If you think Covid is a hoax, you might want to skip this post.
If you don’t like when people find silver linings – or entire pieces of silver – in the midst of challenges, you might want to skip it as well.
Almost four years after Covid first made its pesky appearance on the planet, Melissa and I finally got it.
It took us a week before we realized what was going on. We thought we had the flu. We rarely get sick, so it was strange that we’d both gotten so sick, but we still didn’t realize what was going on. We didn’t have any respiratory issues or sore throats, so that didn’t help with the assessment of what was happening.
Then I got an email from someone I’d run into at the grocery store a few days before I first had symptoms.
Given that it was the week before Thanksgiving when I ran into her, and given that Melissa was busy gathering up a whole bunch of obscure specialty items for our meal, I stopped and talked to this person waaaaay longer than I usually would.
Turns out, she got Covid the day after I saw her, and she was checking in, hoping she hadn’t given it to me.
When I got the email from her, Melissa and I both tested.
Sure enough, it was Covid.
It explained why we both felt sooo bad. But at least we knew what was going on.
That was all well and good, but what wasn’t so well or so good was that we just Kept. Feeling. Bad.
Finally, after two and a half weeks of this, I called my doctor.
Or, should I say, I called my new doctor. My regular doctor retired last year, and I hadn’t met with my new doc yet.
But my new doc wasn’t there that day, so I talked to another physician in the practice.
I told her what was going on and she started giving me things to do. Vitamins to take, foods to avoid, breathing exercises to do. She even prescribed outdoor time and gentle exercise.
As she was talking, I was thinking Who IS this person? A doctor is prescribing a food and exercise regime? How frickin’ cool is THIS?
So I told her I had a new doc but I hadn’t seen him yet. I asked if she would be my doctor.
She said she would.
She also said that one of her specialties is gender-affirming care. I got really excited and asked if she had seen the them/them pronoun specification in my chart. She had.
Those of us who live off the binary, and those of us who have traversed the binary from one side to another, know how challenging accessing health care and interacting with health care professionals can be. To have a doctor who specializes in gender-affirming care is not something I’ve ever had before.
And if I hadn’t gotten Covid, I still wouldn’t have a doctor who specializes in gender-affirming care.
After we hung up, I looked up my new doc online. Turns out she’s a DO, as opposed to an MD. (For those of you who don’t know what that means, as I didn’t, DOs have the same training as MDs, but with more emphasis on prevention and holistic care. Applications for DO training programs have exploded in recent years. Yay DOs!)
And there’s one more thing.
At the bottom of her bio, it said that she’s not taking new patients.
Yeah.
So now I have a holistic, gender-affirming doctor. Who wasn’t taking new patients but who took me.
Thank you, Covid!
P.S. Once we both started following the prescriptions of my awesome new doc, we got better quickly. Yay!
P.P.S. Melissa and I had yet another miracle to come out of our time with Covid, which I’ll write about in my next post!
What’s your experience with silver linings – or entire pieces of silver – emerging from challenging events? Share your comments below!
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