March 30, 2020: Counterpane – A Ramble Through Vocab as a Ramification, Ending in An Unsatisfying Description -

I have a short section of bookshelf in the guest room where I keep the books that make me laugh. It is essentially a medicine cabinet*: Roz Chast, David Rakoff, Bill Bryson, Sandra Tsing Loh, Thurber. I head for it when I am wretched, and I re-read my favorites for a moment of respite from the sadness, grief, or sickness. When the virus hit (for the sake of argument, assume I am recovering from “mild-to-moderate” NCOVID-19, or “C19” the new nickname), I put Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island next to the bed, and it’s still there, more well-thumbed than ever.

(*less jumbled than the medicine cupboard from which I unearthed the rectal thermometer some entries ago!)

I didn’t get very far, but that wasn’t the point. I ran aground on a beautiful sentence, and just went back to the beginning and started again, for the familiar laughs. The beautiful sentence is: “I rose early the next day and attended to my morning hygiene in a state of small excitation because I had a big day ahead of me.” You don’t find it beautiful? It melts me. Maybe you need to read it in context.

Notes from a Small Island is Bryson’s travelogue of a farewell journey, traversing the length of southern England to Northern Scotland, before moving back to the US. He meets wondrous characters, including one Mrs. Gubbins, who rents out rooms to travelers. Mrs. Gubbins grudgingly rents him a room, and buries him under a mountain of injunctions, the last of which involves the counterpane. He agrees to everything, just to get her out of the room so he can lie down at last.

(She later hauls him to the woeful and ancient shared bathroom, in order to point accusingly at a small turd that failed to flush. He packs up and leaves. It’s a great book. If you get sick, order a copy from Powell’s, and keep them afloat. Not that sort of afloat. Maybe order a copy now – ostensibly we aren’t yet at the height of the crisis.)

Many pages and miles later, long after we’ve forgotten the whole Gubbins scene, in a complete aside to something else, Bryson discovers what a counterpane is: a bedspread! Oh! It’s a bedspread! He thought it had something to do with a window. He didn’t do the bedspread thing Mrs. Gubbins demanded because he was trying to find a “counterpane” somewhere on the window.

I bring this up because I’ve been really appreciating the quilt (maybe counterpane!) under which I sheltered for the past many days. I’ve been looking at it close up, and loving it more than ever. I bought it at a church craft sale from a woman named Betty, who said it was called “Garden Window.” It is more beautiful and far more textured than any photograph can capture. You need to touch it, and to look at it from various angles. The pattern of the quilting itself forms a picture-in-relief over the picture made by the piecing. And some of the pieces are folded, so they are a tiny bit raised on one side, somewhat like leaves lying on the “ground” of the quilt. I can’t describe it.

And that is actually where I’ve been heading this whole time - to the difficulty of describing things. I tried, at my sickest, to describe what it felt like. I tried to describe my symptoms – not the measurable ones, like my temperature (never remotely high enough to get one of the bare handful of tests that were available), but the other ones, the pain, the immense discomfort and agitation, the burning and aching sensations, the wooziness and headache, the brain-on-fire hypo-mania, the sense that every single system was running on high and might burn right out – and I couldn’t do it. I tried when I was not all that sick any more, but still wiped out, and I couldn’t do it.

How do you feel? What are your symptoms? I can’t explain it well. I have no vocabulary. How does this wine taste? There’s a hint of pomegranate, but like a really ROTTEN pomegranate Straight From the Abyss. You know? You don’t know? Best I can do, Rotten Pomegranate from the Abyss.

I cried in frustration at my inability to describe it, and at the kindly efforts of friends to rule out C19 – but your temp isn’t high enough! It must be something else. Maybe you are somatizing a lot of stress! You are acting like you are having a manic episode! Maybe your adrenals are in overdrive! (YES. Yes, I was somatizing. Yes, I felt manic, or what I have always imagined manic feels like. Yes, God, who among us isn’t suffering from overworked adrenals? Yes, yes, also a cough, but I often have a cough, also tightness but I already have an inhaler, I know. I know. I know.) Sounds like a thyroid storm. (My thyroid is long gone.) Stress can bring on terrible auto-immune diseases, and they are then chronic for the rest of your life! Sounds like MS! Thanks, really. Thanks. I have to go now, I feel terrible, bye.

I grasped all the reasons my kindly friends thought it wasn’t C19, and as it continued, I didn’t care what it was. I didn’t want to plead a case. Whatever it was, I was sick. Not in mortal peril, but very sick.

Also, I was sick in a novel way, is all I can say. I had never felt anything like it before. Indescribable.

Novel. Just like the N at the beginning of NCOVID-19. Remember the N????? Like maybe 20 days ago? Back then, there was an N at the beginning, because there are LOTS of coronaviruses out there, but this one was NEW. It was NOVEL.

So here is how it began: It was around 2 pm. I was at my desk, deep into the swing of an interesting idea. And (indescribably) something hit me, hard. WHOOOOOM. It felt like that special effect in the movies, where the walls of the room shrink and expand, shrink and expand, WAaWaWaWaaaa….. It happened, and it passed. I thought: what was THAT? I thought: Earthquake? I waited. I went back to what I had been doing. A few seconds and WHOOOOM. Do you know the sensation “Oh, rats, I’m getting sick?” It was like that little, slightly-sickening swoosh, but exponential. I thought:

That was new. That was NEW! I have not felt that before. New = novel. It was NOVEL.

Shit.

And I was sick for a couple of weeks. Never deathly ill. Never high temp. Never serious breathing tightness. SICK in a new way. I thought there was something highly English-major about using vocab to self-diagnose – it was NOVEL, aha, it must be NOVEL coronavirus-19!

Oh, the next thought after “Shit” was, “This is how it feels to have zero antibodies to something. This is war upon my body, waged by aliens. This is what it felt like to be a Native American getting the measles.” So you see how this ties in to the sweater conundrum above.