The New Abnormal — Living Immune-Compromised in a Pandemic

My parents raised me naturally — natural healing, remedies, food — and instilled in me timeless values that centered around hard work and truth as a guiding light for living. I never received vaccines as a child, but my university required that I receive the full spectrum of immunizations before starting classes. Unfortunately, that set me on a trajectory for an overactive immune system.

For a long time, I believed that everyone possessed a hypersensitive nervous system that allowed the outside world to intrude, sometimes dramatically and even painfully. As a neuro-sensitive and empath, without the normal sensory filters that allow others relative peace and quiet in their daily lives, an assault for me can come from anywhere at any time. Hardly anyone notices when a train rolls through an intersection a mile away in the middle of the night, or a neighbor’s dog barks three doors down, or a tree branch rubs the side of the house in a wind, or a couple enjoys a normal conversation two tables away in a crowded restaurant — their words might as well be coming through my phone’s ear buds.

I learned to navigate that world in my own way using “neuro-distancing” and personal protection. I implemented strategies to tolerate going out and about to do what I needed with less physical pain and minimizing what I call the “hijacking” of my nervous system.

Enter COVID-19. With the uncertain and pervasive threat of the pandemic — now endemic, I live in a world infiltrated by a silent, unseen and opportunistic pathogen that hides, hitchhikes, and flies on anything or anyone. Last week, after running a well-planned errand, for which I wore both a mask and a colorful balaclava, goggles, nitrile gloves, a head covering and layers of clothes, I arrived home without incident, relieved. Just as I stepped out of my car, I startled as a young woman jogged right past me, arm’s length — no mask or gloves, wearing what I assume was her usual running outfit. She didn’t even attempt to avoid me despite the empty street, and never uttered a word. WTF???!!! At best, she could not know whether she carried the virus — willful neglect, righteous indignation?

When I braved venturing out to visit a local lab for a blood draw a month earlier and asked the phlebotomist about the needle gauge given my small veins, she yelled at me. This large maskless health care worker towered directly over my five-foot-nothing, under-100 pound, frame barking at me that she would decide what needle went into my arm, where and how. Scared for my life, I slid slowly and quietly out of harm’s way and left.

My own doctor typically discussed with me various health strategies and medical protocols with the candor of a peer and respect for my own empathic knowingness about my body and how it works. Lately, something had changed. His words to me felt intimidating and pressuring when he urged me to drive across four states to his clinic to sit in a small room for eight hours of treatment several days a week next to four other people — notwithstanding the irrational risks of driving that distance while the virus was still spiking in at least two states I would drive through, staying in hotels, eating meals prepared by strangers, needing to find temporary lodging near his clinic, far away from my support system, to sit for hours within the falling breath of other sick people who might or might not be wearing masks, washing their hands frequently and taking the maximum precautions. Knowing better — and despite knowing me and my immune issues — he nevertheless offered nothing to mitigate my exposure risk while receiving treatment from him. His urgent offer felt like a trap, a betrayal.

When people cannot see or hear or feel an enemy, some decide their strategy will be to treat anyone and anything as the potential enemy. Civility, kindness, generosity, compassion disappear — vaporized by the viral fear that grasps desperately for a life they feel slipping away. I used to think those movies about the “zombie apocalypse” of former humans who had lost their hearts and souls, and sought to infect others, were fiction.