If you follow me on Twitter, you might already know — or you may not, given the firehose nature of social media — that I've been dealing with upper respiratory infections going back and forth through my household. We don't believe it's COVID-19 because that is primarily a lower respiratory infection (lungs, not nose and throat) but we've been treating it with an abundance of caution.

I'm on the list of people who are especially vulnerable to this kind of thing, not because my immune system is particularly poor but because the cells of my body are compromised by a mitochondrial mutation. My heart, lungs, and the muscles that support breathing... none of them have the "oomph" they're supposed to have. The normal fatigue we all suffer when our immune system is fighting an illness hits me like a sledgehammer which makes anything more than the most mild cold tend to knock me on my backside for a while.

I've been up and down quite a bit, which makes me think there's more than one strain of cold going around. Our local extended family includes people in a care facility right now which means that until the governor shut down visitation we've had all kinds of opportunities for germs to come home. I've been on the upswing this week and I think I'm just about clear. My last lingering symptom has been a headache which has made it difficult for me to focus on long-form writing. Even my Twitter threads have been shorter as I've been trying to spend less time focusing on words on a screen.

(Sidenote to self: when we come out the other end of this, I should go in for an eye appointment. It occurs to me now as I describe this that the headaches may be coincidental to being ill. On the other hand, one of the fun things about my mitochondrial disorder is that my eyesight declines sharply with fatigue as the muscles responsible for focusing slack off on me. So even if my headaches are eyesight-related, they may disappear as I continue to recover.)

I have not felt great about being MIA over here in the midst of a crisis, especially when I so recently re-dedicated a portion of my newsletter activities to spreading hope and courage. Yesterday I had some success with catching up my journal using different settings (contrast, font size/zoom) and so I'm going to ramping things back up here now.

Given how many of us are staying in and how many conferences and concerts and celebrations we were individually looking forward to have been cancelled, I'm not going to focus overwhelmingly on news and politics. I think the tenor of the times calls for more courage and hope, and frankly more entertainment and socialization. Social distancing doesn't mean we can't be social at a distance. I was workshopping an RPG project in this space back in the late fall and that kind of got derailed when my work routine with the Flying Camel ended, and I think this is a good time to rejuvenate that.

I hope everybody is well and weathering the crisis well. You'll be hearing more from me soon.

With love, gratitude, and hope,
Alexandra.