CW: Mention of fear of death, bodily fluids, despair
Happy new year.
So guess what, i just about made it through the night. No really.
Oh, and don’t get me wrong.
It’s not as if i did not hate new year’s eve enough before last night.
Feeling like you are dying does add an extra layer there.
But the currently practiced rituals for the passage into the new calendar year, they are just not for me.
I hate fireworks, loud, drunken parties, the imperative for joyousness and superficiality, plus all the resulting fucking noise. With a passion.
And i hate all this even more in a night i would much rather spend grieving in quiet introspection, hoping to evaluate the ending calendar year with an honest and self-critical look.
But fine. Can’t change that shit.
Under capitalism firework and booze companies must be allowed to shift their product. And that’s why all our rituals and celebrations have turned into nothing else but loud and vulgar orgies of consumption.
We refuse to participate. It does not change a thing, though. But why should we give into these bullshit celebrations, that we both hate?
We just try to ignore the entire farce.
And so last night, we did not change much to our normal routine. We ate normal food, went to bed at the normal time, which means early. Just like we always do.
Our hope was that we might fall asleep before the big ruckus and maybe, with the help of our pink noise machine, won’t get woken up when the big bangers among their silly fireworks get blasted into the dark night sky.
This plan never works. We usually do get woken up when they play war outside.
But it never hurts to try. One night, a while ago, i did manage to sleep through it all. That was a good new year’s eve.
And so last night i was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed. But as i finished brushing somehow a cough was triggered.
And then somehow my air duct got clogged and i started to choke.
In a flash i noticed that i could no longer draw in any breath. Since the coughing had emptied my lungs, i started to gasp for air. But no air made it past the blocked spot.
First i tried to cough some more, in the hope that this could maybe open my pharynx or dislodge the phlegm in that way.
But not a chance.
My desperate attempts to catch some air into my lungs grew louder and louder.
It took my partner, who had already been in bed with the doors closed, a moment to hear me fighting. When she did, she ran to me, asking me what she should do.
She tried the heimlich maneuver. It didn’t help.
At this point i thought, this is it. This is how i am going to die. In a moment of gallows humor i had earlier during the evening told myself, too bad that 2023 is ending, i would have liked this number as my date of death.
Had i maybe concluded too early?!
The choking lasted maybe a minute or two. But it sure felt like it lasted forever.
Finally i managed to get a little bit of air through the clogged spot and back into my aching lungs. This was after i had lifted my arms up and pressed my chest against the door frame. Maybe this move had helped to shift the muck just about enough.
Slowly and over the next 10 minutes my breathing started to improve. But now the damn cough was back. And this time it scared me.
Carefully i started to evacuate an incredible amount of foamy and very sticky sputum, not an unfamiliar occurrence for me. The stuff kept coming out for close to half an hour. There is no way to say how much it was in quantity. But it was a lot.
The foamy sputum looked like glue and even felt to the touch like it.
So, uhm.
While it was one of the worst attacks, this was not the first time that this has happened to me.
I believe that i have LongCOVID and the cough/sputum thing is a common symptom in older folks with the disease.
Since march of 2020 this has happened to me at least five or actually maybe closer to ten times. In various degrees of severity.
In more recent times, what has made the situation a lot worse is that i no longer see a possibility how i could receive help.
If only i had a doctor i could trust enough to call in such an instance. I do not.
If only i would feel comfortable to call an ambulance to be taken to the ER. I do not.
And, this should go without saying, to no longer be able to trust the medical system in the country where you live, does not help. When you are choking on your own phlegm.
Nope.
Tested that for you.
Ever since medical facilities have stopped masking or taking any other precautions to try prevent COVID-19 i have lost all my trust in medical doctors and in this medical system.
Gone. My trust is broken for good, i think.
With all the information we now have on COVID-19 and LongCOVID, the effects it can have on immune systems, our brain, the strokes, the long term debilitation and even on our fertility, it is unfathomable to me how we could have arrived at this point.
What a fucked up situation. Most of the medical system now actively participates in the normalization of COVID19 (a disease, mind you, that i’m fairly sure would kill me should i get re-infected with it).
So yesterday, taking things back to the concrete situation, as is was gasping for air, and if it had gotten worse, it would have presented me with an impossible choice.
Either my partner would call an ambulance and they would take me to an ER, where doctors and nurses and other patients would be running around without masks. Which might very well get me infected with COVID as things stand.
Or i decide to rather die at home.
And presented with that choice, i would have chosen to rather die at home. Where i am at least a little comfortable, with my beautiful partner is next to me. Instead of taking the risk of getting infected — in a medical facility of all places — to then die anyway.
So let it be known, i am one person, for whom the organized abandonment, that we are experiencing in this shit country, has become an impossible choice.
The lifting of the most basic safety precautions in medical facilities has made my life much more stressful.
Should i need to go to an ER, i would much rather die at home, than expose myself to the risk.
I would much rather die, at home and in peace, than give myself into the hands of these incompetent ass clowns, who call themselves medical doctors in this joke of a country, risking a re-infection with this insidious disease while doing so.
So let it be known, this is on you, the normalizers, the public health “experts” who gave up on us and the media who failed to question this. And also on a general public, who bought this bullshit hook, line and sinker.
My father was a medical doctor, who died almost 30 years ago. I used to trust in medicine when he was still around. And although i can’t be sure of it, but the way i knew him, i think he would have been appalled to see what is happening in this pandemic.
Do yourselves a favor, please. Read Inflamed by Marya Rupa Marya and Raj Patel.
I made this video in the fall of 2022, then lost my courage to publish it. I recently released it. It’s embarrassing, but since it expresses some of the same thoughts, i’ll post it here.