The Cough

The evening of Wednesday, February 26th marked the start of a terrible new period in my life I can only remember as The Cough. The Cough was relentless, punishing. Two weeks after it began, I scrawled in a notebook: “Just want to stop coughing…Maybe I have the virus and I’ll die.” The Cough came from a place that coughs should not come, a crevasse of the chest touching the spirit. When it got really bad, The Cough turned to dry-heaving. I would watch myself in the bathroom mirror, my taut tongue vibrating like a fish trying to leap from my mouth. Like I was possessed. The Cough made my body no longer my own—it belonged to The Cough. My throat was raw and aching. I would wake from the dead of sleep heaving violently, curled in the fetal position.

The story of The Cough really began five weeks earlier, on January 16th, when I reluctantly went to the doctor for my first physical in a while. I rarely get sick—no cold, no flu—and my only ailment that day was a seasonal flare-up of eczema, a condition that has nagged me for years. But I’m 38 years old, and I’d also begun to think more about my family’s medical history—the high blood pressure, the high blood sugar, the strokes. And so I found myself in the crowded waiting room of a small hospital in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. This was four days before the Center for Disease Control confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in the United States. But I wasn’t worried about the virus then.

Most of the patients seemed to be on Medicaid or Medicare; I sensed this because when the doctors learned I had private insurance through Lafayette College, where I teach English, they started treating me like a celebrity. “What does PPO even stand for?” I wondered aloud. My doctor, a millennial like me, had no clue. He just knew it was the best. I did blood work. I got a referral to see a dermatologist and an allergist about the itch. A few weeks later, good insurance notwithstanding, I got a bill for $500.

By then I was on a new regimen of pills and creams for the eczema, a treatment with no firm end date, which planted a new anxiety. I could never afford the pills and creams without good insurance, and so I would have to keep my job indefinitely. Lafayette was my first tenure-track position, but academia still felt like a precarious place to me—I’d spent the previous five years adjuncting, once teaching four classes at three schools in two states. Despite my newfound stability, I still had my anxieties, like everyone else. I had medical bills to pay. Blood work to get back. A virus was in the air. When I finally got my prescription filled, on February 10th, I left the drug store feeling overwhelmed. To regain a sense of control, or the illusion of it, I started keeping a journal. I tracked the weather, my diet, my moods, the itch. And the meds did their thing. In my first entry, on the evening of February 11th, I wrote: “feel good, usually would be itchy somewhere around this time.”

I soon found there was something soothing about keeping a record of, say, what was on the veggie burger I had for lunch, or the exact time I showered. The meticulousness was a form of control. I had no idea if I would learn anything about myself, but at least I could be certain of these tiny truths. Then, on February 24th, an unseasonably warm day, after a “weird toast combo” for lunch, I started “developing a cough out of nowhere” and later that night “got severe chills + sick feeling body.”

Every Tuesday morning, I take the subway from my apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn to the Port Authority, and from there board a bus to Easton, Pennsylvania, where I climb a steep, wooded hill to campus. It’s a long commute—an hour on the subway, another hour and 45 minutes on the bus, 15 more minutes on foot—so I spend a few days there each week, renting the guest bedroom of a professor-friend. Then, each Thursday evening, I take the bus back to New York. It was on one of these bus rides, on Thursday, February 18th, that I came down with a blinding headache. As soon as we got to the Port Authority, I dove into a newsstand to buy a travel pack of Tylenol, washing it down before I swiped through the crowded subway turnstiles.

Back at Lafayette the following week, I zombied through a few workdays of meetings and classes, regularly coughing into my fist. I had close contact with colleagues at faculty meetings and students at office hours. Should I have canceled my classes and immediately gone back to Brooklyn? Probably. But one of my classes only met 15 times the whole semester. I took those sessions seriously. I tried to push through. That Tuesday night in the guest room in Easton, I went to bed wearing a parka under a heavy down comforter, shivering like I was nude on a frozen tundra.

It feels impossible that there was ever a time when we didn’t know the symptoms of COVID-19. But as recently as the last week in February, I did not even know that I should check for a fever. Did not realize that chills and a cough should cause alarm. The journal entry on February 25th says, “Chills again. And bad cough. Went to bed early. Very tired.” At 3 a.m. on February 26th, in Easton, a headache woke me in the middle of the night. I took two Tylenol, as I’d been doing all week, then fell back asleep. The next morning, after applying the prescription skin cream, I wrote: “Sinus congestion, runny nose. Sore throat started.” After that, the entries stopped, and The Cough began.

I know the subtext of We’re so fucked when I hear it. They scheduled me to come in two hours later.

On March 3rd, Vice President Mike Pence announced the C.D.C. was lifting restrictions on who qualified for COVID-19 testing, and on the 6th, President Donald Trump claimed that “Anyone that wants a test can get a test. That’s what the bottom line is.” By then, it was painfully clear that I needed to get tested. I called my doctor’s office that morning. The Cough had scraped out most of my voice, but I managed to ask for an appointment. “I think I might have the virus,” I said. I remember the receptionist waiting a beat before asking if I had recently traveled to China, Italy, or Iran—countries designated by the State Department as “high-risk.” I hadn’t. What about contact with anyone who’d tested positive? Not that I knew of. Well, she said, unfortunately, they were only testing those high-risk patients at the moment.

By then, I’d read enough to know that those questions were based on faulty information. I pointed out that at least one person in the New York area had tested positive whose answers to those questions were the same as mine. The attendant exhaled and laughed, frustrated. Then her voice changed, the robotic tone of protocol giving way to actual humanity as she told me, exasperated, that they had just had a full staff meeting that morning about the new coronavirus. I know the subtext of We’re so fucked when I hear it. They scheduled me to come in two hours later.

I drove through the wet gray streets of East Flatbush and Crown Heights, parked at a meter and, even though I didn’t yet know about the six-feet rule, did what I could to distance myself from others, pushing buttons and opening doors with the sleeve of my raincoat. The waiting room was nearly empty. A new sign at the front door ordered patients with a cough to procure a mask from the front desk, and I pinched one from the top of a stack. I put it on before I knew how to properly wear it, bending the thin bar over the bridge of my nose, my eyeglasses fogging with breath. I had heard that, even if I had the virus, the risks to me, a millennial with an uncompromised immune system, were supposedly slim. I did not yet know that 38 year olds who rarely get sick could also die from the virus.

After taking my temperature, blood pressure, and weight, the nurse returned, cracking the door open and handing me a thick stack of surgical masks. “Hide these,” she said. It’s the most important thing anyone did for me; I still have some. I wish I could have properly thanked her. The thing about wearing a mask is that it blocks emotions as readily as contagious particles. The smile of gratitude is lost. So too the smirk of acknowledgment after fleeting eye contact. The unconscious lip-chew of anxiety, the slack-jawed gape of confusion—all gone.

For so many in this city of maddening wealth and shameful poverty, doomsday is just another day of the week, another bus ride with no mask during a pandemic.

Finally, a doctor I had never met before arrived at my room wearing what I now know is an N95 mask. Although he peered into my ear canal and listened to my chest, I could not tell you what he looked like. We never removed our masks. Later, my wife asked, annoyed, why the doctor hadn’t checked down my throat, which opened a more familiar uncertainty about the quality of care Black patients receive.

“Is it possible to get tested?” I asked. The doctor shook his head and turned away. I couldn’t make out his full expression under the mask. I wasn’t running a fever, I hadn’t been to any high-risk countries, I hadn’t interacted with anyone who’d tested positive, and I was not immunocompromised. The answer was no, but still I pressed. “There’s already been community spread in Westchester,” I said, deploying new jargon. He confessed that the matter was out of his hands. He would have to request a test from the Department of Health—was it the state or the federal department, or some mysterious Kafka-esque bureau?—and they wouldn’t release it unless I met those criteria. The reason they wouldn’t test me seemed clear, if unstated: They didn’t have any. He told me to stay home until the cough broke. He bid me good day, take care.

As I gathered up my raincoat and bag in the hallway and headed for the exit, the doctor and I ran into each other again. He was paper-toweling his hands and forearms. If I got anything close to a test result that day, it was my doctor diligently scrubbing his hands. He’d been afraid of me. Again, he bid me good day. Take care. This time it was in the unmistakable register of an apology.

As I write this, I’m beginning my fourth week of sheltering while New York is entering its third. Ambulances have been going constantly all day. The bending notes of emergency vehicles are now all I hear, aside from the occasional church bells clanging against the sirens at noon. I am unable to tune them out, like I live in a different city. Nurses lacking supplies here have started to wear Hefty bags and ponchos. Doctors on Twitter sounded like unarmed soldiers on the front lines of a hopeless war.

In the days after I was denied a test by a doctor in New York City, I watched as others with similar symptoms posted long threads on Twitter about their personal odysseys to get tested. Even seemingly well-connected people tried multiple hospitals and offices, then waited for results for the better part of a week. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken no for an answer; maybe I should have driven out to Connecticut and gotten a test. The truth is, I had no idea they were testing in Connecticut; by the time I learned about this on Twitter, I was already several days into self-quarantine, already dreading what might happen to this city I love, where I have spent my adult life.

My twenty-something cousin, a recent transplant to New York who was working as a server at three different restaurants when the city ended dine-in, has no clue how he’s going to make rent this month, never mind the next. His lease renews soon, and his landlord claims to be scheduling replacements to come see the place in the midst of everything. My cousin isn’t sure if he should fight them in court, wait for the government’s help, or just cut his losses and move back to Georgia. Our uncertainties have multiplied like the virus. Well into the lockdown of the city, in mid-March, I saw a bus half-full of people, mostly Black, middle-aged, and unmasked. This was along New York Avenue in East Flatbush, where I was taking my daily walk, wearing my mask properly now; I met eyes with a passenger through the window. I started thinking about how some of us are always gambling, not just when we go to the grocery store to stock up, but because not gambling isn’t an option. For so many in this city of maddening wealth and shameful poverty, doomsday is just another day of the week, another bus ride with no mask during a pandemic.

After leaving the doctor that day, masked but untested, I sat in the car for a while. I’d put more time on the meter than I wound up needing. It was still raining out, cold and sleety. On the other side of the street was a barbershop. Condensation on the windows, a soft orange light draping the plump leather chairs, a few people talking within. I remember it now as the most inviting space I’ve ever seen. If I had known I was negative, I could have gotten one last cut before the shops locked down. If I’d known I was positive, I could have at least had the satisfaction of knowing I’d prevented the spread of the virus and done the right thing. But I knew neither, so I turned the key and drove off.

Maybe they’ll devise an antibody test, and I’ll have the solace of knowing whether I actually had the virus. Maybe I haven’t yet caught it. Maybe I will if I’m not careful. Maybe, even if I did have it, I haven’t developed sufficient antibodies and still have to be careful. Maybe catching it again will be worse. I keep wondering: What is the actual mortality rate? And what is it adjusted for income, gender, and race? Why aren’t they testing instead of ticketing on subway platforms and street corners?

All I know is that I needed a haircut that day—haircuts make me feel better—and I still need one now. I needed something else, too: some barbershop hypotheses, even grim ones, about what was going to happen to our city. Or just a few stories to trim back the uncertainty, a few more questions to stand in place of answers that may never come.

How one young doctor at a Seattle lab tried to get out in front of the coronavirus crisis by inventing his own test. And why the absurdity of his struggle should make us all afraid.

Originally Appeared on GQ