Coming Down with COVID

By Mike Araujo

During the time I’ve had this class, I got Covid-19 and it wasn’t the best, to be honest with you. Looking back at it, I was incredibly lucky and it was probably some of the worst pain I’ve dealt with in a long, long time.

I remember it was the day before class I felt so bad. I had gone to the clinic the night before and tested negative but that morning I felt sharp pains all over, especially on my forehead from the aching headache I’d developed overnight. I knew something was very wrong and I immediately went to my mom and she told me to put my mask on because my stepdad had already contracted it. We went to the hospital during my Psych class time slot and I was in terrible pain and I felt short of breath and I could barely smell due to the amount of mucus built up.

I got tested positive and I spent the rest of that week in a state of intense pain and a hazy fever dream state. I tried my best to attend classes but even getting up on time was so hard. Honestly, I don’t remember much after that Tuesday. It had gotten so bad that by the next week I felt like it was a dream.

I tried my hardest to keep my professors in the loop and how I wasn’t feeling too hot about even being awake and was given some passes to skip class which I didn’t use for some strange reason. The symptoms were literally all of them except the loss of taste, smell, and not being able to breathe.

That Tuesday felt so strange because I had literally been blasted into next week and I missed so much school content and I knew I was so screwed because I was always drowsy during class and struggling to even keep my eyes open and pay attention to the lessons.

By the end of that week, I knew I was gonna have to catch up so fast and it was incredibly daunting but I was determined to catch up even though my body wouldn’t allow it. Thankfully, the weekend of my second week with Covid things started getting better.

I had tried to catch up and it really set me back and I was doing my very best to get back on track. I sadly failed my Math class from what I know now and I hope that’s all I failed.

But Covid really screwed me over, especially since immediately as I was cleared I was back to work. I wasn’t just working normally. I was being forced to work for another day, leaving me no days to myself to do school work and setting me back even more. I couldn’t just tell them to take me off the schedule because it would’ve just ended with me being fired.