Perfect Timing
moving to California
My apologies for the hiatus, but this was one of the most grueling moves I’ve ever had the pleasure of grinding through. As if living in a cave of boxes wasn’t enough for the previous three weeks, we had some bad luck mixed in to make things even more of a challenge. Somehow, I had managed to dodge testing positive for Covid for the last three years of the pandemic. I have no idea how. I was living in New York and bartending when it first hit, and I remember drunk bar goers accidentally spitting in my face while they ordered vodka sodas from me the day they canceled the NBA. I’ve had multiple scares, close calls, and brushes with the virus—including my wife having it for a full two weeks and me somehow not getting it, sharing drinks with friends who called the next day to tell me they had it, and houseguests who tested positive in the morning—but I wouldn’t have expected that I would get it at the WORST POSSIBLE TIME.
We’d put in our notice at our apartment in Portland. We’d boxed up everything except for the essentials already. Hotels were booked and my mom and her husband were coming down with their trailer to convoy with us to Los Angeles. Then I got Covid, bad. What were supposed to be a few last days of leisurely packing up the apartment were spent sweating profusely with a fever in bed. I was terrified we wouldn’t be able to get it done. I could barely move, and my sweat smelled foul, like I was exuding heavy toxins, and it was a challenge to even get up and drag myself to the bathroom. We’d been watching Mad Men, and I had nightmarish visions about Don Draper coming into my room and berating me for doing such a poor job moving. The first night I slept fourteen hours, crumpled up by all the boxes and dirty sheets.
The next day I knew I needed something to help, otherwise I would never escape Oregon.
I found some scammy looking website with a chatbot that promised to get you a prescription of Paxlovid that day as long as you uploaded your positive test and answered some questions to determine if you were eligible. I was dubious, but I figured I had nothing really to lose. I mostly told the truth, I probably exaggerated a few things, and the whole process took about five minutes. I received a kick back email a few moments later telling me my prescription was under review from a real doctor. Who knows. I picked up my blister packs of Paxlovid the next day. I wore a mask, but the pharmacist didn’t and I wondered if he regretted it while I swayed from the fever and the stress of knowing I still had so much to do. It seems like a pharmacy where you dole out Covid-19 medication to sick people would be an appropriate place to wear a mask, but I’m not a pharmacist so I don’t know.
I swallowed my first three pills in the parking lot. They were pretty big and tasted like diesel—a taste I would grow accustomed to as one of the main side effects of the drug for the next five days—and hoped I would feel better soon.
And I did. The pills worked remarkably fast. They revved me up like a shot of steroids, and I felt full of energy in a few hours. I was still sick, but the pills made it so I could move again, and they pushed away most of the headache, nausea and fever. It would have been better for me to rest, but there was no time. We got back to packing again, with a day left until the trailers arrived.
I would recommend not doing much if you have to take Paxlovid. I could feel the drug scraping through my body, ridding me of the virus and boosting my energy in a synthetic manner. Everything tasted like gasoline. I could barely eat because of the taste and the smell associated with it, and beef and eggs still makes me wretch two weeks later if I catch a whiff of them. All I wanted to do was sleep it off, but I had no choice but to move.
Every twelve hours, I had to take three pills. The scraping sensation of the drug working lasted through the day until, exhausted, I would fall onto a pile of sweat soaked sheets. Unfortunately, the other side effect of Paxlovid besides a gasoline mouth was insomnia ,and it hit me hard every night. I’ve battled with insomnia a few times in my life and it always wins. It’s such a strange feeling. You’re ready to sleep but some itch in your chest prevents you from drifting off. I listened to three sleep meditations in a row, sucked in painful lungfuls of air and let it out as slow as possible, and tried to count to a thousand to no avail. I think I got about an hour or two of sleep every night of the move.
Wearing masks, we loaded up two trailers on the 30th of August. We worked well into the night while a super blue moon, the last one for the next 15 years, glared down at us menacingly. Oregon felt like one big curse, hungry to keep us subjugated and stuck there until I had nothing left. The virus made me dizzy. Auditory hallucinations wafted through my mind and I had no choice but to ignore them. The next day we cleaned. I’m not sure if it was the Paxlovid medication, the Covid, or just the immense amount of stress involved in the move, but I barely remember any of it. All I remember was how much I sweat and the strange gasoline smell that seemed to emanate from my pores and sickly mouth.
When we finished, I was still in a dream. Was I okay to drive? I had to be. I’d never pulled a trailer before and my car lurched forward under the weight. It hadn’t rained in three months and it began to pour. We had about a thousand miles to go.
You’ll never forget this one! How was the driving? Kaitlyn drive too? Damn relieved you lived through this!