Author: Carlo Romero

I’ve lived through my share of American Presidents and I’ve studied a few more.  Of all the things we’ve come to expect from the leader of the free world, the primary purpose of the President must be to protect America from all threats, foreign and domestic.

How did they do?

Abraham Lincoln kept the country intact in the face of a violent insurrection meant to protect the right of states to enslave human beings and keep them as property.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the evil the Nazis represented and raised an army of free citizens to wipe them from the face of the earth.
John F. Kennedy faced down the Soviets when they placed nuclear weapons less than ninety miles from our shores, averting the World War III.

Ronald Reagan saw the existential threat of the nuclear arms race and brought the Cold War to an end.

Lyndon Johnson understood the twin threats of racism and poverty and set out to build The Great Society and created Medicare and Medicaid.

George W. Bush studied the history of The Spanish Flu as early as 2005 and put together a detailed plan to prevent and contain pandemics, down to the detail of protecting against a mutation of a coronavirus.

Barack Obama also developed his own plan to prevent and contain pandemics.

I don’t agree with everything each one of these men said or did.  For some of them, I disagree with most of what they did.  Some defended the United States better than others.  What can’t be disputed is that when faced with a threat to the American people, none of them minimized the threat.  They didn’t deny the threat nor pretend that it would simply go away on its own.

None of them actively alienated American allies nor courted American enemies.  Lincoln, Kennedy and Johnson forced America to reckon with the original sin of slavery.  Roosevelt and Obama took the poverty of the average American seriously and set the stage for recoveries from historic economic crises.  Kennedy and Reagan went toe to toe with the Russians—and won.  Roosevelt did not draw a moral equivalence between the Allies and the Axis and say “there were fine people on both sides.”  At least three of them provided more healthcare for Americans instead of trying to take it away.

And all of them believed in America.  All of them, in one way or the other, believed that America truly was a shining City on a Hill.  All of them believed that America was greater united, not divided.  All of them believed that out of the many can come one.

Lebron James has once again risen to the highest level of his profession, winning his fourth championship ring.  Even before the victory that clinched the title, Lebron was already one of the most recognizable human beings on earth.   He has a fortune of half a billion dollars.  He is in the rarified company of those who are considered the best to have ever plied their craft.  And, yet, this is what he said on Sunday, after he received his trophy:  “I just want my damned respect.”  I find that very, very remarkable.  

With a little extra effort, I can simulate the experience of drenching my lungs in acid.  All I have to do is speed up as I run.  My pace right now is a blistering ten minutes forty-three seconds per mile.  If I dare to push my pace above that of a slow, geriatric trot, I will experience the aforementioned burn.  This is the last remaining effect of my covid-19 infection from six months ago.  In other words, six months after infection, my recovery is still incomplete.

Pardon the mild bragging for now since I need to provide some context.  At my fastest, I ran a little over thirteen miles at a pace of seven minutes and forty-five seconds.  A pace I can only maintain for a minute today I was recently able to maintain for over an hour and a half.  The night I experienced my first symptoms—a fever I tried to dismiss—I had been at the gym hours before, doing rounds of push-ups, strict pull-ups, stricter toes to bar and leg lifts.  Within two days of that and the day before the official lockdown in New York, my fever spiked to 102.5F.  My illness hit its trough just as the crisis crested in New York.  With refrigerated trucks situated outside hospitals, waiting for the overflow of bodies, I was trapped inside, for the simple reason that I didn’t even have the energy to sit up.

If I stop to consider the worst part of the experience, I have options to choose.  The extreme fatigue was not pleasant.  My bed was the only part of the world I saw for weeks.  The days seemed endless.  The length of the illness was also horrible.  From the first symptom to the last traces of the fever, it was three weeks.  My cough persisted past that and I didn’t realize at the time that the coughing was emblematic of the damage being done to my lungs.  The illness also came in two waves.  I thought I was getting better after four days and then I experienced a second phase that was worse than the first.

I experienced intense but short lived pain towards the end, likely due to dehydration, itself due to a severe loss  of appetite.  Pain to that degree had once compelled me to call 911 so I did so again when the pain was at its worst.  The paramedics arrived, all covered up in hazmat attire, unwilling to enter my apartment.  They examined me from a distance and recommended that I not accompany them to the ER because I was safer at home.  They described the hospital as a petri dish, with covid-19 propagating throughout the entire ER.  In time, their advice proved wise.  At the time, being turned away by a place I once considered the safest place in New York was terrifying.

On the day of my first symptom, I did seventy-five push-ups, among other exercises.  Three weeks later, my first attempt at exercise produced three push-ups, my arms shaking like leaves in high wind.  Days after that I attempted to walk a mile.  I used to run ten miles without a moment’s thought.  That first mile that I walked proved more challenging then ten miles used to be.  Two months after the end of my bout with covid-19, I tried my first jog.  I could only sustain that slow pace for three quarters of a mile before I had to stop and walk.  And it felt like there was a small beast riding my chest, pouring acid into my lungs.

Now six months later, I’ve recovered a good percentage of my strength.  The prison style workouts during lock down helped.  The small beast on my chest has been gone for months, but I can still make the acid come back if I try too hard—and too hard isn’t very hard at all.

Some people don’t believe in the severity of this illness.  Some even seem to think that the illness is a hoax.  The damage to my lungs should convince otherwise.  Unlike influenza, SARS-COV-2 scars lungs.  It’s damage that I assume will heal in time and allow the return of my normal speed, but that’s an assumption and a hope, not a certainty.

I write this now not just as record of my experience but as a reminder and a warning.  As the virus spread silently at the beginning of this year, we did not take it seriously.  It has felled almost 200,000 in the United States so far. the most of any country in the world.  Any cursory reading of the history of pandemics would provide the sobering lesson that pandemics come in waves.  The so called Spanish flu came in three major waves, the first coming in the spring of 1918, the second and most lethal one coming in the subsequent fall.  As temperatures drop, memories of the crisis fade and exhaustion sets in, we are in danger of repeating the same mistakes our forbears made a century ago.

Let this be a warning.  Remember, I had the “mild” version of covid-19. Six months later, I’m still contending with its aftermath.

“Whatever you choose for a career path remember the struggles along the way are only meant to shape you for your purpose.  But if you are willing to take the harder way, the one that has ultimately proven to have more meaning, more victory, more glory then you will not regret it.”
— Chadwick Boseman, from a 2018 commencement speech he gave at Howard University