Today is the first day in a week that I have not had to lie down on the sofa and fall into a brain clogged stupor for four hours just after breakfast. The Captain and I have had COVID. Of the variety that one catches after three vaccinations, so I’m guessing it was in its latest strain. We were COVID virgins and both of us experienced it in very similar ways. We both had one night within the six days of it in which we thought we were in “the eye of the storm”. That experience alone was a test.
I sat upright the entire night in order to manage the mucus in both nose and throat, so that I might be able to continue breathing. My head spun like a washing machine and my dreams were made of dark materials. My throat was so raw that swallowing was a challenge that had to be planned in advance, alongside gargling aspirin and gasps. I would not wish this disease on my worst enemy and this one was the sanitised post vax version. It took me back to childhood illness when the sore throat and temperature felt like a death knell and in moments you would wish just to be struck down so that the hell could end.
Yes, alright, I admit it. I am a hopeless patient. Thank goodness the Captain and I went through it together because we practically crawled around letting out long groans like animals preparing for their own slaughter. It would have been unbearable for any other person to tolerate.
The worst of it was that it completely removed my sense of smell and taste. I had not realised how dependent my entire psychological well-being was on smell, to the point that its temporary disappearance left me in a depression. Smell marks the beginning and end of my day. It begins, when not suffering from COVID, with waking up to a toasty smelling pillow and the sense that the Captain’s warm body, clothed in a soft, musky T-shirt is close by. I get up and open the window, and the air carrying scents of bluebells, daffodils, tulips, primroses, grape hyacinths make themselves known to my nostrils. I go downstairs and put on the kettle. I squeeze the teabag into the boiling water, so that the amber liquid exudes the strong, quality unique to the dried leaves from the Camelia family. I add milk, a comforting sniff of that before it goes in, just to check its freshness.
Showering follows, in which hot water is combined with a range of gels containing jasmine, rose, lavender, rosemary and geranium foaming all over my body and once again its perfumes float up my nostrils. This set of rituals gives me the firm indication that the beginning of the day has taken place. Without it, I do not know where I am, if I am awake or indeed the walking dead. Imagine, once the mucus has cleared, breathing in through the nose and no sensation enters your brain. It makes you feel like a ghost, a shadow in your own life.
The next smells are of the breakfast type, which might entail coffee or toast, all of which produce a party of smells to enjoy. They also, in turn, message my body to feel hunger and the need to satisfy itself, as my system goes into full preparation for eating. Need I go on? Can you see what I am saying? Having no sense of smell removes all of this experience, and that’s just in the morning. A complete lack of sense of time and life pervades me when deprived of my sense of smell. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was yesterday when it came back. So, Gods of Smells, I worship you, I praise you, Oooooo you are so good, Amen. Please never leave my body again.
In other news, my second novel continues, while I restructure it from an old novella and rethink its narrative. I’ve entered a few competitions with my one act play I wrote a while back, but it always seems to be other people who manage to get the literary agent or a deal at a theatre or a role in a film.
My acting “career”, if I dare still call it that, continues with self-tapes and the odd audition, in fact I have to complete an advert self tape by lunchtime tomorrow, but sometimes the experience, metaphorically, of writing a message which you put into a bottle, placing a cork in it and throwing it out to sea can become very, very, very unsatisfying. Especially when you notice other people’s bottles being picked up by enthusiastic agents and publishers and directors and plastering their messages all over Twitter, as if entirely to annoy me. It does make one feel like one is living on an island, understood only by the plants.
I embark on an oil painting course in June and for some reason I am scared. About the amount of materials I need and about how crap I will actually be. But, some might say that I am lucky to have the chance. That I am lucky to not be a refugee. That I am lucky to have a loving family and to have love in my life from husband and friends. That I am lucky to have access to my talents and to be able to mark the minutes of the fast flowing days by using them. And they’d be right.
But right now, like the weather, my heart is raining. And until it stops, I will be miserable. But it will stop. Eventually. And when my heart sees its own sun again. I will agree with some, that indeed, I am lucky.
Kate Terence's Letters from London 