor/outdoor restaurants in Maui, but furnished like a living room. There were several strange looking items stacked against the wall next to a very old, lemon green couch. I could tell that they were musical instruments, and they were all made of wood. The neighbors were there. They had just moved in. They were having a party and everyone looked like hippies, right out of the 60s. I picked up one of the stringed instruments and began picking at it. I was able to play it somewhat. The hippy neighbor-people, 15 or 20, were all roaming around inside and outside, but none of them were talking to me. There was something not right about these people. I couldn't really figure out what. Someone had asked me to stay for the party but I didn’t remember who it was. I was panicking a little, wanting to tell someone that I was there, because someone had asked me to be there, that I wasn’t just crashing the party. Then I realized I had to leave. I had to get out of there right away. Something bad was happening but I didn’t know what it was. I could feel something evil. I realized I was wearing a pair of shorts, with no shoes or socks or shirt. I was leaving, but stopped when an attractive woman, in her 30s, approached me. She was smiling. She was in a bikini with a sheer wrap around her waist. Her lips wear… lucious, reminded me of an old girlfriend. Her hips swayed just the way hips should sway when the body is being seductive. She walked right up to me, her gorgeous green eyes transfixed on me. She reached out and luxuriously grabbed a small handful of my grey chest hair, then ripped it out of my skin.
“Owch!” That was me. I wasn't in the house anymore. I saw the hand on my chest -- it was a nurse, in scrubs with a protective gown and a plastic face shield. The mask underneath the plastic shield revealed only her eyes, which reminded me of Cruella Devil. She was short and round. Her arms were quite thick and very short as well. She had just ripped a soft, round circular sticker off my chest and as I watched, she had a new, hair-ripping sticker and was replacing the old one. She connected a lead to the sticker which was connected to a monitor showing my every heartbeat and breath. I was confused just for a moment, then I knew this part with the nurse was being awake. In my small hospital room, dreams and reality had been melting into each other. I was not sure how long I had been in the hospital. My reality was like that for the next several days. Dreams, nightmares, waking up, but not realizing when I fell asleep. I dreamed about being in Ireland and kissing the Blarney Stone, that’s a big thing over there. It’s supposed to give you the gift of the gab, which basically means you get good at bullshiting people. I think I have it. I was four years old -- kissing the Blarney Stone was my first terrifying moment. The dream began as wonderful. My Dad (as he is whenever I dream about him) was young, full of life. I’m not sure if my mother or siblings were even in the dream. I was afraid of kissing the stone. My Dad was very encouraging. I loved my Dad very much. He changed when I was about 11 into a chronic alcoholic who could be terribly cruel, but I still loved him. He died sobering up when I was 22. Back in my dream, I was in the awkward position of leaning backwards and viewing the drop when one kisses the stone. The stone is in a very awkward place in the wall at the top of Blarney castle. I remember an older guy wearing one of those Irish caps holding me as I leaned backwards and held on to some bars that were clearly not meant for a four year old, and in my dream I viewed the drop from that vantage point, and became petrified. Even a good dream can turn into a nightmare.
This whole “getting Covid” thing started in a very off hand manner. I did not feel very well and I found out that I had been exposed to Covid. I was working as a therapist in the detox unit of a residential, drug and alcohol treatment center. I had been working there for about 5 months. The last place I worked before that was also a residential treatment center. While I was working there, Covid broke out. It was due to lack-luster protective measures. They were allowing people to come on the unit and then would test them for Covid 2 or 3 days later. I had even spoken out about it at staff meetings. Sure enough, one girl who had been there for a couple of days, got the rapid test and was positive. Then everyone was tested. 7 clients were positive. The next day it was 12. Soon everyone tested positive, staff, clients, everyone had Covid. Everyone but me. I had been in the hospital with low blood oxygen about a year prior, trouble breathing, coughing, 103 temperature. I figured that the reason I was the only one who did not get it was because I must have already had it. So, like a moron, I did not get vaccinated, even though my children begged me to.
So back to feeling a little sick at work… My work balked at giving a rapid test, I’m not sure why, I guess they thought it was a waste of money, so I went to the Prescott Valley Urgent Care. It turned out they only had the test for Covid that takes a day or two to show results. I had the test done, a tech had touched my brain, through my nose, with a really long q-tip. I was not allowed to go back to work until I had the results. I wanted to go back to work, I couldn’t afford not to. A small problem arose the next day. I really started feeling pretty sick. The following day I called the Urgent Care, test results were back and… Welcome to the real Covid. It’s not like that was the end of the world, but I was 60, I had had a heart attack, and had COPD. Maybe getting closer to the edge of the world. By the end of that day I felt like I was going to die, and if my son had not insisted on me going to the hospital a few days later, I might have.
I remember I had been sitting in front of the small little 2 bedroom duplex that my son and I had been living in for the last 2 years in Prescott Valley Arizona. I was on a white plastic chair and was watching the brown muddy ground turning red and then blue. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. For several days I had laid on the couch, feeling horrible. Coughing, having trouble breathing. I just didn’t want to go to the hospital. I thought that would be giving in. I would try to watch movies on television and fall asleep. Then I would wake up in the middle of the night and the movie would be long gone, and I would be coughing again and gasping for air.
A Paramedic kind of shouted “Mr. Gallagher?” I looked way up, he wasn’t a small man and he was standing right in front of my chair. I squinted at him. From what I could see through the flashing lights was a square jaw and a look that was rather nonchalant, as if I was wasting his time.The lights from the fire truck were blinding me. “Your vitals are all good. Blood oxygen is 92, that’s not bad… Now, we can take you to the emergency room, just to have them check you out... Do you want to do that?” I looked over at my son. He was standing across from me. His face flashing blue and red. He was concerned. This was not usual for him. I’m usually good at hiding things like feeling like I'm going to die. .
“Dad… Go to the hospital…”
I looked back at the Paramedic, “You mean I’m fine? I’m okay?”
“Go to the hospital!”
I remember I had told my son that it just might happen, that I may call 911 that day. My son had been wanting me to go to the hospital. My son and I had been living together (a lot like the Odd Couple) since forever, even after my daughters had left. He has a hard time fitting in, he is very smart, maybe too much for his own good. He does have a good heart. I had been tested positive for Covid some days prior to that. All of my kids were worried, even though I, for some crazy reason, have been flawed by having some feeling of invincibility -- I think it was because I never wanted my kids to worry about me -- through anything medical, like after I had a heart attack, I was always telling them, “Daddy’s fine, everything is okay, I’m Dad, it’s just a heart attack...” I guess I said it so much that I began to believe it myself. I thought that I lived by sheer will and I would only die if I allowed the Grim Reaper into my room, I mean he’d have to ask first.
It was just so hard to breathe. I was thinking that this Paramedic guy thought I was okay, why go to the hospital? To lay there for hours until some doctor told me I was okay, go home, get some rest, take an Ibuprofen?
“Dad…” It wasn’t that Shea was irritated at me, or stern with his Father, the thing that made me get on the gurney was that I could hear it, in his voice, forceful as he was trying to be… He was scared. They put me in the back of the ambulance and off we went.
The hospital in Prescott Valley was less than five minutes from our crummy duplex. When we got there, I did not go in the ambulance door. They brought me into the main entrance of the ER and told me to get off the gurney and have a seat. There was a small section, a mini room made of glass or plastic, and us Covid people went in there. I felt like I was on display. There was only one other person in there, a young woman. I had this feeling she was afraid of me. I was coughing a lot. I wasn’t afraid of her. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in that see-through Covid room in the ER except air. I just needed to breathe air. The more I coughed, the harder it was to breathe. I was in that room for possibly a half an hour, which felt like two hours. Weakness… My mind was foggy. I was kind of fading. My thinking was, should I just lay down on the floor, or wait, pass out, and fall on the floor? A nurse or tech or something came out to do my vitals. I told her I was unable to sit anymore, “I can’t sit up right, I’m going to have to lay on the floor.” I wasn’t kidding, and I don’t think she was the most intuitive person on the planet, but she knew I was not kidding.
The next thing was that I got out of the plastic, Covid bubble and was wheeled into the back. Now, I know the ER in Prescott Valley very well. I worked at the ER a lot when I was working for a mobile crisis unit, we therapists or counselors, responded to threats of suicide and a lot of the time they would be in the ER. Probably because no one knew where to take someone like that. On top of that I have had to check myself into the ER many times because of chest pain, which is what you do when you have already had a heart attack. So, in all that experience, I had never seen the room they put me in. I don’t know where it was on the unit. Regardless of what room I was in, I got into a coughing jag from hell. My legs were kicking. I was coughing and coughing, violently. I was gasping between coughs for oxygen that wasn’t getting inside me. I could not stop coughing and I could not breathe. There was one guy trying to stick me in the arm for a drip line, and another guy trying to stick leads onto stickers that had been placed on my chest (you know, the ones that nurses rip out). I could see people looking through the window in the door to the room. It was like they were spectators to some diabolical play. I felt like I was going to die. Not being able to breathe can have that effect. Things were getting more and more fuzzy.
The guy tried several times to put a line in me and couldn’t do it. It hurt, but the sticking of a needle into my arm was the least of my worries. Finally a female nurse came in and got it right away. They were giving me medication, I don’t know what, but I think it began helping and then they put a big oxygen mask on my face. It reminded me of the respirators we used to use when I was working in pest control. Someone said they had to take me to the Prescott Hospital because they did not have enough “Covid” beds in Prescott Valley. I don’t remember who said it, I just remember hearing it. Next thing they wheeled me out and put me in an ambulance again. By this time I do remember that dawn was just beginning to filter into the night sky.
2
As I said before, I had laid on the couch, feeling horrible for several days before I went to the hospital. During my “couch” days I spent quite a bit of time thinking about Ireland. That feeling of wanting to go back.-- what if I die and don’t ever get to go back? I had lived there when I was young, my Mother and Father weren from there. I had experienced all of those “things” there, like my first kiss, when I began to shave… I met the love of my life there… it didn’t last, but I had been thinking, before I got sick, that I wanted to move back there, to Ireland. Maybe not a good idea for someone who hasn’t even been in the country for over thirty years. Now, Ireland laced my dreams as well as many scary, evil things, as if my nightmares were fighting my dreams for control of my soul.
We went to Ireland -- for us kids in the family -- for the first time when I was four, in 1965. At that time we lived in Canoga Park in Southern California near Los Angeles. I remember when we flew to Ireland I did not realize I was on a plane until we arrived because we had to go down steps from the airplane when we landed in Shannon Airport. For the other fights we would be in the airport, we would wait in a big waiting area, then walk down a hallway (the jetway), and get to another smaller room with lots of seats (the plane), and then after probably sleeping for half the fight we would walk up another hallway and be in the airport again. When we walked down the jetway to board the plane I never realized we were leaving the airport. Okay, I was only four years old, what do you expect? I remember how fresh the air was when we got to Ireland, how cold it was during summertime, and seeing lots and lots of green..
For that trip we stayed in Ireland for three months on my maternal Grandfather’s small little farm situated on a hill about two or three miles from the small village of Foxford, in the County Mayo in the west of Ireland. I remember the cows, and feeding the chickens. For whatever reason, I remember taking baths in the kitchen sink, a big one. It was Auntie Kay who would wash me, not my Mother. I remember my Grandfather, William Doherty. He was a little scary, a big guy, he was bent over from pain in his back and could not straighten up, he walked with what they called a “stoop” in Ireland. He smoked a pipe. He was like a perfect old Irish character in a movie. My Auntie Kay was my Mother's sister. Two sisters could not be more different. Kay was full of love and kindness. My Mother did not hug or kiss, she scolded, and that’s about all I can recall her doing. I'm probably wrong about that, she may have had a warm and tender side, I just cannot remember it. I remember Kay would make a large pan of apple tart, and she would give us kids some of the dough so we could make our own little apple tarts. I remember the village of Foxford. I did not know I would live there in the future. It is where my Mother grew up, and where my Grandfather had lived his whole life, and probably his father before him. A little village surrounded by beautiful, green, wild countryside.
I remember us driving on the very narrow country roads back then (this was 1965) to a town called Castlebar. The journey was so long and tedious that I actually thought we had left Ireland and gone somewhere else. I guess I thought we went back to America. I remember being on Broage (that is a gaelic name and is probably not spelled right), which is the name of the rocky top of the hill we lived on with a commanding view of Foxford, and it used to have a massive cross on the top of it. My Grandfather's farm was along the dirt road that leads up to Broage. I do not know if the cross is still there or not. It was there for a long time.We went to the farm my Father grew up on. My uncle Packey-John lived there with his wife, who’s name I cannot recall, and my paternal Grandfather, Andrew, lived in a separate house down the road. Packey-John had a lot of kids. I remember sisters Durvala and Urvala, or Noola or something, and all kinds of very Irish looking boys and girls. I cannot remember how many kids there were but we were outnumbered. I remember little Patsy. He was my counterpart, the youngest of the brood. He would pick up a rock and threaten to “fling it” at me. Scared the hell out of me… “Hey Mom, Dad, this kid wants to throw a rock at me!” “Be nice to your cousin…”
The Universe decided to throw Covid at me over a half a century later. I listened to my son. I got on the gurney and was shoved into the ambulance. The realization of how long ago it had been since I had seen those green fields, that place that would end up affecting my life forever, was heartbreaking. That loss mixes with all of a life’s worth of loss and helps to scare you even more when you’re in an ambulance, feeling like dying.
The ambulance became a hospital room. After that first night in the ER when I was being wheeled out, seeing that dawn, I was transferred to Prescott hospital (which is about 15 miles away). This time they did bring me in through the ambulance door. And this time, I stayed on the gurney. I think we got on an elevator. We went to the “Covid area.” It had a large white sheet sealed with that yellow emergency tape. They had to rip it open to let me in. I was soon to find out that there would be no visitation what-so-ever, even if I died.
Life was good, I thought, well, it was okay. It was lousy sometimes, but it was life. Because of the little hospital room, I have a far better appreciation for simply breathing. Family reached out when I was in the hospital room. A lack of oxygen had gotten bad enough that it was affecting my perception and memory. When I was beginning to understand where I was (an isolated “Covid'' wing of the hospital), becoming more cognisant, I did not have my phone with me, but my kids were calling, Andrea, my sister, was calling to see if I was alive, (my kids told me later that they were pretty sure I was going to die and were preparing for that eventuality, as did Andrea). At first I was told of the calls by a nurse, then they began to bring this phone with a very long cord into my room and I could actually speak to people. My brother Gerald lives in Ireland, and we talked more in 6 days than we had talked in 6 months. I have not spoken with my other brother in about twenty years and the possibility of me dying had no effect on him. Catherine, my sister, who is physically and mentally challenged, and who is twelve years younger than I am, was on a call with Andrea at some point. Andrea, whom I consider my best friend, just had her own battle, and it was with Cancer. She has told me since that when she talked to me I was asking about her house in Malibu. Of course, she has never lived in a house in Malibu. Nurses would come and introduce themselves. Looking back, those were 12 hour shifts. For the first, probably 2 or 3 days I had the same nurse, from what I remember she would have been the day nurse, because she would help me order lunch or dinner. . “I’m Doctor…” I will never be able to remember his name. This was the “we’re doing everything we can” guy. I’m terrible with names and always have been. Even as a young man. Faces, I'm good at... names, forget it. With the mask and the shield, all I could see were his eyes. There was something about his eyes, was it pity? I could see that his forehead was glistening with sweat. His voice was weird. It was a soft voice with a tremble in it. The kind of tone one might use with someone very old, like the tone you might use giving condolences at a funeral. I didn’t like the tone. He was also hesitant. I thought, God, it must be hot in there, I mean inside the shield and the mask and all his gear. He asked me how I was doing and I probably said something sarcastic like, how do I look? He was explaining something, but not something like we’re going to do this, or we’re going to do that. It was more like, “you’re breathing has improved and we’ll have to just continue to monitor…” It sounded to me like there was no game plan.
Imagine a British frigate during the war with Spain and the wind suddenly stopping. The wind coming out of it’s sails. Imagine the fright in their minds as they came to a complete stop, dead in the water, with Spanish ships coming up fast. We’re doing everything we can? I was very ill, I mean this was about the sickest I had ever remembered being. I was 60 and became very afraid.
3
It occurred to me that no one survives. Certainly, no one survives death, and although that may seem like an obvious conclusion it isn’t that obvious to someone who survives something. One could say they survived a car crash or a plane crash. But one does not “survive.” Even if one wins one of these battles, they -- we -- are all going to die anyway… Maybe just not this time. If anything, this discussion only serves to remind me that I will be dying at some point in the most fininte of terms.
What about these people who survive catastrophes? If you are old enough, you have seen people win countless battles and then, of course, die anyway. The older one gets, the more of life they see, which includes death. Seeing life is also seeing death, because we are all running -- chasing -- pursuing, with a vengeance… death. That’s what’s strange. We are all chasing our own demise. We are pursuing death to get to the “end” as fast as we can because 1st place wins
Myself, having possibly just won some small battle of my own, now reconsider everything. No, I didn’t die, but I will. Let’s make the best of it. I got a close-up of that picture of “dying,” and I did not like looking at that picture one bit. Here I am, being as old as I am, and having lived, with life events won, and lost, and… what-ever-the fuck -- I saw this picture for the first time, and guess what? This is a race I want to lose.
In my hospital room, it was so hard to keep track of time. I cared, but I didn’t care. Time just goes, it’s got great batteries. Doesn’t stop for a second. There was a clock on the wall, but when I did look at it, I would forget what time it had been the last time I had looked at it. Sometimes I forgot the clock was there. The curtains on the large window were always drawn and I was in and out of sleeping a lot and it was difficult to discern that line between sleeping and not sleeping, dreaming and being awake. I would feel more aware at times, realize I was awake, but not be sure how long I had been awake for. Or if it were day or night. Dreams become a huge part of life when you think you could actually be dying, and the reality is I was in a room that scared me sometimes, like some weird hotel room in a Stephen King novel. I thought I was on top of things before this Covid thing. I worked out. I was 60 with a lot of other physical ailments, but still had some irrational idea I could still kick someone’s ass if I had too! Now, in my small hospital room, I was just an old man…. Nothing like some chipper nurse coming in and yanking at all the wires stuck to my chest hairy Irish chest.
Then there is hygiene, if you haven’t had a shower or shaved for a week, well… you haven’t shaved or showered for a week. This made me feel so bad for people who are bedridden for months at a time. It took something more from my dignity. It also added to the fear. I had lost control of that aspect of living, cleaning myself.
My one solace was television. I would surf through channels, a tennis match here, a “Gunsmoke” episode there. There were a lot of specials about the movie “Field of Dreams.” At that time it was the 20th anniversary of the original movie. There is a line in the movie where a very young Ray Leota is running into the outfield, alone, and he turns back to Kevin Costner and asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kostner shouts back “No, it’s Iowa!” Yes… my line here is “No, it’s the hospital and I am becoming very afraid there is not going to be a Heaven!” I had thought dying was supposed to be some beautiful or peaceful thing… It’s not. It's frightening and lonely. More lonely than I ever thought I could be (and I have been lonely in my time, as have we all). Maybe death is only sweet when it is sudden. Dying in your sleep must be terrifying.
An episode of “Gunsmoke” had some cowboy guy lying on this bed/cot type thing in a cabin. There is a woman with him and she was lying to this guy about how everything was going to be alright, and how she loved him. He was sweating, slightly delusional, and very scared. And he was dying. Somehow a dream slipped into my consciousness and I found myself waking up, caught for a moment in a world where I was sweating on a cot in a cabin out on the prairie. But there were wires all over me and my sweat had absolutely soaked the sheets on the hospital bed. As I moved, wires tore at my chest hair again, even though my chest is dripping with sweat (they stick to your hairs but not the skin), and I had to go to the bathroom, and in my situation, that is not easy. When I was a kid, I would call it TV’s coming of age. Matt Dillon, James West, Gilligan and the Skipper too. Why is it that on TV and in most movies, no one ever has to go to the bathroom? Think of Han Solo firing up the Millennium Falcon, and turning to Princess Lia and telling her to go to the bathroom now, whether she feels like she has to or not, because once he is at Light Speed he’s not going to be pulling over. Well, the hospital is not television and going to the bathroom becomes very serious. I won’t go into detail but they bring this thing in, that has a hole in the seat, and wheel it next to your bed. Then they put this blanket thing down into the hole. They help you out of bed, wires and all, and sit you on the seat. They leave the room expecting you to do your business in this blanket all the while, you know they’re waiting for you right outside the door.
Sometimes I had night-terror dreams that I would only remember as “feelings.” Those were possibly worse than the dreams I actually remembered. Then there would be these distant flashes in my mind, not dreams really, just flashes. My blood/oxygen level had been very low and that had played on the use of my memory, and focus, so the dreamworld -- the nightmares, the dreams that were simply remembered as feelings, and the flashes of images that were not terrifying but terrified me -- seemed to ooze into a large pot of Munsters soup. One thing flashing in my mind was swimming. A familiar pool -- though I had never seen it, the strangers whom I somehow already knew… Then a real person from my life, a woman…who I like, maybe even had a crush on, if that still happens at my age, and did not feel any fear from, was suddenly there. I was swimming. I went underwater, as I love to do, and saw her legs kicking, and felt happy -- no, I discovered very quickly that I felt like I was drowning. Then nurse and wires. I could see tennis being played as if in the room, and hear the echoing of the player bouncing the ball. Then I see Burt Reynolds in black and white on “Gunsmoke.” Then I know I am awake. I am not drowning anymore. I suppose this realization came because I was hungry. Oh, there’s the clock -- 2:30.... PM or AM? I didn’t know. Time for meds, time to clean myself, but I’m too weak to go to the bathroom.
I have lived through events in my life that were far more terrifying, and were real, but when this was happening to me in the small hospital room over the period of 6 days, the thought that I could be dying amplified everything and made the unreal worse than the real. I had this constant, underlying feeling of having something important to do, but could not remember what it was. My taste had become weird. The first thing I remember was eating a hospital sausage. Hospital food, I had found in the past, was not all that bad -- it’s a hell of a lot better than County Jail, yes been there, done that -- but with all my previous stays at a hospital, well I thought the food was okay. That first sausage did taste like jail food. It was this odd, unpleasant taste. I found out that the hash browns and eggs tasted the same. I did not have no-taste (a symptom of Covid), it was that everything tasted the same, and everything tasted awful. Smells, I slowly discovered, were the same, it wasn't that there was no smell, it was one smell, and it was as bad as the taste.
Cake mix
At first I thought, If I survived this, I would change everything, forever. I would be kinder, more thoughtful. Love deeper and call everyone I ever knew. It did not work out exactly that way but I gained a new ability to pause and think of something kind to say to… anyone. But people in your life have had no similar experience as you have had and they go on doing what they do, it can make it hard to become as wonderful a person as Ebenizer Scrooge at the end of “A Christmas Carol.” Celebrating everyday as if it were Christmas Day is very hard to do.
Life is obviously more than a hospital room -- Ha! Just caught myself… no, it’s not. Life meanders about and ends up in a hospital room or goes directly to the morgue or the grave or whatever tradition one’s body ends up suffering through. There is life then, for me anyway, a small hospital room, with the curtains drawn and memories melding with fantasies. With dreams fading into nightmares, and where something ends with no surety of a new beginning.
My kids joke that I’m always talking about how I have had a heart attack, back surgery, have had both hips replaced, one knee replaced, and have other internal conditions like gastritis, colitis, a hiatal hernia and COPD -- oh, that’s right and these things don’t ever slow me down… well, they do but I used act like they didn’t, after this hospital stay I’m not sure I’ll be able to anymore. I’m not so good at managing medical issues. I do not follow the diet prescribed by my cardiologist. I still smoked and I still drink. Vitamines? Supplements? What are those? On top of these petty physical ailments, I am divorced for the 5th time and have lost three houses due to circumstances that three different judges have told me were of my own making… I agree with all three of them. At this point my main goal in life (for what I have left) is to be able to always be here… in the moment, which is a hard thing to accomplish. It happens easier when you are with anyone you love. And always happens with my children.
It’s interesting, when I was young I used to hear my parents say things like “We didn’t have television at all when I was a lad,” or “we had to walk everywhere.” Now I find myself saying “we didn’t even have computers when I was a kid. No internet, none of these fancey phones you guys live with in your hand.” Snap chat, FaceBook, we had plastic toys made in Japan. We went outside to play out with friends, and we drank water out of the hose.
When Covid first hit, I saw it on the news. I was 59. Donald Trump was president and was being criticized for telling people not to panic. I thought it was just some kind of Flu and it would blow over. I thought people were making political points over it. I would talk to my brother in Ireland about it and we would be talking about how the regular flu was killing more people than this new thing. Suddenly people were wearing masks. It was slowly becoming this “thing.” Life and history bring adjustments. If you move to Alaska, you make adjustments. My Grandfather in Ireland went from seeing the first car ever to drive through the village, to cars being the main mode of transportation. He was a young man when the Wright brothers had their first powered flight. He was also alive when man landed on the moon. Adjustments.
At first I thought that this Covid thing would be very temporary and would never affect me. I would be able to say that I lived through the pandemic of 2021! Then I was beginning to think that this may be one of those permanent adjustments.
When covid first began to break in America I was not much at following the news. I had been big into the news, politics and current events for much of my life, but had lost interest some years prior. All the news was bad and cable cost too much anyway. I had settled on Netflix and would get a wee bit of news off of google when I turned on my computer. My brother Gerald and I would talk on the phone once in a while. We are both conservative, I don’t want to bring politics into this, but we kind of thought that this Covid thing was being used for political purposes, that it wasn’t as scary as everyone was making it out to be. It was on the east coast, it was in big cities, and I didn’t live in a big city and it was kind of one of those things that is just not going to affect you so you don’t worry about it. In Ireland, my brother told me that they had practically closed the country down.
A familiar pool -- though I had never seen it, the strangers whom I already knew, a real person from my life, a woman…who I like, and did not feel any fear about, swimming. I went underwater, as I love to do, and saw her legs kicking, and felt happy -- no, I discovered very quickly that I was terrified. I felt like I was drowning. Then nurse and wires. I could see tennis being played as if in the room, and hear the echoing of the player bouncing the ball. Then I see Burt Reynolds in black and white on “Gunsmoke.” I was hungry but did not want to eat. Oh, there was the clock -- 2:30.... PM or AM? I didn’t know. Time for meds, time to clean myself but I’m too weak to go to the bathroom.
I have lived through events in my life that were far more terrifying, and were real, but when this was happening to me over the period of 6 days, the thought that I could be dying amplified everything and made the unreal worse than the real. I had this constant, underlying feeling of having something important to do, but could not remember what it was. Things tasted the same, nothing smelled like it was supposed to. Rough week. And the week was not the end of it, it followed me home, followed me around for a long time. The dreams did not last as long as the physical. At first I thought I would change everything, forever. I would be kinder, more thoughtful. Love deeper and call everyone I ever knew. It did not work out exactly that way but I gained a new ability to pause and think of something kind to say to… anyone. But people in your life have had no similar experience as you have had and they go on doing what they do, it can make it hard to become as wonderful a person as Ebenizer Scrooge at the end of “A Christmas Carol.” Celebrating everyday as if it were Christmas Day isn't quite possible.
Life is obviously more than a hospital room -- Ha! Just caught myself… no, it’s not. Life meanders about and ends up in a hospital room or goes directly to the morgue or the grave or whatever tradition one’s body ends up suffering through. There is life then, for me anyway, a small hospital room, with the curtains drawn and memories melding with fantasies. With dreams fading into nightmares, and where something ends with no surety of a new beginning
4
I knew about ageism, and now know that it is a real thing. Prejudice comes to all kinds of groups of people that we sometimes never think of.. I realize that I was 60 at the time, but I was a young 60, people never believed me. I was active. I was funny and thought I was clever. At that time, and even now, I don’t “feel” like I’m over 60. I thought when people talked about ageism, they were talking about “old people.” I never thought, before my experience in my hospital room, that I was “old.” I guess at 60, one is old. I just thought “old people” meant old people, you know, 90 years old. Age is a number on a bit of paper called one’s “chart” and people who work in the hospital look at these bits of paper and then… I’m old. Most of the nurses and the doc from Back To The Future were not the pleasantest people in the world, but I never felt anything from them I would consider ageism toward me. There was a, what I would cal kid, who worked at night. He could not have been a nurse, I worked for a mobile crisis team and spent most of my time in the ER, and this kid was not a nurse. He must have been a tech. This kid worked at night and never bothered with me unless the nurse alarm went off. There were times when I pushed the nurse call button because I needed water or something. This kid would come in and start telling me
Then I would sit up by the edge of my bed, wires straining, and use a large pee container to piss. Some wire would disconnect or something and this kid would come in and see me and then tell me that I mustn't break the rules, he had to watch me pee. I told him to leave and he wouldn’t. He did not push me but made sure I laid down. Then. So I push the button and he bounces back in and I tell I need to see the nurse. I made up something about a pain and he started asking questions and I asked for the nurse again and this time I pressed the button again. Finally the nurse came in and I demanded that the kid leave the room. He worked nights for the entire time I was in the Covid unit.
Then there was this, Guardian Angel nurse. A Nightingale. She must have been in her 50s but her slim face was very long, and very pale… white. I wasn’t sure if she was just frighteningly pale or powdered her face to look like a ghost. Her hair was kind of half bleached, half blond and looked as though it had not seen a brush since Christ was a Corporal. For all I know she was a ghost, an angel. I have never gone back to the hospital to find her. She had makeup around her narrow eyes that was very heavy and dark. Almost that Gothic style. She would kind of sneak into my room and check my oxygen levels and other vitals. As my brain became clearer I realized she was coming into my room every day. Because at first I could not keep track of how many days were going by, when I became more aware, and could start counting days, I didn’t know where to start because I did not know how long I had been there. She would tell me that my nurse was on a break and that she was just helping out. I don’t remember seeing her with anyone else at all, or interacting with anyone. She came into the room alone, when the room was empty. She’d be just the kind of angel I’d get; very kind but creepy and her nurse outfit was navy blue and seemed at least a size too big for her. The way she moved about was a little creepy as well, as if she was not supposed to be there. She was always very excited when she looked at my vitals; “Oh that’s great, you’re improving tremendously!” “Does that mean I’m getting out soon?” “No, but you’re improving, which is better than not improving…” A smile. Her teeth were small and discolored. She was very kind though, and so interested in me and how I was doing.
When the word came that I would be getting transferred to a “regular” ward and, apparently doing good enough to not be in critical care. The angel came in after I got the news, no one else was in the room. She sat down and began talking to me about how long she had been working in this “Covid” unit and how many people she had seen die. She said she took an interest in me because the first night I was there, they didn’t think I was going to make it. She said she was actually the nurse in charge of nursing, and did not want to tell me because she did not want to worry me. She left when a nurse and a tech came in to get me ready to move rooms. It was the only time I saw with other people, but they did not acknowledge her. They did not seem to see her. No one recognized her presence. Kind of weird for the head of nursing.
I knew it wasn’t over, not by a long shot. I also knew (or at least thought) that if they were taking me out of this unit… I was going to be okay.
Of course I was not okay. I spent a couple of days in a regular hospital room and was allowed to go home, with oxygen and a finger blood-oxygen-level reader. When I was going home I felt that I may have been dealt one of those “I’ll never be the same” kind of blows. But, I was alive and I was able to go back to the miserable little duplex. My daughter was now living there as well. It was to take several weeks before I could go back to work. The whole thing was financially devastating. I had been unable to pay rent for 2 months. Ever so slowly I began to feel kind of okay again. It’s been 4 months and my taste and smell still aren’t right, but I am alive.
1
“Gallagher?”
“Yes, Michael Gallagher…”
“Your Covid test came back positive.”
“Fuck!” I said it out loud, but apologized right away. Not sure what that means… I guess it’s just part of the story. Days later, in a hospital bed, I saw a doctor. He looked like something out of “Back to the Future,” in protective gear, gloves and a plastic shield over the mask on his face. I asked him “I’m going to be okay, right? I mean this is going to go away?” His answer did not fill me with hope.
“We’re doing all we can…”
There was something that used to happen to me when I was very young, maybe 4 or 5 years old, that used to terrify me. It was a feeling I would have when I went to bed sometimes. The circumstances of it are not quite there, in my mind, of when these feelings occurred or how often. There were times when I remember the room kind of growing, becoming massive, or me just becoming tiny, I’m not sure which. I remember my fingers would then become huge. I remember a kind of ringing, or whining in my ears. My most vivid memory of it was when my family was visiting Ireland (we eventually moved there), I was four, and I was in the “back bedroom,” which had been added on to the ancient cottage of my maternal Grandfather, many years before. I remember the cream colored wallpaper with vertical lines of tiny pink flowers strung together, it was cold and the room began to get bigger. I felt like I was shrinking away. When I think of that feeling now, after having experimented (well, more than experimented) with many legal and illegal drugs, it’s like I was on something. In retrospect, I think my Mother or Father may have given me a drug. It couldn’t have been a kid drug like cough mixture, it was all too weird. It was almost out-of-body, and it was right when I went to bed, that’s why I think one or both of my parents were slipping me a mickey. They probably just wanted me to go to sleep. My Father was a pharmaceutical salesman, then a regional manager, of a pharmaceutical company. He always had access to all kinds of prescription drugs. My uncle Tommy, my Mother’s brother, once accused my Father of getting my Mother hooked on some kind of prescription drugs. My Uncle Tommy was a weird guy. I used to like him, then I didn’t. He was one of those alcoholics who manages to get by with his job and family and slows down as he gets older, but there was a time when I would get those 2 AM drunk calls from him. The thing about uncle Tommy is that he was the first person that I actually knew, who died of Covid.
I remember the feeling though, going to sleep, four years old, it was scary and it felt like I was in a dark place. A wicked place. I also remember not being able to get out of bed or walk around, a super kind of paranoia would engulf me… That’s pretty wild for a kid who is not old enough to understand what paranoia is.
I really don’t think those feelings were dreams, but they should have been nightmares. Nightmarish reality, scared of the dark. Keep the lights on. I’m too scared to go to sleep. Then, when I was so much older, I was in a hospital room, and I was scared of the dark again. For the first time in 50 some-odd years I had that weird feeling, just like when I was four in that “back bedroom.” It slowly began to creep into my reality. From out of nowhere, I was getting smaller, the room was getting bigger, and it was just as scary.
I kept finding myself at a house, it was a small house. The first time I remember it, it was on some grounds, maybe a playground. I was standing outside. It wasn’t a house I had seen before, but I had the feeling I lived there. There was something familiar about it. I walked down a small hill to another small house in the same park. It was as if both places were part of the same rental. Somehow I knew they were rentals. This other apartment, or house, was very open. It was like one of those indoor/outdoor restaurants in Maui, but furnished like a living room. There were several strange looking items stacked against the wall next to a very old, lemon green couch. I could tell that they were musical instruments, and they were all made of wood. The neighbors were there. They had just moved in. They were having a party and everyone looked like hippies, right out of the 60s. I picked up one of the stringed instruments and began picking at it. I was able to play it somewhat. The hippy neighbor-people, 15 or 20, were all roaming around inside and outside, but none of them were talking to me. There was something not right about these people. I couldn't really figure out what. Someone had asked me to stay for the party but I didn’t remember who it was. I was panicking a little, wanting to tell someone that I was there, because someone had asked me to be there, that I wasn’t just crashing the party. Then I realized I had to leave. I had to get out of there right away. Something bad was happening but I didn’t know what it was. I could feel something evil. I realized I was wearing a pair of shorts, with no shoes or socks or shirt. I was leaving, but stopped when an attractive woman, in her 30s, approached me. She was smiling. She was in a bikini with a sheer wrap around her waist. Her lips wear… lucious, reminded me of an old girlfriend. Her hips swayed just the way hips should sway when the body is being seductive. She walked right up to me, her gorgeous green eyes transfixed on me. She reached out and luxuriously grabbed a small handful of my grey chest hair, then ripped it out of my skin.
“Owch!” That was me. I wasn't in the house anymore. I saw the hand on my chest -- it was a nurse, in scrubs with a protective gown and a plastic face shield. The mask underneath the plastic shield revealed only her eyes, which reminded me of Cruella Devil. She was short and round. Her arms were quite thick and very short as well. She had just ripped a soft, round circular sticker off my chest and as I watched, she had a new, hair-ripping sticker and was replacing the old one. She connected a lead to the sticker which was connected to a monitor showing my every heartbeat and breath. I was confused just for a moment, then I knew this part with the nurse was being awake. In my small hospital room, dreams and reality had been melting into each other. I was not sure how long I had been in the hospital. My reality was like that for the next several days. Dreams, nightmares, waking up, but not realizing when I fell asleep. I dreamed about being in Ireland and kissing the Blarney Stone, that’s a big thing over there. It’s supposed to give you the gift of the gab, which basically means you get good at bullshiting people. I think I have it. I was four years old -- kissing the Blarney Stone was my first terrifying moment. The dream began as wonderful. My Dad (as he is whenever I dream about him) was young, full of life. I’m not sure if my mother or siblings were even in the dream. I was afraid of kissing the stone. My Dad was very encouraging. I loved my Dad very much. He changed when I was about 11 into a chronic alcoholic who could be terribly cruel, but I still loved him. He died sobering up when I was 22. Back in my dream, I was in the awkward position of leaning backwards and viewing the drop when one kisses the stone. The stone is in a very awkward place in the wall at the top of Blarney castle. I remember an older guy wearing one of those Irish caps holding me as I leaned backwards and held on to some bars that were clearly not meant for a four year old, and in my dream I viewed the drop from that vantage point, and became petrified. Even a good dream can turn into a nightmare.
This whole “getting Covid” thing started in a very off hand manner. I did not feel very well and I found out that I had been exposed to Covid. I was working as a therapist in the detox unit of a residential, drug and alcohol treatment center. I had been working there for about 5 months. The last place I worked before that was also a residential treatment center. While I was working there, Covid broke out. It was due to lack-luster protective measures. They were allowing people to come on the unit and then would test them for Covid 2 or 3 days later. I had even spoken out about it at staff meetings. Sure enough, one girl who had been there for a couple of days, got the rapid test and was positive. Then everyone was tested. 7 clients were positive. The next day it was 12. Soon everyone tested positive, staff, clients, everyone had Covid. Everyone but me. I had been in the hospital with low blood oxygen about a year prior, trouble breathing, coughing, 103 temperature. I figured that the reason I was the only one who did not get it was because I must have already had it. So, like a moron, I did not get vaccinated, even though my children begged me to.
So back to feeling a little sick at work… My work balked at giving a rapid test, I’m not sure why, I guess they thought it was a waste of money, so I went to the Prescott Valley Urgent Care. It turned out they only had the test for Covid that takes a day or two to show results. I had the test done, a tech had touched my brain, through my nose, with a really long q-tip. I was not allowed to go back to work until I had the results. I wanted to go back to work, I couldn’t afford not to. A small problem arose the next day. I really started feeling pretty sick. The following day I called the Urgent Care, test results were back and… Welcome to the real Covid. It’s not like that was the end of the world, but I was 60, I had had a heart attack, and had COPD. Maybe getting closer to the edge of the world. By the end of that day I felt like I was going to die, and if my son had not insisted on me going to the hospital a few days later, I might have.
I remember I had been sitting in front of the small little 2 bedroom duplex that my son and I had been living in for the last 2 years in Prescott Valley Arizona. I was on a white plastic chair and was watching the brown muddy ground turning red and then blue. I was having a lot of trouble breathing. For several days I had laid on the couch, feeling horrible. Coughing, having trouble breathing. I just didn’t want to go to the hospital. I thought that would be giving in. I would try to watch movies on television and fall asleep. Then I would wake up in the middle of the night and the movie would be long gone, and I would be coughing again and gasping for air.
A Paramedic kind of shouted “Mr. Gallagher?” I looked way up, he wasn’t a small man and he was standing right in front of my chair. I squinted at him. From what I could see through the flashing lights was a square jaw and a look that was rather nonchalant, as if I was wasting his time.The lights from the fire truck were blinding me. “Your vitals are all good. Blood oxygen is 92, that’s not bad… Now, we can take you to the emergency room, just to have them check you out... Do you want to do that?” I looked over at my son. He was standing across from me. His face flashing blue and red. He was concerned. This was not usual for him. I’m usually good at hiding things like feeling like I'm going to die. .
“Dad… Go to the hospital…”
I looked back at the Paramedic, “You mean I’m fine? I’m okay?”
“Go to the hospital!”
I remember I had told my son that it just might happen, that I may call 911 that day. My son had been wanting me to go to the hospital. My son and I had been living together (a lot like the Odd Couple) since forever, even after my daughters had left. He has a hard time fitting in, he is very smart, maybe too much for his own good. He does have a good heart. I had been tested positive for Covid some days prior to that. All of my kids were worried, even though I, for some crazy reason, have been flawed by having some feeling of invincibility -- I think it was because I never wanted my kids to worry about me -- through anything medical, like after I had a heart attack, I was always telling them, “Daddy’s fine, everything is okay, I’m Dad, it’s just a heart attack...” I guess I said it so much that I began to believe it myself. I thought that I lived by sheer will and I would only die if I allowed the Grim Reaper into my room, I mean he’d have to ask first.
It was just so hard to breathe. I was thinking that this Paramedic guy thought I was okay, why go to the hospital? To lay there for hours until some doctor told me I was okay, go home, get some rest, take an Ibuprofen?
“Dad…” It wasn’t that Shea was irritated at me, or stern with his Father, the thing that made me get on the gurney was that I could hear it, in his voice, forceful as he was trying to be… He was scared. They put me in the back of the ambulance and off we went.
The hospital in Prescott Valley was less than five minutes from our crummy duplex. When we got there, I did not go in the ambulance door. They brought me into the main entrance of the ER and told me to get off the gurney and have a seat. There was a small section, a mini room made of glass or plastic, and us Covid people went in there. I felt like I was on display. There was only one other person in there, a young woman. I had this feeling she was afraid of me. I was coughing a lot. I wasn’t afraid of her. I wasn’t really thinking about anything in that see-through Covid room in the ER except air. I just needed to breathe air. The more I coughed, the harder it was to breathe. I was in that room for possibly a half an hour, which felt like two hours. Weakness… My mind was foggy. I was kind of fading. My thinking was, should I just lay down on the floor, or wait, pass out, and fall on the floor? A nurse or tech or something came out to do my vitals. I told her I was unable to sit anymore, “I can’t sit up right, I’m going to have to lay on the floor.” I wasn’t kidding, and I don’t think she was the most intuitive person on the planet, but she knew I was not kidding.
The next thing was that I got out of the plastic, Covid bubble and was wheeled into the back. Now, I know the ER in Prescott Valley very well. I worked at the ER a lot when I was working for a mobile crisis unit, we therapists or counselors, responded to threats of suicide and a lot of the time they would be in the ER. Probably because no one knew where to take someone like that. On top of that I have had to check myself into the ER many times because of chest pain, which is what you do when you have already had a heart attack. So, in all that experience, I had never seen the room they put me in. I don’t know where it was on the unit. Regardless of what room I was in, I got into a coughing jag from hell. My legs were kicking. I was coughing and coughing, violently. I was gasping between coughs for oxygen that wasn’t getting inside me. I could not stop coughing and I could not breathe. There was one guy trying to stick me in the arm for a drip line, and another guy trying to stick leads onto stickers that had been placed on my chest (you know, the ones that nurses rip out). I could see people looking through the window in the door to the room. It was like they were spectators to some diabolical play. I felt like I was going to die. Not being able to breathe can have that effect. Things were getting more and more fuzzy.
The guy tried several times to put a line in me and couldn’t do it. It hurt, but the sticking of a needle into my arm was the least of my worries. Finally a female nurse came in and got it right away. They were giving me medication, I don’t know what, but I think it began helping and then they put a big oxygen mask on my face. It reminded me of the respirators we used to use when I was working in pest control. Someone said they had to take me to the Prescott Hospital because they did not have enough “Covid” beds in Prescott Valley. I don’t remember who said it, I just remember hearing it. Next thing they wheeled me out and put me in an ambulance again. By this time I do remember that dawn was just beginning to filter into the night sky.
2
As I said before, I had laid on the couch, feeling horrible for several days before I went to the hospital. During my “couch” days I spent quite a bit of time thinking about Ireland. That feeling of wanting to go back.-- what if I die and don’t ever get to go back? I had lived there when I was young, my Mother and Father weren from there. I had experienced all of those “things” there, like my first kiss, when I began to shave… I met the love of my life there… it didn’t last, but I had been thinking, before I got sick, that I wanted to move back there, to Ireland. Maybe not a good idea for someone who hasn’t even been in the country for over thirty years. Now, Ireland laced my dreams as well as many scary, evil things, as if my nightmares were fighting my dreams for control of my soul.
We went to Ireland -- for us kids in the family -- for the first time when I was four, in 1965. At that time we lived in Canoga Park in Southern California near Los Angeles. I remember when we flew to Ireland I did not realize I was on a plane until we arrived because we had to go down steps from the airplane when we landed in Shannon Airport. For the other fights we would be in the airport, we would wait in a big waiting area, then walk down a hallway (the jetway), and get to another smaller room with lots of seats (the plane), and then after probably sleeping for half the fight we would walk up another hallway and be in the airport again. When we walked down the jetway to board the plane I never realized we were leaving the airport. Okay, I was only four years old, what do you expect? I remember how fresh the air was when we got to Ireland, how cold it was during summertime, and seeing lots and lots of green..
For that trip we stayed in Ireland for three months on my maternal Grandfather’s small little farm situated on a hill about two or three miles from the small village of Foxford, in the County Mayo in the west of Ireland. I remember the cows, and feeding the chickens. For whatever reason, I remember taking baths in the kitchen sink, a big one. It was Auntie Kay who would wash me, not my Mother. I remember my Grandfather, William Doherty. He was a little scary, a big guy, he was bent over from pain in his back and could not straighten up, he walked with what they called a “stoop” in Ireland. He smoked a pipe. He was like a perfect old Irish character in a movie. My Auntie Kay was my Mother's sister. Two sisters could not be more different. Kay was full of love and kindness. My Mother did not hug or kiss, she scolded, and that’s about all I can recall her doing. I'm probably wrong about that, she may have had a warm and tender side, I just cannot remember it. I remember Kay would make a large pan of apple tart, and she would give us kids some of the dough so we could make our own little apple tarts. I remember the village of Foxford. I did not know I would live there in the future. It is where my Mother grew up, and where my Grandfather had lived his whole life, and probably his father before him. A little village surrounded by beautiful, green, wild countryside.
I remember us driving on the very narrow country roads back then (this was 1965) to a town called Castlebar. The journey was so long and tedious that I actually thought we had left Ireland and gone somewhere else. I guess I thought we went back to America. I remember being on Broage (that is a gaelic name and is probably not spelled right), which is the name of the rocky top of the hill we lived on with a commanding view of Foxford, and it used to have a massive cross on the top of it. My Grandfather's farm was along the dirt road that leads up to Broage. I do not know if the cross is still there or not. It was there for a long time.We went to the farm my Father grew up on. My uncle Packey-John lived there with his wife, who’s name I cannot recall, and my paternal Grandfather, Andrew, lived in a separate house down the road. Packey-John had a lot of kids. I remember sisters Durvala and Urvala, or Noola or something, and all kinds of very Irish looking boys and girls. I cannot remember how many kids there were but we were outnumbered. I remember little Patsy. He was my counterpart, the youngest of the brood. He would pick up a rock and threaten to “fling it” at me. Scared the hell out of me… “Hey Mom, Dad, this kid wants to throw a rock at me!” “Be nice to your cousin…”
The Universe decided to throw Covid at me over a half a century later. I listened to my son. I got on the gurney and was shoved into the ambulance. The realization of how long ago it had been since I had seen those green fields, that place that would end up affecting my life forever, was heartbreaking. That loss mixes with all of a life’s worth of loss and helps to scare you even more when you’re in an ambulance, feeling like dying.
The ambulance became a hospital room. After that first night in the ER when I was being wheeled out, seeing that dawn, I was transferred to Prescott hospital (which is about 15 miles away). This time they did bring me in through the ambulance door. And this time, I stayed on the gurney. I think we got on an elevator. We went to the “Covid area.” It had a large white sheet sealed with that yellow emergency tape. They had to rip it open to let me in. I was soon to find out that there would be no visitation what-so-ever, even if I died.
Life was good, I thought, well, it was okay. It was lousy sometimes, but it was life. Because of the little hospital room, I have a far better appreciation for simply breathing. Family reached out when I was in the hospital room. A lack of oxygen had gotten bad enough that it was affecting my perception and memory. When I was beginning to understand where I was (an isolated “Covid'' wing of the hospital), becoming more cognisant, I did not have my phone with me, but my kids were calling, Andrea, my sister, was calling to see if I was alive, (my kids told me later that they were pretty sure I was going to die and were preparing for that eventuality, as did Andrea). At first I was told of the calls by a nurse, then they began to bring this phone with a very long cord into my room and I could actually speak to people. My brother Gerald lives in Ireland, and we talked more in 6 days than we had talked in 6 months. I have not spoken with my other brother in about twenty years and the possibility of me dying had no effect on him. Catherine, my sister, who is physically and mentally challenged, and who is twelve years younger than I am, was on a call with Andrea at some point. Andrea, whom I consider my best friend, just had her own battle, and it was with Cancer. She has told me since that when she talked to me I was asking about her house in Malibu. Of course, she has never lived in a house in Malibu. Nurses would come and introduce themselves. Looking back, those were 12 hour shifts. For the first, probably 2 or 3 days I had the same nurse, from what I remember she would have been the day nurse, because she would help me order lunch or dinner. . “I’m Doctor…” I will never be able to remember his name. This was the “we’re doing everything we can” guy. I’m terrible with names and always have been. Even as a young man. Faces, I'm good at... names, forget it. With the mask and the shield, all I could see were his eyes. There was something about his eyes, was it pity? I could see that his forehead was glistening with sweat. His voice was weird. It was a soft voice with a tremble in it. The kind of tone one might use with someone very old, like the tone you might use giving condolences at a funeral. I didn’t like the tone. He was also hesitant. I thought, God, it must be hot in there, I mean inside the shield and the mask and all his gear. He asked me how I was doing and I probably said something sarcastic like, how do I look? He was explaining something, but not something like we’re going to do this, or we’re going to do that. It was more like, “you’re breathing has improved and we’ll have to just continue to monitor…” It sounded to me like there was no game plan.
Imagine a British frigate during the war with Spain and the wind suddenly stopping. The wind coming out of it’s sails. Imagine the fright in their minds as they came to a complete stop, dead in the water, with Spanish ships coming up fast. We’re doing everything we can? I was very ill, I mean this was about the sickest I had ever remembered being. I was 60 and became very afraid.
3
It occurred to me that no one survives. Certainly, no one survives death, and although that may seem like an obvious conclusion it isn’t that obvious to someone who survives something. One could say they survived a car crash or a plane crash. But one does not “survive.” Even if one wins one of these battles, they -- we -- are all going to die anyway… Maybe just not this time. If anything, this discussion only serves to remind me that I will be dying at some point in the most fininte of terms.
What about these people who survive catastrophes? If you are old enough, you have seen people win countless battles and then, of course, die anyway. The older one gets, the more of life they see, which includes death. Seeing life is also seeing death, because we are all running -- chasing -- pursuing, with a vengeance… death. That’s what’s strange. We are all chasing our own demise. We are pursuing death to get to the “end” as fast as we can because 1st place wins
Myself, having possibly just won some small battle of my own, now reconsider everything. No, I didn’t die, but I will. Let’s make the best of it. I got a close-up of that picture of “dying,” and I did not like looking at that picture one bit. Here I am, being as old as I am, and having lived, with life events won, and lost, and… what-ever-the fuck -- I saw this picture for the first time, and guess what? This is a race I want to lose.
In my hospital room, it was so hard to keep track of time. I cared, but I didn’t care. Time just goes, it’s got great batteries. Doesn’t stop for a second. There was a clock on the wall, but when I did look at it, I would forget what time it had been the last time I had looked at it. Sometimes I forgot the clock was there. The curtains on the large window were always drawn and I was in and out of sleeping a lot and it was difficult to discern that line between sleeping and not sleeping, dreaming and being awake. I would feel more aware at times, realize I was awake, but not be sure how long I had been awake for. Or if it were day or night. Dreams become a huge part of life when you think you could actually be dying, and the reality is I was in a room that scared me sometimes, like some weird hotel room in a Stephen King novel. I thought I was on top of things before this Covid thing. I worked out. I was 60 with a lot of other physical ailments, but still had some irrational idea I could still kick someone’s ass if I had too! Now, in my small hospital room, I was just an old man…. Nothing like some chipper nurse coming in and yanking at all the wires stuck to my chest hairy Irish chest.
Then there is hygiene, if you haven’t had a shower or shaved for a week, well… you haven’t shaved or showered for a week. This made me feel so bad for people who are bedridden for months at a time. It took something more from my dignity. It also added to the fear. I had lost control of that aspect of living, cleaning myself.
My one solace was television. I would surf through channels, a tennis match here, a “Gunsmoke” episode there. There were a lot of specials about the movie “Field of Dreams.” At that time it was the 20th anniversary of the original movie. There is a line in the movie where a very young Ray Leota is running into the outfield, alone, and he turns back to Kevin Costner and asks “Is this Heaven?” and Kostner shouts back “No, it’s Iowa!” Yes… my line here is “No, it’s the hospital and I am becoming very afraid there is not going to be a Heaven!” I had thought dying was supposed to be some beautiful or peaceful thing… It’s not. It's frightening and lonely. More lonely than I ever thought I could be (and I have been lonely in my time, as have we all). Maybe death is only sweet when it is sudden. Dying in your sleep must be terrifying.
An episode of “Gunsmoke” had some cowboy guy lying on this bed/cot type thing in a cabin. There is a woman with him and she was lying to this guy about how everything was going to be alright, and how she loved him. He was sweating, slightly delusional, and very scared. And he was dying. Somehow a dream slipped into my consciousness and I found myself waking up, caught for a moment in a world where I was sweating on a cot in a cabin out on the prairie. But there were wires all over me and my sweat had absolutely soaked the sheets on the hospital bed. As I moved, wires tore at my chest hair again, even though my chest is dripping with sweat (they stick to your hairs but not the skin), and I had to go to the bathroom, and in my situation, that is not easy. When I was a kid, I would call it TV’s coming of age. Matt Dillon, James West, Gilligan and the Skipper too. Why is it that on TV and in most movies, no one ever has to go to the bathroom? Think of Han Solo firing up the Millennium Falcon, and turning to Princess Lia and telling her to go to the bathroom now, whether she feels like she has to or not, because once he is at Light Speed he’s not going to be pulling over. Well, the hospital is not television and going to the bathroom becomes very serious. I won’t go into detail but they bring this thing in, that has a hole in the seat, and wheel it next to your bed. Then they put this blanket thing down into the hole. They help you out of bed, wires and all, and sit you on the seat. They leave the room expecting you to do your business in this blanket all the while, you know they’re waiting for you right outside the door.
Sometimes I had night-terror dreams that I would only remember as “feelings.” Those were possibly worse than the dreams I actually remembered. Then there would be these distant flashes in my mind, not dreams really, just flashes. My blood/oxygen level had been very low and that had played on the use of my memory, and focus, so the dreamworld -- the nightmares, the dreams that were simply remembered as feelings, and the flashes of images that were not terrifying but terrified me -- seemed to ooze into a large pot of Munsters soup. One thing flashing in my mind was swimming. A familiar pool -- though I had never seen it, the strangers whom I somehow already knew… Then a real person from my life, a woman…who I like, maybe even had a crush on, if that still happens at my age, and did not feel any fear from, was suddenly there. I was swimming. I went underwater, as I love to do, and saw her legs kicking, and felt happy -- no, I discovered very quickly that I felt like I was drowning. Then nurse and wires. I could see tennis being played as if in the room, and hear the echoing of the player bouncing the ball. Then I see Burt Reynolds in black and white on “Gunsmoke.” Then I know I am awake. I am not drowning anymore. I suppose this realization came because I was hungry. Oh, there’s the clock -- 2:30.... PM or AM? I didn’t know. Time for meds, time to clean myself, but I’m too weak to go to the bathroom.
I have lived through events in my life that were far more terrifying, and were real, but when this was happening to me in the small hospital room over the period of 6 days, the thought that I could be dying amplified everything and made the unreal worse than the real. I had this constant, underlying feeling of having something important to do, but could not remember what it was. My taste had become weird. The first thing I remember was eating a hospital sausage. Hospital food, I had found in the past, was not all that bad -- it’s a hell of a lot better than County Jail, yes been there, done that -- but with all my previous stays at a hospital, well I thought the food was okay. That first sausage did taste like jail food. It was this odd, unpleasant taste. I found out that the hash browns and eggs tasted the same. I did not have no-taste (a symptom of Covid), it was that everything tasted the same, and everything tasted awful. Smells, I slowly discovered, were the same, it wasn't that there was no smell, it was one smell, and it was as bad as the taste.
Cake mix
At first I thought, If I survived this, I would change everything, forever. I would be kinder, more thoughtful. Love deeper and call everyone I ever knew. It did not work out exactly that way but I gained a new ability to pause and think of something kind to say to… anyone. But people in your life have had no similar experience as you have had and they go on doing what they do, it can make it hard to become as wonderful a person as Ebenizer Scrooge at the end of “A Christmas Carol.” Celebrating everyday as if it were Christmas Day is very hard to do.
Life is obviously more than a hospital room -- Ha! Just caught myself… no, it’s not. Life meanders about and ends up in a hospital room or goes directly to the morgue or the grave or whatever tradition one’s body ends up suffering through. There is life then, for me anyway, a small hospital room, with the curtains drawn and memories melding with fantasies. With dreams fading into nightmares, and where something ends with no surety of a new beginning.
My kids joke that I’m always talking about how I have had a heart attack, back surgery, have had both hips replaced, one knee replaced, and have other internal conditions like gastritis, colitis, a hiatal hernia and COPD -- oh, that’s right and these things don’t ever slow me down… well, they do but I used act like they didn’t, after this hospital stay I’m not sure I’ll be able to anymore. I’m not so good at managing medical issues. I do not follow the diet prescribed by my cardiologist. I still smoked and I still drink. Vitamines? Supplements? What are those? On top of these petty physical ailments, I am divorced for the 5th time and have lost three houses due to circumstances that three different judges have told me were of my own making… I agree with all three of them. At this point my main goal in life (for what I have left) is to be able to always be here… in the moment, which is a hard thing to accomplish. It happens easier when you are with anyone you love. And always happens with my children.
It’s interesting, when I was young I used to hear my parents say things like “We didn’t have television at all when I was a lad,” or “we had to walk everywhere.” Now I find myself saying “we didn’t even have computers when I was a kid. No internet, none of these fancey phones you guys live with in your hand.” Snap chat, FaceBook, we had plastic toys made in Japan. We went outside to play out with friends, and we drank water out of the hose.
When Covid first hit, I saw it on the news. I was 59. Donald Trump was president and was being criticized for telling people not to panic. I thought it was just some kind of Flu and it would blow over. I thought people were making political points over it. I would talk to my brother in Ireland about it and we would be talking about how the regular flu was killing more people than this new thing. Suddenly people were wearing masks. It was slowly becoming this “thing.” Life and history bring adjustments. If you move to Alaska, you make adjustments. My Grandfather in Ireland went from seeing the first car ever to drive through the village, to cars being the main mode of transportation. He was a young man when the Wright brothers had their first powered flight. He was also alive when man landed on the moon. Adjustments.
At first I thought that this Covid thing would be very temporary and would never affect me. I would be able to say that I lived through the pandemic of 2021! Then I was beginning to think that this may be one of those permanent adjustments.
When covid first began to break in America I was not much at following the news. I had been big into the news, politics and current events for much of my life, but had lost interest some years prior. All the news was bad and cable cost too much anyway. I had settled on Netflix and would get a wee bit of news off of google when I turned on my computer. My brother Gerald and I would talk on the phone once in a while. We are both conservative, I don’t want to bring politics into this, but we kind of thought that this Covid thing was being used for political purposes, that it wasn’t as scary as everyone was making it out to be. It was on the east coast, it was in big cities, and I didn’t live in a big city and it was kind of one of those things that is just not going to affect you so you don’t worry about it. In Ireland, my brother told me that they had practically closed the country down.
A familiar pool -- though I had never seen it, the strangers whom I already knew, a real person from my life, a woman…who I like, and did not feel any fear about, swimming. I went underwater, as I love to do, and saw her legs kicking, and felt happy -- no, I discovered very quickly that I was terrified. I felt like I was drowning. Then nurse and wires. I could see tennis being played as if in the room, and hear the echoing of the player bouncing the ball. Then I see Burt Reynolds in black and white on “Gunsmoke.” I was hungry but did not want to eat. Oh, there was the clock -- 2:30.... PM or AM? I didn’t know. Time for meds, time to clean myself but I’m too weak to go to the bathroom.
I have lived through events in my life that were far more terrifying, and were real, but when this was happening to me over the period of 6 days, the thought that I could be dying amplified everything and made the unreal worse than the real. I had this constant, underlying feeling of having something important to do, but could not remember what it was. Things tasted the same, nothing smelled like it was supposed to. Rough week. And the week was not the end of it, it followed me home, followed me around for a long time. The dreams did not last as long as the physical. At first I thought I would change everything, forever. I would be kinder, more thoughtful. Love deeper and call everyone I ever knew. It did not work out exactly that way but I gained a new ability to pause and think of something kind to say to… anyone. But people in your life have had no similar experience as you have had and they go on doing what they do, it can make it hard to become as wonderful a person as Ebenizer Scrooge at the end of “A Christmas Carol.” Celebrating everyday as if it were Christmas Day isn't quite possible.
Life is obviously more than a hospital room -- Ha! Just caught myself… no, it’s not. Life meanders about and ends up in a hospital room or goes directly to the morgue or the grave or whatever tradition one’s body ends up suffering through. There is life then, for me anyway, a small hospital room, with the curtains drawn and memories melding with fantasies. With dreams fading into nightmares, and where something ends with no surety of a new beginning
4
I knew about ageism, and now know that it is a real thing. Prejudice comes to all kinds of groups of people that we sometimes never think of.. I realize that I was 60 at the time, but I was a young 60, people never believed me. I was active. I was funny and thought I was clever. At that time, and even now, I don’t “feel” like I’m over 60. I thought when people talked about ageism, they were talking about “old people.” I never thought, before my experience in my hospital room, that I was “old.” I guess at 60, one is old. I just thought “old people” meant old people, you know, 90 years old. Age is a number on a bit of paper called one’s “chart” and people who work in the hospital look at these bits of paper and then… I’m old. Most of the nurses and the doc from Back To The Future were not the pleasantest people in the world, but I never felt anything from them I would consider ageism toward me. There was a, what I would cal kid, who worked at night. He could not have been a nurse, I worked for a mobile crisis team and spent most of my time in the ER, and this kid was not a nurse. He must have been a tech. This kid worked at night and never bothered with me unless the nurse alarm went off. There were times when I pushed the nurse call button because I needed water or something. This kid would come in and start telling me
Then I would sit up by the edge of my bed, wires straining, and use a large pee container to piss. Some wire would disconnect or something and this kid would come in and see me and then tell me that I mustn't break the rules, he had to watch me pee. I told him to leave and he wouldn’t. He did not push me but made sure I laid down. Then. So I push the button and he bounces back in and I tell I need to see the nurse. I made up something about a pain and he started asking questions and I asked for the nurse again and this time I pressed the button again. Finally the nurse came in and I demanded that the kid leave the room. He worked nights for the entire time I was in the Covid unit.
Then there was this, Guardian Angel nurse. A Nightingale. She must have been in her 50s but her slim face was very long, and very pale… white. I wasn’t sure if she was just frighteningly pale or powdered her face to look like a ghost. Her hair was kind of half bleached, half blond and looked as though it had not seen a brush since Christ was a Corporal. For all I know she was a ghost, an angel. I have never gone back to the hospital to find her. She had makeup around her narrow eyes that was very heavy and dark. Almost that Gothic style. She would kind of sneak into my room and check my oxygen levels and other vitals. As my brain became clearer I realized she was coming into my room every day. Because at first I could not keep track of how many days were going by, when I became more aware, and could start counting days, I didn’t know where to start because I did not know how long I had been there. She would tell me that my nurse was on a break and that she was just helping out. I don’t remember seeing her with anyone else at all, or interacting with anyone. She came into the room alone, when the room was empty. She’d be just the kind of angel I’d get; very kind but creepy and her nurse outfit was navy blue and seemed at least a size too big for her. The way she moved about was a little creepy as well, as if she was not supposed to be there. She was always very excited when she looked at my vitals; “Oh that’s great, you’re improving tremendously!” “Does that mean I’m getting out soon?” “No, but you’re improving, which is better than not improving…” A smile. Her teeth were small and discolored. She was very kind though, and so interested in me and how I was doing.
When the word came that I would be getting transferred to a “regular” ward and, apparently doing good enough to not be in critical care. The angel came in after I got the news, no one else was in the room. She sat down and began talking to me about how long she had been working in this “Covid” unit and how many people she had seen die. She said she took an interest in me because the first night I was there, they didn’t think I was going to make it. She said she was actually the nurse in charge of nursing, and did not want to tell me because she did not want to worry me. She left when a nurse and a tech came in to get me ready to move rooms. It was the only time I saw with other people, but they did not acknowledge her. They did not seem to see her. No one recognized her presence. Kind of weird for the head of nursing.
I knew it wasn’t over, not by a long shot. I also knew (or at least thought) that if they were taking me out of this unit… I was going to be okay.
Of course I was not okay. I spent a couple of days in a regular hospital room and was allowed to go home, with oxygen and a finger blood-oxygen-level reader. When I was going home I felt that I may have been dealt one of those “I’ll never be the same” kind of blows. But, I was alive and I was able to go back to the miserable little duplex. My daughter was now living there as well. It was to take several weeks before I could go back to work. The whole thing was financially devastating. I had been unable to pay rent for 2 months. Ever so slowly I began to feel kind of okay again. It’s been 4 months and my taste and smell still aren’t right, but I am alive.
Support Michael P Gallagher
