Rant #2,390: Bad Time

This coronavirus thing hit myself and my family pretty hard this weekend.

My sister and her husband have been sick off and on for weeks, and my brother in law was actually so sick for a period that he was in pretty bad shape,

He had teleconferences with his doctor, but the doctor never prescribed getting the coronavirus test, because he evidently did not have breathing problems. He had every other element and characteristic of the disease, so we will never truly know if he actually had it because he was never tested for it.

But we all thought he did have it, whether he tested positive for it or not.

Happily, after something like three weeks to a month of convalescence, he is just about back to fighting strength.

The proof in the pudding was that my sister has been battling something herself for the past few weeks. It began when her husband had whatever he had, and it just got worse, and I mean, it got really, really bad.

She also had teleconferences with her doctor, who again did not think that what she had needed to be checked out with a test.

But my sister kept on suffering, to the point that it got to the point during the past few days that she could not breath, she could not swallow without pain, and she was completely miserable.

So finally, the doctor relented--I guess you need to be virtually knocking on death's door for some doctors to prescribe the test--and lo and behold, to the surprise of no one in our family, my sister has the coronavirus.

On top- of that, she has double pneumonia, which might go hand in hand with the disease, but whatever the case, now we know that her suffering is as a direct result of having the disease.

She didn't necessarily get the disease from her husband, who again, no one knows exactly what he had because he wasn't tested. But she picked it up from somewhere, like thousands of people have, and now she is stuck with it, and will be out of commission for probably at least a month,

Personally, I do not understand her and my brother in law's doctors, who should have given each of them permission to be tested, him when he became sick and she when she became sick. They had all the symptoms, but the doctors held off.

One can say that the lack of testing kits was the reason that the doctors held off, but when each of them became sick, people were being tested left and right on Long Island, people who were not as sick as they were. Yes, when my brother in law became sick, the availability of testing kits were a problem, and since he did not exhibit breathing problems, I guess the doctor figured he might just have a bad case of the normal flu ... but now that my sister actually has the coronavirus, who is to say that he didn't have it? We might never know.

My sister is resting at home now, thank God she isn't in a bad enough state to have to be in a hospital. I have texted her several times, and she is in good spirits. She is taking something prescribed by the doctor, I presume for the double pneumonia, and she is feeling better, but still feels as if she got hit by a truck.

But knowing my sister, if she continues to have the positive outlook that she has, she will beat this thing, and beat it to a pulp. It will turn into a blip on her personal life radar, and she will move on from it.

But she has to kick it first, and I know that she will.

Up to this weekend, I knew just one person, personally, who had the disease, and this person was the friend of friends, who I have recently gotten to know through those friends. He is a smart, well-educated guy, has taken the whole thing in stride, and has fought the disease back, and is beating it as we speak.

But this weekend, I was alerted to someone from my past, who admittedly I did not know well way back when, but whose name I knew very well, who succumbed to the disease. Not only did he die from the coronavirus, but his wife did too.

This person was two years older than me, and while we weren't friends in the truest sense of the word, I knew his name and I am sure he knew mine.

So when I heard, through another person from my past, that he had passed away, it hit me pretty hard. Mix that with my sister's situation, and no, this was not a good weekend at all.

I wish that family well, but for relatively healthy people to be hit by this scourge the way that they have been ... .

I don't know what else to say, how to end that sentence.

All that I know is that we are going to kick this thing, kick this thing hard, and we are going to get our lives back.

it will take time, but we will do it. I am convinced of that.

There is nothing more to say right now, other than I wish for my sister a speedy recovery.