DAY           SYMPTOMS

DAY 15

We’re beyond the CDC paperwork. On Day 1—March 14, 2020, the day my husband and I flew from Delhi to Boston—the surveys were already outdated. I accepted a hastily stapled booklet from the gloved hand of a man sweating through his lab coat in the chill of the jetway. Flipped through ten pages of icons, steps, and charts that, over the next two weeks, won’t contain our sickness—it leached across borders and spilled into margins. I crossed out China and wrote India. Corrected the health official’s misspelling of a symptom we reported as we stumbled off the plane: diarrea. Crossed out China again. Continued to record the data no one is collecting. 

DAY 16

The invisible web woven over my thorax tightens and nausea stirs my stomach, but my mind is so murky. It’s difficult to differentiate these sensations from the fear that snags at my heart and tugs at my gut. After carrying laundry upstairs, I collapse on the living room floor. 

DAY 17

In On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf complains that words are not adequate to describe illness. She calls for “a new language…more primitive, more sensual, more obscene.” She was talking about the flu.

DAY 18

But how to describe a novel disease, new to human experience?

DAY 19

In the parking lot of an urgent care, I roll down the car window and try. “This fatigue,” I tell the nurse pressing a stethoscope to my back, “is a wave, a weight, a way of being that doesn’t feel like me.” The nurse passes me a prescription for antibiotics. Tests are for healthcare workers. 

DAY 20

We begin to call cooking our “exercise”—each meal is the great energy expenditure of our day. The grocery site, we discover, refreshes at one a.m., allowing us to book a delivery two weeks out. I plot our dwindling supplies on the calendar: if we eat lentils for six days, we’ll make it. 

DAY 21

The nurse I first reported symptoms to calls to check in. As we talk, my arm aches with the effort of holding the phone to my ear. She suggests Tylenol, but I’m scared of silencing something I’m supposed to hear.

DAY 22

Marc complains of a pressure at the back of his head that grips after exertion, mental or physical. The compression is all in my chest, but, in terms of intensity, our symptoms are synced—ebbing and flaring as if we’re on the same unending roller coaster.

DAY 23

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag warns against the language that springs up around ailments that can’t be solved by science. Tuberculosis, romanticized in the nineteenth century; cancer and AIDS, demonized in the twentieth. Now: coronavirus.

DAY 24

The screen on the bedroom window has been stuck open for days. I put my head out and breathe in the warm air with the promise of a new season. I recall simpler times, when ocean waves knocked me to my knees or crashed into the coastline. This year, there will be no summer in Rhode Island.

DAY 25

“How the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across the far fields” (Woolf, On Being Ill). 

DAY 26

Our virtual writing group is over, everyone else has signed off, faces disappearing one by one. I ask the woman who tested positive to stay. Quiz her about her symptoms: fever, wet cough, fourteen days. They sound nothing like my own.

DAY 27

At thirty-seven, I’ve found my first white hair. Marc has been speckled for years, but now his dark crown is strobed with white. He reads a little about it. Whatever was stopping us from going gray, it seems, has turned inward to fight the virus.

DAY 28

I give these cells permission to leave their posts.

DAY 29

The antibiotics prescribed at urgent care are gone; our symptoms: still present. We’re unable to stand at the sink long enough to wash dishes. Workdays are truncated by my body’s need to be horizontal.

DAY 30

“I think I might be getting chilblains again,” I tell Marc. When we lived in Minneapolis, during the coldest months my toes would swell into tender, itchy lumps.

DAY 31/32

The pain, like the days, begins to feel borderless, blurred, untraceable—is it on the surface of the skin or underneath? Is it lodged deep in marrow, threaded through nerves or lacing my veins? Strange aches extend along the bones of my forearms. Talking, moving, or sustained thought cause it to flare, as if in punishment.

DAY 33

An English translation of Sophocles renders a character’s cry of pain as “Ah! Ah!!!!” when, according to scholar Elaine Scarry, readers of the original Greek would encounter his anguish as an array of words, some of them twelve syllables long. 

DAY 34

When the groceries are delivered, we tag team them, relaying bags up three flights to the fridge. On the oximeter, my pulse reaches 183. The top stair has become a summit. Is this what growing old is: the landscapes of your life shrinking to a single interior?

DAY 35

A new symptom, though, at first, I didn’t recognize it. The media are calling it “Covid toe,” and it looks a lot like my chilblains.

DAY 36

We walk around the block. Return breathless. But triumphant. Finally, we think, we’re beating this thing.

DAY 37

Marc and I wake up and lock eyes. We overdid it. It’s worse.

DAY 38

Ah! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

DAY 39

The pain comes in waves and in different casts. There’s the ache that grips me around the ribs, then the sharp, fleeting pain that flutters through my lungs, stabbing below the breast, beneath the shoulder blade, near my heart.

DAY 40

“It’s a grit-your-teeth kind of pain,” I tell my cardiologist brother-in-law. He says: “Call me when it’s radiating.”

DAY 41

Woolf alludes to “undiscovered countries that are then disclosed” to the ill. Sontag, too, divides us between the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. But surely we can find a common language to communicate with those back home?

DAY 42

Metaphor, simile, apostrophe. I’ll try anything.

DAY 43

I read accounts of illness and take notes on how others describe it. The pain of a mastectomy, documented in Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals: “There were fixed pains, and moveable pains, deep pains and surface pains, strong pains and weak pains. There were stabs and throbs and burns, gripes and tickles and itches.”

DAY 44

“Sharp” and “knife-like” seem trite and overused. Yet, while watching the blade of a kitchen knife mince garlic into delicate shards, I picture the plunge into flesh and believe the description accurate.

DAY 45

Chopping garlic is exhausting. I sit down and pant.

DAY 46

Lorde makes good use of simile. “The muscles…began to screech as if they’d been pulled apart and were coming back to life slowly…My breast which was no longer there would hurt as if it were being squeezed in a vise.” [italics mine]

DAY 47

I feel as if I’m wearing a corset. I’ve never worn a corset before, but I swear I have one on now. I picture whale bones; someone is lacing them tight.

DAY 48

Woolf bemoans the lack of language available to the sick: “The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

DAY 49

Scarry, too, finds only “isolated instances” when it comes to representation of physical pain in literature, and in her book, The Body in Pain, she turns to other contexts (torture, war) for its expression.

DAY 50

Our symptoms have intensified enough to earn us a test. It’s pouring as we pull up to the site. Through the rain-streaked windshield, I glimpse administrators bowing at car windows, bodies swaddled against elements, faces masked against the virus. As one approaches, I swallow a cry for help. Silently accept the swab.

DAY 51

“Press on your chest with your fingers” my father-in-law, a retired physician, guides over the phone. “Does it hurt there? There? Are there any tender spots?” But now the pain is on the surface, an ache below my left breast. “That’s the cartilage,” he sounds satisfied. “That is not a concern.”

DAY 52

But earlier, it was deeper. Untouchable.

DAY 53

The tests are negative.

DAY 54

“Are words actually any use to describe what pain . . . really feels like?” writes Alphonse Daudet in In the Land of Pain, an unfinished manuscript describing the French author’s struggle with tertiary syphilis. “Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down.”

DAY 55

But: when will it be over?

DAY 56

Blood red spots bloom down my legs, across thighs and shin bones. My heart pounds without warning, or reason. As I close my eyes to sleep. My chest feels like it’s caving in.

DAY 57

“I am in bed with influenza,” writes Woolf, “—but what does that convey of the great experience.”

DAY 58

Of course, figurative language can be dangerous when it comes to disease. Sontag documents how the horrors of war, invasion, and decay are imposed upon the body through the allusions of metaphor. Yes, it’s hard to find language to talk about what hurts, but it’s unfair to turn illness into something else.

DAY 59

“It feels dangerous,” I tell my doctor. “Like falling.”

DAY 60

“Maybe that’s not pain,” my husband suggests. “Maybe that’s fear.”

DAY 61

As war is overlayed on the body, the body’s infirmities are applied to the political world. “Stalinism is cancer,” is Sontag’s example, but you don’t have to read her to see the practice in action. How quickly the coronavirus became the “Chinese virus.” 

DAY 62

I call my mother, on her way to plant flowers outside my grandma’s nursing home window. I skip the pain: “I’m scared, Mom.” 

DAY 63

Sometimes pain is a choir, a song, a voice deep inside. Lorde again: “All in concert, or even in small repertory groups, they were excruciating. There were constant ones and intermittent ones. There were short sharp and long dull and various combinations of the same ones.” 

DAY 64

While there may be common metaphors, according to Daudet, there is no “general theory of pain. Each patient discovers his own, and the nature of pain varies, like a singer’s voice, according to the acoustics of the hall.”

DAY 65

When the chorus gets too loud I go to the ER. The tests show nothing abnormal. 

DAY 66

The doctors think it’s a post-viral syndrome, but I can’t bring myself to call the pain “post.”

DAY 67

Head out the window.

DAY 68

The allegories Daudet turns to are of the maritime variety: “I need some such term to describe the crisis I find myself in…The ship has fouled. Will it ever pull free?”

DAY 69

My niece and nephews send illustrated stories from their home-bound schooling. In one, a Spinosaurus eats Rhode Island. In another, a pizza slice slips down a water slide. Then comes a page filled with scribbles, notated by an adult hand: N’s map to find Jodie and Marc. I trace the line through its circles, spirals, and caveats, ending nowhere.  

DAY 70

DAY 71

Woolf borrows Daudet’s boat: “The whole landscape of life lies remote and fair like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.”

DAY 72

Instead of describing, we try quantifying. Marc, a behavior analyst, prints charts on which I corral pain into tallies. Fifteen on the first day, eight on the next, which is progress until it isn’t. Twenty-one on day seventy-two.

DAY 73

DAY 74

The data begins to show a correlation between rest and pain. The more I rest, the tallies tell me, the better I’ll feel. But, the disease demands a radical respite, a let-everything-go-and-don’t-move kind of repose, which feels less like rest and more like not living.

DAY 75

I rested.

DAY 76

On a webinar on chronic fatigue a therapist tells us to “conserve our spoons”—a person has only so many metaphorical utensils to get through a day—warning my expectations must shift. “Instead of cleaning the whole house in one day, you may have to limit yourself to one room a day.” 

DAY 77

I follow this advice, until I realize if you clean an apartment one room at a time rather than the whole place at once, the whole place will never at once be clean.

DAY 78

Measuring my days out in spoons, I begin to feel like Prufrock.

DAY 79

The weather grows warmer; the apartment is sweltering, but neither of us have strength to lift the air conditioning unit to the window.

DAY 80

To escape the heat, Marc and I drive to a seaside town. We walk along the water for four minutes before returning home exhausted. I fall asleep on the couch like an over-stimulated child.

DAY 81

In place of spoons, a book suggests we have only $100 a day to spend in energy—as opposed to our normal $1,000—and if we overspend, we risk being in debt for the next, day, week, month. “I feel like I used up all my ‘money’ over the weekend,” Marc says, struggling to get through a Monday, “and now I’m on Bitcoin.”

DAY 82

I perch on our front step, talking through my mask. A friend sits cross-legged on the sidewalk, listening. The squirrels who’ve taken over the yard charge at us, defending new territory. The sun goes down and the insects come out. My friend stays.

DAY 83

A coworker sends flowers. I google each bloom: coral-colored tulips, floating clouds of lilacs, lacy orbs of allium, cheery tangerine ranunculus. Finally, something I can name.

DAY 84

I try a walk along a path near our apartment. When the chest compression returns, I slow my pace. Reaching a bench, I sink down to check my pulse: 123. I wait until it drops below 100, then carry on. At the following bench it’s leapt to 141. When I stand, the next bench looks a long way off.

DAY 85

Today is a day when the pain pervades—retaliation for yesterday’s exertion. A day when the body is a mute, heavy thing. The brain is a blank slate smudged with chalk.

DAY 86

DAY 87

DAY 88

At the Brown University clinic, the pulmonologist calls himself a Yale man, talks about his son in the National Guard, his daughter at college, the Big 10, the Big 12, the big fish he caught. I sit silent on the exam table, grasping my side where the pain is biting, breathing shallowly.

DAY 89

“But if,” Scarry writes, “the only external sign of the felt-experience of pain (for which there is no alteration in the blood count, no shadow on the X ray, no pattern on the CAT scan) is the patient’s verbal report (however itself in-adequate), then to bypass the voice is to bypass the bodily event, to bypass the patient, to bypass the patient in pain.” Anyone who’s been dismissed by a doctor knows such doubt, as Scarry puts it, “amplifies the suffering of those already in pain.”

DAY 90

I grow envious of the asymptomatic, the mild cases, the convalesced: back on their feet in fourteen days.

DAY 91

Yet there are many who endure more. Amidst my self pity, the pain of others breaks in. When I read descriptions of their suffering, I stop searching for my own.

DAY 92

The woman I barely know on a Zoom call who, as we wait for colleagues to join the meeting, stoically describes the chronic condition that keeps her housebound.

DAY 93

My sister-in-law, who reveals she’s lived with an undiagnosed illness for years. Who sends miso and books and puzzles through the post. 

DAY 94

My father-in-law, who calls daily for updates on our health, wheezing with his own lung disease.

DAY 95

My grandmother, suffering inside a nursing home until her daughters break her out of quarantine to care for their mother at her farmhouse.

DAY 96

The GoFundMe campaign in my inbox from the friend of a friend: “the day I gave birth to my daughter I found out I have breast cancer…it is stage four because it has spread to the bones.”

DAY 97

According to Scarry, “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language.” Her conclusion: “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability.” 

DAY 98

She may be right. Despite my best efforts, I’ve failed to express what ails me to others. And yet, through my pain, I’ve become more receptive to theirs. 

DAY 99

Which, at least, gets us halfway there.

DAY 100

My husband asks: “How’s the pain today?” I grab my rib cage, the side that feels as if it’s been stitched up in knots, and grimace. He nods. Maybe we’ve found our language.