How Contracting COVID Probably Added Years to My Life
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in March 2020, I was terrified just like everyone else. There was so much misinformation, uncertainty, and fear-mongering. It also wasn’t a good sign for the country that the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, became the most recognized name and face in the United States.I didn’t even have a Primary Care Physician. I hated the smells, the sounds, the needles, the poking, the prodding, and the endless questions about my medical history and my family’s medical history. Deep down, I always thought that if something was wrong with me, I didn’t want to know and preferred to drop dead rather than deal with seeing a doctor.
My parents never took my brothers and me to the doctor unless it was for something serious. We didn’t receive annual check-ups, and I realized not experiencing those as a child definitely impacted my comfort as an adult. I became an expert at convincing myself that if I didn’t go and didn’t know, then it wasn’t real. I handled my health reactively instead of proactively and lived by the moniker “That won’t happen to me.”My family’s health history was not good. Both of my grandfathers died of massive heart attacks in their early 60s. My one grandma had her first heart bypass surgery in 1990 at age 57 after watching her husband drop dead in their bedroom a few months earlier. She struggled with heart issues until the day she died in 2019.
0 Comments