One full cycle of the moon since the podcast began and Kate succumbs to the dreaded rona. Sunday blurs into the days around it, as the illness colours everything.

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Transcript for the podcast Tide to the Moon

To adapt a Shakespeare quote:

All the world’s a story and

All the men and women endless tellers.

***

Welcome to episode three of Tide to the Moon, a podcast about yearning and learning to dance with the rhythms of nature, starting with allocating one day a week for rest. My name is Kate Lawrence

It is one full lunar cycle since the first episode, here I am back at the start, like a dawning day

And in realizing that, I felt called to do a little quarter by quarter lunar retrospective - four weeks, each with a highlight, a flavour, an arc, buried yet knowable with a little excavation.

Maybe there’s a pattern, a thread between them and maybe even with the moon? We are after all, sense making machines.

But that's not what this episode is about. It is about the week that's been.

***

DAY ONE: FRIDAY

My 16 year old, Ainslie, is coughing as he’s getting ready for school.

‘I think you’d better do I test’ I yell as I sit down with my morning coffee.

A few minutes later he calls back ‘Yeah there’s two lines.’

I get up and annoyingly repeat what he just said ‘There’s two lines?” and verbalise the obvious conclusion ’So you’ve got covid then?’

For once he doesn’t quip ‘Nah, it’s a mistake’ or Nah, it probably means Ive got measles’ or any number of sarcastic rejoinders my stating the obvious habit usually evokes

‘Yep I’ve got covid.’ is all he can muster.

And with that he vanishes to his room.

I sit back down. The Rona’s finally arrived.

After two years and three shots each, our house has now been admitted to the covid club.

I test negative which makes things trickier

I now I need to keep away from Ainslie, and we both need to keep away from my 23 year old son who has end stage kidney disease,

With a bit rapid google searching I make a plan

I grab anything I need from Sam’s end of the house, and head down to my study which is at Ainslie’s end.

And I then cancel a surprising number of plans and eventually get on with my usual work

It is an odd day though.

Waves of feeling dreamy and distant wash over me and I wonder,

Am I getting it? Is that it?

Then I berate myself for the capricious visions I’ve got of tiny little tip toeing covid critters creeping along my veins.

DAY TWO: SATURDAY

I wake and I feel foggy, heavy and slow. This calls for another test; yep I’m positive.

So I pick up my covid story package and tuck it in my back pocket. It contains files from two years of conversations and communications, anecdotes and government declarations, and most importantly it contains two pairs of recent case studies:

Pair No 1
My sister and her husband had covid two weeks ago. She described it as ‘symptoms like a bad cold that comes on all at once’ and otherwise ‘not too bad’

And last week a friend wrote to say ‘my symptoms were fairly mild and I only spent a day in bed’

Pair No 2

The second pair of recent case studies came from two conversations, with two women in my local community, who are both suffering from long covid - ongoing tiredness, brain fog and breathlessness, and one also has repeated bouts of significant heart palpitations.

So with the story bank full of possibilities I realise that my diagnosis actually makes things a lot easier practically , particularly for Ainslie. He and I don’t need to avoid each other anymore, we can both hang out in this end of the house. We just need to avoid sam.

That day I am fortuitously enrolled in an online writing workshop which seems perfect for a day in iso. My physical state stays much the same and the workshop does it’s job of diverting me although it is a struggle towards the end.

In the evening, finally, after what seems like a long wait, the online delivery van arrives with yesterday’s order of groceries Although by this stage I have no appetite.

We are settled in for iso.

My awareness that it will be Sunday the next day barely registers and when it does it seems almost irrelevant - I am now in a bigger, all encompassing space-time of illness and rest.

My minimal preparation is to put my computer away before I go to bed.

DAY THREE SUNDAY

I wake and feel much the same, with the addition of a very faint ache in my head.

I light a candle, my only real reminder that its Sunday and the day passes pleasantly enough.

And I go to bed thinking I’ve pretty much nailed this Covid thing. Mild dose, very few symptoms, thanks to those three doses of vaccine.

DAY FOUR MONDAY

I sleep on top of sleep and in the morning I struggle out of bed feeling like I haven’t slept at all.

My head is thumping with a dull pulse, and nothing fells me more certainty than a headache. Waves of fever wash over me, my eyes sting, my back aches and there is a slightly strange sensation in my mind.

I can’t stomach coffee but I eat some muesli hoping it will make me feel better.

I lie on the couch but the light hurts my eyes

I go back to bed and read and sleep fitfully, on and off, for most of the morning.

I get up and lay on the couch again and Ainslie makes me an egg on toast.

I go back to bed and read until I cant.

I sweat and hold my head and rock around in the bed

It’s not that bad really, but in that moment it is all I am.

I wonder if I lost the lottery or it is more personal than that,

is there’s something wrong with me and the choices I’ve made that mean I can’t just say:

It was just like a bad cold or

I was only one day in bed

I wonder, is the Covid coursing through me just getting its mojo and the worst was yet to come?

Maybe I’ll get long Covid, or some of the serious side effects,

maybe hospitalisation is in my future.

Suddenly I realise that I don't know what is going to unfold with this invader of my body.

I am at a crossing and the path forward is dark.

I feel too shitty to dwell any more on possibilities, good or bad,

I am in the bottom of burrow and all I can do is yield

and accept that my journey is mine alone and

not dependant on or even connected to those stories I carried with me down the tunnel.

I am in liminal space-time, at the place of descent,

maybe there further down to go, I don’t and can’t know.

There is only now and only one thing to do, surrender.

I sleep some more, get up and lie on the couch and dig out the panadol.

I take two and go to bed early.

I wake in the night awash in my own sweat.

and drift back to sleep.

Day FIVE

I wake headache free. I move, tentatively at first, but pretty soon there’s a slight spring in my step.

I feel alright.

Like, pretty good.

Like amazing compared to the day before.

I wonder if the two panadol are still working and the headache is gunna come back but by lunchtime that seems very unlikely.

I bustle around doing things only to be hauled back by a wave of fever or tiredness, the body guideing my recovery pace, which I’ve learned from bitter experience is well worth listening to.

But I am definitely on the mend

***

The next day I write an email to a friend and before I can even blink, I write ‘ I have caught the dreaded beast although I hope I am over the worst of it and it wasn’t that bad.’

What just happened?

I just whitewashed my own experience that was somehow important.

So I think it is the peak end rule hard at work in my memory

The peak end rule is a psychological theory which says that we tend to remember the most emotionally intense points and the end points of experiences we have.

For me while the bottom of the burrow moment was insightful, the most intense emotional moment is the morning of day five when I feel like the first flower of spring.

And the end point, the fact that the worst is over, that colours everything else before it, much like a newborn baby relegates the pain of childbirth to the back corner

Sometimes we are so quick to move on we miss the jewels on the cave floor,

the gems of insight just waiting for the light of reflection to flicker

so they can glint and guide us to deeper understanding.

***

I don’t really suppose I can say anything that hasn’t already been said by someone some where in the world about covid; we all have our experience of it, and this universality is one of the gifts and horrors of contagious diseases.

We are shown in no uncertain terms that we are all connected.

Ever since my childhood illnesses brought with them mind tricks and fever hallucinations,

illness has seemed to me to be a journey that is not just physical.

It is a portal, a decent and return.

Illness is in liminal time, a place of crossing, and

I always come back different,

humbled, not only by my body’s frailty

but by the reminder that I am not in control,

I am at the mercy of something much greater than me or any of us.

And I am grateful all over again for my health

It is this which I think the ancients knew more closely

They knew our tendency to forget that we are beholden to nature

so they built in mechanisms to regularly remind them:

ceremonies and rituals,

stories and prayers,

temples and alters.

Now, now, we must now remind ourselves and each other,

over and over and over

Of where the path is that leads to a life that sings.

Illness is a story - initiation, descent, return-,

and like all great stories we must give it resolution, we must make meaning from it

***

Just before I go, let me just put it on the record so I don't tempt fate,

l do not assume that the worst of covid is behind me.

I might be and I hope it is, but it might not be.

Thanks for listening to ‘Tide to the Moon’’.

If you like this podcast please rate and review us on itunes or wherever you listen, and tell other people about it.

And if you have any ideas, suggestions, requests, comments or feedback, I would love to hear from you.

You can find the shownotes and contact details at storyground.com.au

Theme music by Danya from Audio Jungle.

This podcast is a production of Story Ground, and me, Kate Lawrence and is made on the traditional lands of the Gunum Willam Balluk,

at the foot of Mt Macedon, 65 km north west of Melbourne, Australia.