An Over-The-Top COVID-19 Intervention
Tags: Covid 19, Science, Nonrational Experiences, Spirituality, Self

An Over-The-Top COVID-19 Intervention

If you put them all together in a single day, you really have to work hard to rationalize the whole of it away

At the end of October 2019 my five-year-old granddaughter, with the help of her mom, sent me a video asking me to please come visit them. She was so cute in the video that I tried to buy tickets that day.

I had been planning on visiting them, as is my habit; but the logistics were difficult that Fall because my partner was going to Austria for a course, and I was finding it difficult to make arrangements for our dog. My granddaughter’s birthday is in December and I usually visit the States then and stay for the holidays.

But my first attempt to buy tickets ran into some difficulties with the airline website, so I wasn’t able to buy the tickets until the next day — for a departure two weeks later. For some reason, on the first attempt, I couldn’t get the website to allow me to purchase the flights that I wanted.

When it came time two weeks later to check in for the flight, it was very full, especially in economy, so I couldn’t get a window seat, which I prefer; instead I had to take an aisle seat.

The next morning, my partner and I jumped into the car at 6:45 am with my gift-filled valise, and our dog, to head to the train, which I would take to Paris, and then make my way to Charles de Gaulle Airport by an RER train.

I’ve made this trip so many times myself and with my partner, as well as frequently driving older neighbors to the same train station whenever they travel. I knew the way, and what to expect. It was off-season, so I wasn’t expecting much traffic, and it takes about 50 minutes to get to the station, so we left with an hour and twenty-five minutes to get there, which was plenty of time.

We took the dog with us because my partner was going to stop on the way back at a favorite place where she and the dog like to take long walks at a cold stream that comes up from underground there.

There was nothing special happening, but we ran into a lot of obstacles on the way — slow moving trucks, distracted drivers, and little “voiture sans permis” cars that don’t require a license to drive, but can only go 45 kilometers-an-hour, which is half-speed on the route we were taking. Then there was congestion as we approached the small city of Brive — for no apparent reason — and once we were in the city itself just before 8:00am, there was the expected rush of people driving to work. It wasn’t a normal trip and it didn’t go as planned.

We arrived at the station one minute before the train was scheduled to leave.

I jumped out of the car, grabbed my valise, and flew into the lobby of the train station. As I ran through the waiting room, I saw that my train was not on the main track just outside the waiting room, but was half way across the dozen-or-so tracks. This meant that I had to run down stairs, through a tunnel, and then back up stairs to the correct track, and I had about thirty seconds.

But it didn’t matter, the doors on the train — which was clearly visible because there were no other trains in the station — were already closing, and as I got to the head of the stairs to descend, I could see it was already moving. I quickly called my partner and told her to not leave yet. But I think she already knew that I hadn’t made the train.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t another train that would leave for Paris early enough for me to catch an RER train once there, to get to the airport in time for my flight.

When I got back to the car, we quickly discussed what to do, and decided to take the autoroute to the next stop of the train at Limoges. It was only an hour’s drive and the train took an hour and a quarter to get there, so off we went, passing through the same commuter traffic to get back to the autoroute to Limoges.

After exiting at Limoges, we started for the train station and at the very first red light, I looked at my phone’s map display which showed it would take us five minutes to get to the station. The train would leave in four.

We missed it again!

Rather than make the effort, we decided to make our way back to the autoroute and proceed once more to the next stop of my train at La Souterraine, which was only about thirty-five minutes away.

We arrived in the small rural station with one minute to spare. I jumped out of the car, grabbed my valise, turned around to see the train closing its doors, too far away to make it in time.

Third miss!

We quickly talked about what to do, and decided to continue on to the train’s next stop, Argenton-sur-Creuse. The train would make it in 29 minutes according to the schedule, and our maps app said we would make it in 30. I drove faster.

We arrived in Argenton-sur-Creuse and were less than half a kilometer from the station, with four minutes before the train left. We were going to make it!

Suddenly, there was a very loud metallic “bang!” under the car in the rear. For a very brief moment I hesitated to stop. But the thought of something major being wrong with the car and my partner getting stuck taking care of it flashed quickly through my brain, so I quickly braked slowed and pulled into a parking lot.

I got out to inspect the damage, and found nothing. I went around the whole car on my hands and knees and could see nothing wrong. I thought that it must have been something on the road, so I walked back to where it happened, but there was nothing visible anywhere on the road, or alongside it on a sidewalk. I even looked around for a plate or manhole cover that might have been the cause, but there were none in the area.

I ran back to the car, raced to the train station, and watched the train pull away as I pulled up to the terminal.

Fourth miss.

We discussed just driving the rest of the way to Paris, rather than try again to race the train to the next stop. The problem was that I had to drive to Charles de Gaulle airport, considering the traffic around Paris, we wouldn’t make it on time. She found an RER train — one only — that I could catch at the Massy–Palaiseau RER station, south of Paris, that would take me to the airport in time to catch my flight. Massy–Palaiseau was two-and-a-half hours away by car. All I could think about was my disappointed granddaughter’s face. We went for it, but it was going to be close.

At Massy–Palaiseau, we arrived with only a few minutes before the train would leave, so I did my “jump out of the car, grab my valise, and run” act one more time, zig-zagging through the heavy, but slow moving traffic to get to the station on the other side of the road. As I cleared the road, just in front of the station, a very large man literally jumped in front of me, blocking my way, excitedly calling to me “Monsieur! Monsieur!” with some brochures about something or other in his hand. I just ran around him, as if I was playing American football, dodging someone trying to tackle me, leaving him insulted in my wake. I raced up the stairs, quickly found a ticket machine, bought a ticket and raced down to the platform and jumped through the closing doors.

I made it to my plane.

My partner spent the rest of the day, late into the evening, completing the one thousand kilometer round-trip, with the dog still in the back of the car, looking worried because he hadn’t had a walk yet.

And as I boarded the plane and found my seat, I discovered I was in the middle of a group of about 15 to 20 Chinese tourists, sitting all around me. The seat next to me was now empty, so whoever had originally reserved it had obviously moved, but there was an older woman slouched in the window seat, doing an amazing imitation of a dead body, with half open eyes and her head leaning against the fuselage.

She coughed. A deep, hacking cough.

“Wonderful!” I thought, chiding myself, and feeling rather stupid, because I had a box of anti-viral face-masks at home, which I had bought after the last time I got sick on a flight — but I hadn’t brought one with me.

I got sick two days after arriving in New York.

My symptoms were flu-like, a bad cough, some nasal congestion, exhaustion (but that might have been travel-related as well), neck pain, a fever of some sort, alternating with chills, and the one really weird thing: I woke up the morning after getting sick with an eye filled with blood, looking very much like I had been stabbed in the white of my eye with a pencil. I spent the next week confining myself to my room, so I wouldn’t get anyone else sick. Usually, when I have the flu, it’s over very quickly. This stuck around.

I still had a small cough and a bloodshot eye when I went to my granddaughter’s class the following week to show them pictures of castles and painted prehistoric caves from where I live in France. My granddaughter tells everyone I live on another planet…

When I returned to France, my partner and I had organized my return and her departure to Austria in such a way that I had to go take a train to Bordeaux from Paris so that we could hand-off the car there. I had scheduled a TGV train before I had left the State, forgetting about my problem with trains. I had left very little time to change terminals, after I collected my bag, but I thought, what could go wrong? I waited forty-five minutes for my bag and missed the train. I changed my ticket for another, arriving late at night, and settled in for a six hour wait at the airport.

The thing is, before my sudden decision to go to the States, my partner and I were talking about my going to Austria with her, possibly taking the same course as she, and perhaps visiting some of her friends and family there. Instead, we settled on this other schedule, and she booked her flights so that she would return directly after her course ended. She arrived in Bordeaux the same day as a friend and neighbor of ours arrived from London for a four day weekend.

The next morning, I went with him to the local tax office, fifteen minutes away, to help translate for him while he was trying to correct a property tax issue. He coughed the whole time. He said it was a “just little cold.”

But it was a dry cough.

The following morning, I drove another friend to a government office in the nearby city of Perigueux in the morning. She also needed me to help translate for her. I was fine. But as we were driving home after lunch in Perigueux, I could feel a little “tickle” in my throat. She gave me a cough drop.

In the early morning hours, the next day, I woke with shivers and a very high fever. Over the course of the next three days, my fever went over 41 degrees Centigrade (106+ degrees Fahrenheit).

I went to the weekend emergency doctor on Sunday afternoon as a compromise with my partner who wanted me to go to the hospital. I don’t like hospitals, and have only been in one twice in my 60+ years: when I was born, and once when I fractured my ankle. And that was enough.

The doctor felt it was just a flu, and sent me home with the admonition to drink lots of fluids.

My partner worked tirelessly to try to keep my fever down, getting up every two hours or so and wrapping towels moistened with a vinegar-water solution around my ankles and wrists, and she mixed up a number of essential oils with anti-viral effects and put them in a pot of water that she boiled, and then had me place my face over the steaming pot, with a towel over my head, breathing deeply. That really helped my lungs open up, and I credit the anti-viral essential oils for keeping my air passages clear. I kept doing that for days because I really found it helpful.

I couldn’t eat anything for five days because everything tasted like metal. I just drank hot water — lots of hot water.

And my right eye ‘exploded’ again.

Throughout the first week, my head felt like it was underwater, “fuzzy,” and squeezed.

I met with my own doctor on Friday the 20th. She sent me for blood work and a chest X-ray. While my lungs were clear, my ferritin level was three times the suggested upper limit, indicating that I was fighting a massive infection.

I wasn’t able to leave the house until Christmas Eve.

And I wasn’t the only one that got sick. My friend from London infected me, but my partner never showed symptoms, he also infected a friend of his, but seemingly not his wife, and the wife of a neighbor, but not her husband. And an electrician.

I had infected my other friend, who I had driven to Perigueux the prior Friday. She called from the local hospital on Tuesday evening. She had collapsed on the floor of a supermarket that morning, or Monday — she wasn’t sure — and couldn’t get up. She just wanted to sleep. She was rushed to the hospital by the Gendarmes who arrived and who called an ambulance. She had a build-up of fluid in her lungs, as well as a cough.

All of this happened before the name “COVID-19” or even “novel coronavirus” were known. My friend who arrived with it had been infected within three days of the “first” official case in China, but he was working for the two weeks before he flew to France on a project in Scotland.

And in March, another friend called me to wish me happy birthday from Burma. She had also traveled that same week that I became infected, and within a couple of days of having arrived in Burma for a three month meditation retreat, she fell ill with similar symptoms.

She swore the only reason that she survived was because “a little old Vietnamese nun” noticed her passed out on her bed and started giving her medicinal herbs. This friend had passed through Frankfurt airport, on to Dubai, and then to Burma.

And last week I heard from another friend living in London, and he too had been ill in early December with similar symptoms.

So, it appears that this virus was widely distributed before even the first official case was recorded.

None of us here, except for the friend who had collapsed, went to the hospital, and we weren’t tested either — because there were no tests for the virus that hadn’t yet been identified. Even my friend who had been rushed to the hospital hasn’t been counted as a victim of COVID-19.

I did some research after my second illness in December, to see if there was a really “bad” flu around. I found articles in the States saying that the flu season there had started particularly earlier last fall, which “may be attributed to the early rise of influenza B — a strain of the virus that typically emerges toward the end of flu season.”⁠1 It was a bad flu, with many more cases than normal — almost 50% more. But no one was being tested for a novel coronavirus.

According to the quoted article, there were “about 910 deaths, 16,000 hospitalizations, 800,000 doctors’ visits and 1.7 million cases of the flu connected to the 2019–2020 flu season, according to the CDC” — as of some date before the 12th of December publication of the article.

I personally believe that this outbreak here in December died off because we all stayed home, away from everyone else. But honestly, there is no way to know the truth.

And I also think, that even though the series of hurdles that I went through to get to the States, as insane as they seem — or as insane as my efforts to overcome them seem — could be explained in a rational way, or excuses could be made for almost all of them, except the loud metallic bang under my car, that I felt under my feet and heard very distinctly — it was loud. Yet, it left no trace — neither damage to the car, nor debris on the road — and can’t be as easily dismissed out of hand. A recent major servicing of the car by the dealer found no damage anywhere.

But if you put them all together in a single day, you really have to work hard to rationalize the whole of it away.

For me, this event was just one more nonrational experience in my life, which I accept as just that, by which I mean, I accept that it happened without any possibility of rational explanation, and without any attempt to create any an explanation.

And I am as dismissive of the position that there must be a rational explanation for everything, even if we cannot find it, as a holder of such a position would be dismissive of any possibility of nonrational, unexplainable events occurring in our lives.

But theirs is too neat a totalizing position, that can never be proven scientifically.

As I pointed out in the dialog Entertaining The Nonrational When Your Received Worldview Sucks At Life, Kurt Gödel showed that this assumption: that to be true, something must be proved through verification, simply conflates truth and proof, because science has never proven that nothing can be true unless it is verifiable — it has merely adopted the assertion that to be true is to be verified. That is, Science has never verified its most central tenet of the Scientific Method.

But more to the point: for something to be verified to be true, the fact must already be true. Verification adds nothing to the fact, just to its recognition, thus there are necessarily more true things in realty than have been proven to be true. And thus, the validity — it’s truth value — of the belief that something must be verified to be true is not itself a verified truth, nor is it even potentially true since there are more true things — necessarily — than verified true things. Verificationism is just a convention of Science, and nothing more.

ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།

I see now that my desire to please my granddaughter, by coming to visit her, caused me to ignore the obvious effort manifesting that day to keep me home. And the thing is, when I texted my travel dates to my family, I gave only the day — “the 13th” — and not the month, and they had assumed I was coming December 13th because I usually visit them in December.

In hindsight, it is not hard to see that day’s events as an effort to protect me, from what might have been, not one, but two cases of COVID-19. Because neither infection would have happened if I hadn’t made that trip to the States. I would have been in Austria when my friend arrived from London. Instead, I lost a month due to illnesses and put my friends and family in danger.

But you have to decide for yourself whether you have the courage to follow the obvious signs in your life.

Perhaps, after reading these twelve accounts of visceral dreams, unexplainable events, and physical interventions in my life, that I have recounted for you in this section of Tranquillity’s Secret, you too might open up your horizons just a little bit and accept that whatever else might be at play, there is a loving and spontaneous responsiveness present within each our lives — if only we pay attention to it, and not ignore the help when it is given, as I did this time, much to my detriment. If I had seen the days events — as they were unfolding — for what they were, I would have saved myself having to suffer through the worst illness in my life.

ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།

Footnote:

¹ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/12/12/flu-what-is-influenza-type-b/4407753002/