Illustration courtesy Mirko Ilic, “AC 2020.”

Last Tuesday afternoon I decided to leave my office early in order to soak up the warmth of the sunny late spring day while walking the mile or so when home. I have been experiencing nerve pain in my legs lately, and so when I reached the pavement it was no surprise that I began dragging my legs (to minimize the pain and recoup for my wizened range of motion). However, as I limped lanugo the street, I was surprised that I involuntarily picked up speed as though my turbo chargers were all of a sudden switched on. I reminded myself of Marty Feldman’s hobbling EYEGOR (Igor) weft in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein.

What’s worse, I had lost my brakes; I couldn’t stop! I just kept going …

I began grasping signposts and looking for places to sit; anything resembling a bench, chair, fire hydrant or other sturdy construction. Usually I am used to walking for a few tree lined blocks until the pain is intolerable, then I splay out on a seat in Madison Square Park until regaining unbearable fortitude to protract the second leg (no pun intended) of my trek home. Only this time my shuffling had wilt increasingly turned-on while my whole soul surged forward, off-kilter, as though well-nigh to fall down. At various points Good Samaritan New Yorkers stopped to ask if they could help. Although short of vapor and obviously in distress, I thanked them and pushed on until falling to my knees 100 feet from my home. I was kindly helped into the elevator by the super. That’s when I believe I was engulfed by the first wave of COVID fog.

I did not have many of the viral symptoms I’ve read about—no fever, chills, sore throat—but I began to finger heaviness in my chest. Later it turned into a horrible hacking, dry cough with fever. I laid lanugo and barely had the strength to pick up the phone. I home-tested and it was well-spoken that without all the months of quarantines, social distancing, masking, vaxxes, boosters and otherwise avoidance of anything or anyone that could trigger the virus in me, I was in its grip.

But the strangest thing, whispered from the unexpected positive test, was my crazy unanticipated walking problems. When I gathered unbearable strength I sent emails to my three primary specialist doctors. The first wrote back, “I have no idea what it could be, but you should take it easy.” The second wrote, “Your constellation of symptoms in not resulting with your troublesome leg and back—maybe you should go to an emergency ward.” The third wrote and unquestionably phoned to ask me to describe everything in detail; he prescribed Paxlovid, the anti-COVID pill, and sent me a detailed list of what to do and not to do. That’s when the clock started. With the pill the virus was expected to only last for five days. What well-nigh the walking part? He didn’t know.

Illustration courtesy Mirko Ilic, “AC 2020.”

I was quarantined in a separate room in the suite on a pull-out bed and restricted to a guest bathroom. Waves of the COVID fog rolled in and enveloped my consciousness and unconsciousness. I was in a quasi-magical and mystical dimension. I could not (nor did I want to) focus on anything for long. All those Daily Heller posts I had planned to write would not come through my fingers and onto the keyboard. What I did write was filled with so much gibberish and typos it seemed that my cognitive capabilities were gone. I could not concentrate on anything for increasingly than a few minutes, other than an eerie sense that I was looking inside myself and watching my soul operate as a machine (like Fritz Kahn’s Modernist “industrial palace” visualization of the digestive and respiratory system).

But the most incredible magnitude of my particular variant (and I wonder if other sufferers have had the same experience) is that many of my daily disorders, including movement issues and insomnia, simply disappeared. It was as though my system is designed to handle only one major slipperiness at a time. The fog, while uncomfortable and unknowable, obstructed out everything I did not want to deal with, either overtly or covertly. Of course, anyone who is plane the slightest bit ill could not superintendency less well-nigh fulfilling their daily routines and one-off responsibilities. When the one responsibility you have is fighting and vibration the viral enemy and protecting (as weightier as possible) your family from transmissible it too, writing Daily Heller columns, meeting deadlines and editing other projects is not as compelling or important.

And yet it is all well-nigh timing. While I had a staycation from authorial chores, classes, panels and plane daily movement exercises, I was unable to shepherd the one event that I had happily predictable all month long: the Tribeca Mucosa Festival premiere of my son Nicolas Heller’s first narrative short film, Out of Order. Coming out of the fog just made that loss of vigilance and mobility plane increasingly painful.

We are told that the pandemic is “over.” I hope that the experts are right. But COVID is still out there, like so many other “conquered” diseases, just waiting for safeguards to stop getting in the way of our daily pleasures and resistance to be relaxed. Memo to self: Stay protected, do not politicize disease, healthcare and medicine, and remain vigilant.

Thanks to Mirko Ilic for generously permitting me to use his AC (After COVID) 2020 comic strips. They are perfect representations of exactly how I was feeling.