Q&A With the Author

There are several reasons. My original posts on Facebook from when I was in the hospital attracted a lot of followers, and after I got out, many of them encouraged me to write a book. But at the time, I wanted to put it all behind me. I thought I had said all I wanted to say about the topic.

But one of the things that has struck me is when I tell people about my experience, they are often quite surprised at the depth of my struggle and all the complications and lengthy recovery. They have seen all the headlines about COVID deaths, but maybe because they didn’t get the virus themselves or knew someone who had died from it, they came to believe what many of the anti-vaxxers and COVID conspiracy theorists have been saying, that the dangers of COVID are overblown, that the government overreacted to it with the shutdowns and masks, that it’s really “just a cold” that only is a danger to the elderly and people who are overweight and unhealthy. That sort of misinformation and distortion is still being spread today by people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan, people with huge audiences.

So, in my small way, I wanted to write a book about my grim experience with COVID, with all the gruesome details, and remind people that COVID is a dangerous disease with all sorts of complications that can affect anyone. It’s still killing people today, and we need to be reminded of that. 

The COVID conspiracy theories and misinformation have done more to sow distrust and division in this country than anything else, not only in our government but in basic science and the healthcare profession. This is a sad byproduct of the pandemic. Science has been twisted for political gain, and trust in the medical profession is at an all-time low.  It’s led to widespread vaccine hesitancy, people who buy into the bullshit and don’t follow the advice of healthcare experts. As a result, the vast majority of people dying from COVID today are dying because they are not vaccinated. It’s why the vaccination rate in the U.S. today is only around 70%, while in many other countries, including Portugal where I live, the rate is more than 90%. If people don’t trust the experts, the very people who are working to keep us safe, and instead listen to people like Tucker Carlson or FOX News, then many more people — thousands of people — are going to die needlessly of COVID or future viruses. It's going to make responding to the next pandemic so much more difficult.

The aloneness. Because COVID is so contagious and so dangerous, I was effectively in solitary confinement. My only personal interaction with people was with the doctors and nurses, who were so heavily masked and robed in protective gear that it was like talking to robots. There were plenty of people interacting with me online, responding to my Facebook posts, and I got regular calls from family and friends, although talking was difficult because it made me cough. But for the most part, for long stretches of the night and day, I was alone. It made me think about all the hundreds of thousands of people who died from COVID, alone, without the touch of their loved ones, no one talking to them or holding their hands. It’s an awful way to go. 

You know, it’s odd to say this now, but despite me being unable to breathe on my own and spending two weeks in intensive care, it never really occurred to me that I could die, and most of the time, I never felt very sick. I’m a pretty positive guy, I felt like I was in good hands with all the care I was getting, and I just felt like, well, I’ll get through this. It will pass, like a cold. It was only later, in talking with the doctors and nurses, that I came to understand that I was in tough shape. I should have figured it out, that I was in intensive care for a reason. The doctors weren’t letting me go home because they had seen this thing turn on a dime. One minute a patient seemed reasonably well, like he was recovering, and then died the next day from respiratory collapse. That’s what they were worried about.

But there were some scary times, like the night my heart rate went up to 160 beats per minute for no reason, and stayed there for 10 hours. They had to shock me with the paddles to get it all under control. That was bit concerning. And once my blood pressure got really low, enough so the nurse came in and stayed with me for about an hour giving me meds and keeping an eye on my vitals. She was obviously concerned. But I was a bit oblivious, which is probably a good thing, I guess.

I say this many times in the book: no one knew anything. There's a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking now about decisions that were made about masks and shutdowns, but we need to cut the experts some slack. This was a new, deadly, complex virus and no one knew at the time how to combat it. The decisions they made were made with the best intentions based on the best information at the time. But that information changed. At first, we thought the virus was spread by contact, so everybody washed their hands, used hand sanitizer, washed down their groceries and deliveries. Then it turned out that COVID was spread by droplets in the air, so everybody masked up. These aren't flip-flops or lies, as some on the right maintain. This was simply following the science.

I saw this first-hand in the hospital. The doctors were doing everything they could to save my life, but they really didn't know if anything they were doing actually helped. They were throwing all kinds of experimental drugs at me, but we don't know to this day if any of them worked. It was a journey into the unknown, for everybody.

That the COVID virus is a very dangerous, lethal disease and we shouldn’t take it for granted. The vaccine has allowed us to get things back to normal, to a point, but in many ways, it has lulled us into thinking we no longer have anything to fear. Maybe this particular virus has been conquered, but it can mutate into a new variance that could put us right back into 2020 with mask mandates and shutdowns. We need to be vigilant about that. We're very fortunate that a vaccine was developed so quickly. It's truly a marvel of science. But we have to remember that scientists have been working on an AIDS vaccine for decades with no success. Same with Ebola and Sars. The next pandemic might fall into that category, and we won't get a vaccine for years. 

The second thing I’d like people to get is, to stop listening to the anti-vaxxers and COVID conspiracy kooks. Turn off FOX. Listen to the scientists, the healthcare professionals, the experts in the field. Read the peer-reviewed studies. Get the facts, and get your boosters. I’m convinced that all the misinformation and ignorance out there about COVID is more dangerous than the virus itself. There's a direct line from the COVID "infodemic" to the lies and fake news about the 2020 election being stolen that's infecting our politics. It's OK to be skeptical, to get second opinions about everything. But when skepticism becomes outright disbelief in basic science and quantifiable evidence, that puts us in a very dangerous place, which unfortunately is where we find ourselves today.