I believe I became a hypochondriac the morning that I woke up and couldn’t hear. 

 

I was eleven years old and one brisk October morning I found that I could not process any sound on my right side. I couldn’t walk in a straight line, I couldn’t keep food down, and no amount of steroids allowed the microscopic hairs on my snail-shaped cochlea to regrow – and, furthermore, I became permanently hard-of-hearing. It’s been a long and troubling road coming to terms with my deafness after nearly ten years, but it taught me two very important things: first, that being sick is incredibly scary, and second, it’s necessary for me to be hyper aware of the way my body functions. 

 

It started out slowly. My anxiety was emerging as an adolescent, creeping into my throat and waking me up in the early hours of the morning. My overcrowded teeth required oral surgery and the fear of something corrupting my mouth came over me in waves. I remember sitting in the corner of my bedroom, pressing my pointer and middle fingers to the pulse beating in my throat, breathing in and out to the rhythm.

 

I have an incredible amount of bizarre illness tales. The sudden hearing loss, certainly, and the two-week long flu-bronchitis hybrid, the fist-sized bug bite and vomiting up antibiotics all over myself on the drive to school my senior year after the smell of a chicken biscuit sent me over the edge. I was by no means a sickly kid, but my illnesses stand in stark technicolor in my memory. They were not life-threatening but the thought of getting sick was grave, terrifying.

 

I moved away for college, and suddenly I was a regular at Campus Health. My seasonal allergies battered me and required a number of sprays and drops and daily antihistamines to control. I was on antibiotics for probably 70% of my first semester. I had two ear infections, the first of which had symptoms similar to my original hearing loss – I sat outside my suite, hyperventilating and in tears. Would I go to bed, wake up, and be fully deaf? It ended up being a standard, treatable infection, but the fear was only escalating. I had chronic styes. I took note of the weight of my head, my appetite, the way my breaths enter and exit my throat.

 

When something was wrong, I knew.

 

To make matters even more amusing, I have a very particular style of panic attack. It’s genetic. Rarely do I wheeze, like many experience. No, I actually get a very brief temperature – I’ll overheat, hit about 100.6 for fifteen minutes, and my speech will stunt, my head will get fuzzy, and I’ll blast the AC or stick my head into a freezer until I can ride it out.

 

So, it felt like a cosmic joke when the world split into a global pandemic that was often identified by its feverish tendencies. 

 

I was okay, at first. After all, I was home and everyone was stuck inside, too – my family was fortunate enough to get grocery delivered and work from home, so my high-risk mother and I buckled down for the ride. There were packs of idiots, sure, but communities as a whole were taking preventative measures.

 

And yet, I’d watch CNN during breaks from online classes and see the death toll tick up, feeling an insurmountable sense of loss. I kept telling myself it’d be over soon. We all know now that it wouldn’t be – writing this a year out, we’re still looking at least another season of restricted life. In March, it looked like it’d be better in May, and when May came, we were certain that things would be cool by the time we went back to school. 

 

Reality set in by August, but by then I found it odd how I was adjusting to the new normal.

 

I was living with seven other people – some of my closest friends. We had signed the lease back in January of 2020, so far before we could have known the shitshow that was about to unfold. We tried our best to be safe, but no one was willing to fully isolate. With seven sets of pods, the social circle was larger than I was used to. With every new individual someone saw, I could swear I felt my chest tighten just a little bit more.

 

As summer transitioned to fall, I’d wake up with a sore throat, as I have my whole life. But now, it had a certain implication. I’d press my fingers to my pulse as I’ve been doing all these years and try to remind myself that this is baseline for me, this is who I’ve always been – if Claritin makes the sniffing go away, it’s not COVID-19. That’s the logic, right?

 

But my hypochondria never bowed to logic. In the middle of a date, I snuck into my bedroom and pressed the thermometer into my mouth. I had woken up earlier that day with the barest scratch in my throat, and my chronic dehydration made my mouth feel oddly hot. I remember sitting on my bed with my legs crossed as my heart slammed against my ribcage. I tried to calm my breathing as the numbers ticked up. I had hit over 100 and I thought I was about to die. I thought that this was it, I had COVID, and I infected my housemates and the guy I was dating at the time, and I’d have to sit in my own sweat as I sank into some heavy, life-changing sickness.

 

Fifteen minutes later, after I had rounded out my breathing and drank water; my temperature had returned to a safe 98.6. I promised myself that I wouldn’t use the thermometer during a panic attack again.

 

My life during the climax of the pandemic can be summarized in vignettes. My eating slowed and my appetite dropped – I became permanently cold, nearly shaking, which I tended to subconsciously interpret as a sign of fever. Staying in my bedroom when any of my roommates had a guest over that wasn’t a significant other. Pushing my hair away from my neck in the passenger seat and pressing my face close to the blasting AC, praying for my body to slow down. I had to know where everyone had been, who everyone had seen, and I was tearing myself apart. I was temperamental, and frequently tearful. Masks didn’t make me feel more secure, no, because I was certain that it would be my luck to be part of that small percentage that would manage to get infected regardless.

 

My mental health has been contingent on social interaction for years, and suddenly the thought of being close enough with most people, even my housemates, to make conversation was capable of making me nauseous. I ate myself alive. I lost 25 pounds and I was gaunt. My clinical anxiety was in a drastic state of flux thanks to nothing more than bad timing – processing old trauma and a relationship that wasn’t healthy for me, not understanding how to work without killing myself, and to top it off, my hypochondria chipping away at any concept of physical health that I had.

 

All these factors fused together in some kind of perverted tsunami and I found myself in a fetal position by January, swallowing bites of toast and taking breaks from Zoom class because I couldn’t keep myself from crying.

 

I went home for about two weeks. I couldn’t live the way I had been anymore – it simply wasn’t sustainable.

 

So, I took action. I moved across town, into a less-populated, more-vaccinated household. I integrated something as simple as regular walks into my routine, and the added exercise worked wonders. I began to see friends, masked. I took Vitamin D supplements and went to therapy twice a week until I was ready to go once a week, then once every other week.

 

I still wake up some days convinced that even though I’ve lasted a year evading COVID-19, my time has arrived. North Carolina weather consistently shifting from 30 degrees to 70 doesn’t help. My throat breaks out in scratches and I have to count my pulse again.

 

I do not take out my thermometer. I drink some water. I remind myself of my baseline. I remind myself that I’m being safe. I remind myself that it’s almost over. I remind myself that we’ll be facing a newer, better world, hopefully by next fall. Life, after all, never ended; even with the hysteria, I loved during the pandemic, and I adventured. I leaned on my friends and pushed myself to grow professionally. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt and tears spilled out of my eyes. I danced the way I used to in clubs and at parties – albeit on a far smaller scale, but I still shook it out until I felt properly freed.

 

We all lost a year of our lives. It wasn’t just me, and that’s something to seek solace in. We’re all waiting for safety. We’re all mourning our social lives, and the relationships that couldn’t brave the isolation and the people we were unable to properly bury. We’re surrounded by death and stuck in a dying world. 

 

Some of us were – are – more terrified than others, but it all comes in waves. Eat. Take steps. Swallow the fear, even for just a minute. The panic will end. Just hold out a little longer, because there will be a future where breathing will be easy again.