…is what one of my students said to me today. She’s 6. For all intends and purposes she does not remember a time before the pandemic. It is “still COVID” despite what her Escalade driving mother says.
This is just a post to complain. One of those yelling into the void screeds you gotta get one once in a while. Feel free to skip.
I’m an elementary school teacher. I’m new to my current school building, but have been a teacher since before lockdown. I take great measures to keep myself, and by extension my family, safe from the on-going pandemic. First and foremost by masking. Everyday I come to school in what I call “business casual black bloc”, which is just typical teacher clothes but with a black hoodie and an n95/kn95 with a neck gator over it. And my long hair makes me look either like I’m going to throw a Molotov into a police precinct or fix a printer.
Allow me to tell you some more things I’ve heard this school year so far.
“Oh I get it. My sister has lupus, so I’m really careful,” is what a colleague says. She then hugs a student with a visibly runny nose and dead eyes. She hugs two more zombie children after that.
“You’ve never had it?!” the music teacher asks me as I’m washing my dry and cracked hands for the 80th time today. I guess he hasn’t realized that he has never seen my mouth or nose before.
“I just HANDISIZED!” cries a disgruntled student. I told them to go wash their hands after they wiped their nose on their palm. They turn the sink on for 0.006 seconds. They get frustrated when I tell them to try again.
“My sister-in-law is a yoga instructor and she got these for free from when we were all still, you know, crazy about COVID,” is what the office secretary says as she hands me a box of Lululemon designer masks. I will never wear them. The cloth is all but translucent.
“My son is worried he’s doing something wrong,” a parent says to me. Their son asked about my mask. I told him I don’t want to get sick. The parents says their son is now worried they’ll get sick. You can see how this is my fault.
“Do you have a duffle bag?” the resource officer asks me, accusingly, in front of my class. A parent called to say a shifty looking man with a duffle bag and a mask came in the side door this morning. I have a duffle bag by my desk. It’s full of more masks.
“Haha I guess I still have a little brain fog that gets me sometimes,” an instructional assistant says. I have flashbacks to ten years ago, when my depression induced brain fog was so bad I didn’t leave my apartment for nearly a month.
“GRHSAAHHACK,” a student sneezes directly onto my water bottle.
“I could get a mask if you want,” another teacher says in the doorway of the secluded supply room where I eat my lunch. I tell them it’s fine as I feel peanut butter stick to the inside of my kn95 I hastily slapped on my face. It was a newer one too.
“No no! It’s just that, you know, we figured with your newborn you’d probably not be able to come,” says a colleague about the grade level team’s monthly outing to Applebees. Don’t worry, I don’t feel left out. In fact, thank you for not inviting me. I am morally opposed to Applebees.
22F here. My mother is a nurse who worked on a PACU unit that shut down and turned into a covid unit in 2020. I drove 9 hours home from school (I was a freshman in college & had just turned 19) in the middle of the night to go be with her right before the state/nationwide lockdown was in effect because while there was no way to diagnose it yet, I knew she had it. At this point she was 49, she was so sick & so little was known about it…. I was worried she was going to die. Thank goodness, she was okay. I immediately got it though, and so did everyone else in my family. “Worth it,” I thought to myself. I’d rather contract this disease from my mother and be with her in the event that either of us passes away from it as opposed to quarantine and risk not saying goodbye to her. She continued to work on the Covid unit, and slowly her opinion began to change… she was no longer scared of it, and actually thought of it as harmless. April of 2020, she’s permitted my younger brother who just got his license to go see his friends & his girlfriend if he wants. I’m shocked, baffled, and disappointed. She takes us to go see my grandparents & starts regularly pressuring me to get out of the house. I remember feeling so confused as to why she’s feeling this way until she starts to tell me that as a frontline worker, she’s more scared of covid when she comes home and watches the news than she is when she’s at work. She starts to pour alt-right propaganda into my brain about covid while I’m trapped at my parents’ house (who are both healthcare workers, both telling me the same thing. She’s certainly the main propagator of this narrative though), and she backs it up by telling me she, “works with it every day!! it’s not that bad!! It’s all overhyped.” She and my father then both start pumping anti vaxx narratives into my mind when the covid vaccine comes out, and being that they are both healthcare providers, while this is all so confusing to me, I’m inclined to trust them…. My mom’s a covid nurse… my dad, an ER doctor…. They’re so well versed on these topics, right? I can trust what they’re telling me, right …??? I get covid again at the very beginning of 2021. Thankfully, the first and second time I had it, I experienced no major, long term impacts. Finally I’m out of the house at a new school by the end of 2021, and despite how scared I now am of the covid vaccine, thank fucking god i get the first and second shot. My mother is extremely disapproving of this decision & tells me I’ve probably been sterilized. October of 2022, I have not gotten a covid booster because she’s put the fear of God in me at this point (I’m not religious btw. I just use phrases like this for the embellished effect). My new boyfriend encourages me to wear a mask & get a booster shot, desperately trying to educate me on the long term risks. I half-ass wearing a mask; I’m still so uncertain about all of this.
Then, I get covid a third time.
& it’s one of the most devastating things that’s ever happened to me.
[TW: TMI, medical information]
I don’t remember much of it; the brain fog is earth shattering and immense. I do, however, remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe or catch my breath though. I remember my lungs spasming & coughing so hard that I’d start vomiting mucus for days on end. I remember texting my mom at 1am, telling her I think I needed to go to the hospital, and her telling me doing that would kill me just like it did my aunt (for context, my aunt passed away from covid; she was hospitalized, intubated, and never extubated unfortunately. She fell victim to my mother’s anti-vaxx narrative. The weekend of her funeral, my mother talked about how covid was a hoax in front of my aunt’s widowed spouse/her own brother. She then posted more anti-vaxx content on facebook later that week. How terribly sad and inappropriate!!). I’m honestly not sure if I’ve been right since I’ve had covid. It’s hard to say, there have been a lot of life stressors since. I learned a very hard lesson from all of this though; I now mask diligently every single day without fail. I have 4 vaccines under my belt thank goodness. I’m still working on not trusting my mother’s medical advice. She’s my mom…. She’s a nurse…. It’s devastating to think she really is so far right that she can’t even provide proficient care as a healthcare worker because her viewpoint is so heavily influenced by facebook. It’s hard for me to come to grips with. I don’t really know why I’m writing all of this. I guess just to relate to you and to tell everyone to PLEASE DEAR GOD, FOR YOUR OWN SAKE AND EVERYONE ELSE’S, WEAR A MASK. IF YOU’VE READ NOTHING I’VE WRITTEN AT THIS POINT, PLEASE WEAR A MASK!!!
Covid’s rocked my world. The brain fog I experienced the third time around lasted for months. Sometimes I wonder if I still have it. I don’t know. Wear a mask everybody. Thank you to my amazing boyfriend for educating me on the dangers of COVID-19
This is just a stream-of-conscious post, sorry it’s all over the place. Like I said, other life stressors going on right now that have me feeling very tired/mentally drained. I just wanted to share. Thank you everybody for reading
Please don’t apologize. So many others have experiences like yours, and they all matter. I can completely empathize with the disappointment towards family members who are also healthcare workers themselves. I have several who quickly tossed their masks out in favor of “not letting the virus control their lives.”
These same people will wonder why they rarely see my children despite living a short distance away. They didn’t invite us to thanksgiving this year. Not that we would have gone, but not even a mention. They know we’ll say we’re not going to come over. And rather than being accommodating by hosting something outside during the day or at least video chatting a bit during dinner, they simply do not want to deal with it. It’s heartbreaking to me sometimes. To know that members of my own family would rather not be inconvenienced so more that they would pretend we didn’t exist.