Leaving Nashvegas last week, I boarded an airplane with a sore throat, a runny nose and a sense of doom I’ve never experienced at the start of an undiagnosed illness.

Up to that point, I had not been sick or even felt sick since November 2019, unless you count the two-day ass-kicking I took from the Moderna booster in December. So when I awoke from my air-conditioned cocoon in the Hayes Street Hotel with a raw throat, I initially attributed it to a lack of sleep, polluted city air and shredded vocal cords. Working primarily from home, I don’t talk much. I communicate plenty throughout the day via email and WhatsApp, but aside from occasional chit-chat with Erica while we work and maybe one or two phone calls, my mouth stays shut. But after landing in Nashville on a warm and sunny Monday afternoon, I soon found myself among hundreds of people at a national music conference, reconnecting with industry friends I had not seen in nearly three years, and suddenly I was talking a lot – and loudly – in crowded rooms and noisy bars.

My initial response was to sit up in my hotel bed and guzzle water, hoping a little hydration would work the razor blades out of my throat. No luck. Soon enough, after a hot wakeup shower, my nose started running – clear and thin at first, but turning colorful and thick. Then the sneezing. And coughing. Here we go. Clearly this was not from talking, nor a temporary reaction to a new environment, but something worse – hopefully, not that something. I took a quick head-to-toe inventory: no aches, no chills, no creepy-looking toes. I could taste and I could smell. Fatigue was a moot point, as I was averaging four to five hours of sleep each night at the conference and I didn’t feel any more tired than I had felt since waking up in my bed in Hudson at 4am Monday to get to the airport. I Googled “COVID vs. cold,” crosschecked my symptoms with a few trustworthy infographics and deduced, to the best of my diagnostic capabilities in the absence of a thermometer and a rapid COVID test, that I was coming down with a good old-fashioned cold. So with mask on and sanitizer at the ready, I carried on, which meant a cab ride to the airport and a flight back to Ohio via New York City, and what should have been a happy return home was now clouded with the unease of carrying whatever germs I was carrying through terminals and flying tubes until I reunited with Erica and Magnolia in Columbus. 

I flew back through Columbus because Magnolia was there competing in the state Power of the Pen writing tournament, and Erica and I had signed up to volunteer Friday afternoon. After my symptoms started in Nashville, I texted Erica and asked her to bring a thermometer and some home COVID tests just to be safe. Upon landing at John Glenn around 1pm Thursday, I got in the truck with Erica and left my mask on, as I would for the next five days. We drove straight to our hotel in Westerville and I took my temperature – no fever. Then I ripped open a test and swabbed my nostrils. As I waited the 20 anxious minutes for the result, my mind ran through the list of everyone I would have to contact, every bad decision I made boot-scootin’ through Nashville, everything I could have done to avoid this predicament. Worse than being sick is getting other people sick, and knowing you’re to blame. But my rational mind, thankfully, intervened, and reminded me that I had been ultra-careful leading up to and during the trip, masking up and maintaining my distance from the exposed and unvaccinated, and that the conference required proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test from each and every attendee before they were handed their badge. 

The 20 minutes (finally) passed, the test was negative, and Erica and I went out for a late lunch like we had planned all along. But I wasn’t out of the woods just yet. We went back to the hotel and took a nap, then I took my temperature again after waking up – 99.3 degrees. Not good. A low-grade fever, but still not good. And unfortunately, it took me out of the running for volunteering the next day – or at least I took myself out of the running. I also texted friends we were supposed to meet up with in Columbus and backed out of our evening plans. Then back to Google and confirmation, thankfully, that a fever can occasionally accompany a cold, though it was rare. With that information, I decided I would take another COVID test Friday morning but stay back at the hotel either way. Even before the fever appeared, I was engaged in a near-constant assessment of my condition: Did I really taste that last French fry? Can I take a good whiff and really smell the inside of my KN95 mask? Do my toes look funky? My findings were all positive signs that, despite the slight fever, I was not confusing a case of “the COVID” with the common cold, though I will say, after staring at my toes more intently than perhaps I ever have, that toes – be them COVID toes or ordinary toes – are fucking weird, and they only get weirder the longer you look at them. And while we’re here, let’s step back and collectively appreciate the word “sputum” which, as a blanket term for all the thick, nasty shit a cough forces out of your lungs during a cold, is beautifully grotesque and grotesquely beautiful, one of the few words in the English language that is perfectly spelled and pronounced relative to its definition. Sputum.

There was no need for an alarm clock on Friday morning, and mercifully I slept until I woke up for the first time in days. There was no cause for alarm either: No more fever and the second COVID test was negative, too. Nonetheless, we arranged for a late checkout and I left the do-not-disturb tag on the door. A mile away, Magnolia wrote and Erica volunteered, and later I watched the awards ceremony in bed via YouTube and teared up when the emcee announced Magnolia’s fifth-place finish. Even though I knew I made the right choice, there was still the slight sting of not being there in person, especially with my own Power of the Pen experiences 30 years ago being so formative to my career path. I am one grumpy bastard when I get sick, and I’ve determined that my mood is less about my condition than what my condition keeps me from doing, and all I wanted to do after getting home from Nashville was be there for my kid, be with my family and be outside in the yard over the weekend, engaging in the spring for the first meaningful stretch of time since the season finally made its reluctant appearance in Northeast Ohio. But after mowing the lawn Saturday morning I was positively spent, and I spent the rest of the day resting and feeling sorry for myself that I wasn’t outside with the rest of the sunny suburban world. 

It took a week to shake off the cold, but as everybody knows, it’s hard to put a time stamp on colds, as they tend to linger and fade away, whereas a classic flu ends on a hard stop, and in a sick way I’ve always appreciated how a down-for-the-count 24-hour flu comes and goes as advertised. Getting over a cold, meanwhile, is your body’s way of writing a bad self-help book, every day getting better than the one before, and as a healing process (or an easy-answer philosophy found on the knick-knack shelf at TJ Maxx), I have little patience for it. One positive of this global hygiene lesson is we’re no longer expected to suck it up and live our lives as if we weren’t sick. Tom Brady led the Patriots to victory in the 2004 AFC Championship game with the flu, laying a smackdown on the top-seeded Steelers after running a 103-degree fever and an IV through his arm before kickoff, and most of the free world held it up as another example of Brady’s admirable toughness. Perhaps, but now we recognize how stupid he was, too. The closest I’ve come – and it wasn’t remotely close to a high-stakes playoff football game – was cold-sweating through a three-hour DJ gig with what turned out to be the flu, equally stupid if not more so. Ditto all those years I went to work sick to prove … I don’t know, what were we all trying to prove again? Playing through the pain isn’t always a feather in your helmet, and from here on out, with a chest full of sputum, I’ll happily bench myself until I’m ready to slide back into my boots.

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