The Beginning
This is where it all started — a slow burn of confusion, sleepless nights, and strange visions that didn't feel like dreams at all.
When COVID hit me, I wasn't just sick. It was something else entirely. The sickness took me to places I can't fully explain. It started with the diarrhea then the exhaustion. Not the kind where you're tired — the kind where your body feels like it's made of lead and your mind is floating somewhere above it, watching. Soon it became focusing on breathing, fighting for every breath. Then came the dreams. Or were they dreams? I still don't know.
This is how it all started:
We had just returned from a short vacation back to Montana to see family and explore the old haunts. I took the kids back to some mountain lakes I liked to visit when I was a young man. It was a seventeen-mile hike back into the mountain. Having just turned fifty-two, I thought to myself "I better do this while I still can." I didn't know how close to reality that thought was. The trip was great.
On the return, I had a couple teeth acting up and found out I needed to have two wisdom teeth pulled. Ya, I had been putting that off for years. Before the extraction my wife and I planned a weekend trip see our oldest daughter who had not been able the make the Montana trip. It was a great trip; we got ride the motorcycles on windy roads of Missouri. It was a blast; we even got to stop and see our youngest daughter on the way back. Unbeknownst to us, our daughter was exposed to Covid.
Monday morning went as planned, no fever, no sickness; I felt great, a little nervous but great. The extraction went well, no complications, until the text "Dad, I have Covid".
