Jesus Smells Like Eggs & Bacon and Long Covid is real. 

March, 2021

“You’ve got to get out of your apartment. Drive to the beach.” -V, on yet another 6 am phone call. 

“Promise me you won’t do anything reckless.” -K, after I woke her up, again. 

“Do you want to come over for breakfast?”-B

Jesus smelled like eggs & bacon that day. 

Finding myself in the middle of a nervous breakdown/midlife crisis/lose my shit moment wasn’t how I wanted to start 2021. But let’s be real, in 2020-2021, the world was in its own nervous breakdown moment. 

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December, 2020, right before Christmas

“You absolutely have COVID. Do not leave your apartment.”-The City of New York

Awesome. 

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I’m not sure what your COVID story is. We all have one (lots). I’d started a new job that Fall. I transitioned from nearly two decades of working with middle school kids to running a preschool. Yep. It was weird. But for a million reasons that may never make it to words on paper, I needed to shift. So I did. I was numb and maybe a little dumb, and I’d jumped in with both feet. My biggest obstacles in the Fall of 2019 were wrapped up in teacher perception and preschool admissions. I needed to get another Master’s Degree but that sounded easy (Honestly, it was). 

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Rewind–February 26, 2020, 6:00 am, my cellphone rang.

“The New York Times just sent me home from work. I just got back from Italy. Can I send my kid to school?”

“Please hold” 

“Hi-City of New York-can this family send their kid to school? Yeah, I know it’s early. Right. You say Italy isn’t on the watch list?” 

(Insert gut feeling) “Please keep your daughter at home.” 

3 weeks later…

The world shut down. I drove home to my parents in VA and quarantined there (another story for another day). I built an online platform for preschoolers. I talked teachers off the ledge. I talked myself off the ledge. I took a lot of walks. 

We were taught that COVID was enemy number one. 

And then I got it. 

And I was alone in my tiny NYC apartment…with more than a dozen mice. 

And I was so sick. 

I started begging the mice to make tea. They’d come out of their holes and look at me. 

They didn’t run away but generally seemed annoyed I was in their space. 

The maintenance men in my building did drugs in the basement under my apartment. 

At least I felt like I was on a secondary high. That seemed to help. 

14 days. 14 mice. Marijuana haze. 

My doctor friend came to check in on me. She showed up in full PPE, checked my vitals,and brought me vitamins. She wanted to keep me out of the hospital–my chances weren’t good if I went in. 

And then, the day I got out of quarantine, I went back to work. 

Running the school. 

It seemed like the teachers were always upset. I never gave them enough. They didn’t realize the school had lost so much money. They didn’t get that I didn’t have the luxury to turn down students who didn’t quite fit into our classes. I needed to take every kid who walked in the door. I had to say yes. I had to keep them safe. I had to keep the doors open. And I was still so sick...but I didn’t realize it. 

I’d done my 14 days. I was better, right? Except my heart would pound at weird times. I’d burst into tears on the sidewalk. I’d panic and not be able to breathe. My thoughts would race. I’d break out into a sweat. I couldn’t take a full breath. 

January and February of 2021 were a blur of panic, tears, and breathless walks. 

Finally, a nurse practitioner gave me language. Long COVID. 

No one believed me. I upped my vitamins. 

All the while, some dear friends (FYI-People who lie to you consistently are not dear friends. Lesson learned) were lying to me. They were protecting themselves at any cost, and, as it turns out, lying was part of that. 

And I felt crazy. 

They told me I was insecure. They told me I was making up stories. 

I wasn’t. 

Finally, the day of my second COVID vaccine shot, I learned I’d been right about them. And I lost it. That was the straw. It wasn’t so much about the truth revealed, but the months of lying and neglecting my own voice. 

I was done. I was broken. I took V's advice and drove to the beach. And then I went to my friend's apartment for eggs & bacon.

And Jesus smelled like breakfast that day.

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I’ve come to kind of hate the phrase “nervous breakdown” but here’s the thing-when something breaks down, you know it’s broken. You have no choice but to fix it. Something simply must change.