Being sick is still okay.

Sunday I decided to get rid of an old wooden playground set that we installed in our backyard 20 years ago. The wood was rotting and the whole thing was unstable. No one has played on it in years.

I began cutting the wood down so I could fit it in the back of my truck to take to the dump. I noticed while doing so that I started having a hard time breathing. Then before I got smart enough to realize I should be wearing a mask as I was cutting I took a deep breath and I inhaled something that I knew wasn’t right. It was some kind of mold spores.

The next morning I woke up with a temperature of 101 degrees, my chest was full of fluid and I couldn’t stop coughing. Fortunately, I was off on Monday and Tuesday of this week so I knew I would have time to recover to get back to work today. That didn’t work out like I planned because I am in no shape to go back to work.

The point of me telling you this is not for sympathy. The reason why I am writing about this today is that I wanted to talk about the reactions I got when I told people I wasn’t feeling well.

In today’s world being sick especially with the symptoms I have everyone is concerned that you might have COVID-19. Even though I know exactly how it happened I still am being questioned if I got tested, need to get tested, or plan on getting tested for the coronavirus. The same thing happened when my allergies flared up several months ago after cutting down a bunch of dry grass for two days. It was asked, “Are you sure it’s allergies?”

I understand that some people are hypersensitive about COVID-19 and there is a lot of paranoia out there. While I don’t wish to share my thoughts on the pandemic I will just say I am not one of those people. Sometimes having allergies is just having allergies. Sometimes getting an infection from doing something stupid like cutting moldy wood without a mask is just an infection. Not everything is related to coronavirus.

We get sick. We’re human. Don’t panic. It’s okay.