We’ve been fortunate in our house as we have yet to have been stricken with COVID-19, or, at least, if we have, we were asymptomatic. With the shear number of people contracting the Omicron variant of the virus, the word luck is the only thing, I think, that has kept us well.
We have been very careful in public, though, and we did opt to get the vaccine and the booster early on. We got Moderna. Whether that has helped or not is one debate, but I believe it has! I do know several people who have been vaccinated and boosted and still came down with Omicron. They have, however, had very mild “sinus cold” like symptoms.
Unfortunately there are other side effects, one might say, to this crazy pandemic. Before Christmas some of my very best, lifelong friends moved their father/father-in-law from his home in Newton to live with them in their home in Brandon. He was 92 when he died last week.
He didn’t die of COVID, he was old and his health had deteriorated very quickly in the last year. Just six months ago he was driving himself from Newton to Brandon and Newton to Meridian and enjoying life.
A fall led to other issues and he had been in the hospital at least twice after moving to Brandon. The last time he tested positive for COVID — he likely contracted it there — and was moved to the isolated COVID-19 floor of St. Dominic’s in Jackson. His son, my friend, tested positive at the same time and went home to quarantine. My friend’s wife, whom I’ve been friends with my entire life, tested negative one day and then positive the next, which put them both in quarantine and unable to go to the hospital where their loved one was in critical condition. They were both, by the way, fully vaccinated.
“I know Gramps isn’t going to make it,” my friend said to me in a text message the day she tested positive, “I just hate that he has to be alone.”
That is one of the very sad, very evil things, this pandemic has done to so many people. In its own cruel way it has forced families into isolation and kept them from being at their loved one’s side in their final moments.
And it doesn’t stop there.
My friend’s father died last Tuesday, February 8, and since his son and daughter-in-law were both COVID positive not only did they not get to be at his bedside, they also had to postpone his funeral and visitation until after they had cleared the quarantine period. The funeral is today, a full week later.
It is an extremely sad situation.
It is an extremely sad situation and it’s not an isolated one. This same scenario plays out daily in hundreds of locations all over Mississippi, the nation, and the world.
Another friend and business associate of mine, and her family, know first hand the severity of this pandemic. She contracted the original COVID early on and ended up being airlifted from her home in Charleston, Miss. to a Memphis hospital. She, too, was alone in the hospital isolated from her family. Thanks to God and the monoclonal antibodies — she credits the infusion with saving her life — she survived.
It has been a slow recovery for her and for months after she got out of the hospital she could not taste nor smell. She says it has been a rough experience from the start. Then a couple of weeks ago one of her first cousins died from the virus, and last week another of her first cousins died from COVID too.
“When you grow up with cousins, they are your playmates, your friends and some are like siblings. So heartbreaking,” she posted to social meda. Last Thursday she added in all caps, “I. HATE. COVID.”
I hate COVID too!
