Fainting Couch

I was teaching Mrs. Dalloway when I got sick. I had thought in the summer before I was sick, oh this will be interesting. I will teach this novel, already assigned, in a plague year, and we will have a vision of what life will be like when the plague is over. I thought it would be an opportunity to talk about life after the pandemic, when we could walk around our own Londons buying flowers and sitting on park benches and going to parties with our oldest friends. I thought it might be useful for the students. I didn't know it would be useful for me. I didn't know that I would be trapped within the plague.I taught the first week outside because I was not assigned a classroom where the students could sit six feet apart. The students did not like being outside. It was hot and they had allergies. It was not a scenario conducive to the discussion of modernism. Once we had a classroom, we moved indoors. Five days later, I was sick.It could have been the ventilation in the classroom. It could have been my mask, which was not an N95. It was pretty. It had cats wearing masks on it. It could have been that where I was sitting at the front of the classroom put me at a vector from a student who happened to have a high viral load. It could have been my student. It could have been anybody's student from that day. It could have been one of the other instructors.I try not to think that Mrs. Dalloway made me sick, but sometimes I think it did.I should tell you something about Mrs. Dalloway, but if you are reading this essay, you probably already know something about Mrs. Dalloway. A woman named Clarissa Dalloway buys flowers in the morning, naps in the afternoon, and hosts a party at her house in the evening. In the parallel plot, a man named Septimus Smith walks around London and then jumps from the window of his flat to his death. He is a veteran of the war. Clarissa is a veteran of the virus. Septimus and Clarissa are people who can't get over things.At the beginning of the pandemic, there were a series of articles talking about how the novel celebrates the tasks of everyday living and the excitement of moving among strangers in a big city like London. It was what people were nostalgic for. I remember reading the articles when I prepared to teach the novel. I remember reading about Elizabeth Outka's book Viral Modernism: The Influenza and Pandemic and Interwar Literature. I have not read this book. I meant to, and then I got sick. It looks great, something I would have loved to read before I got sick, but not something I have the ability to read now, because of my cognitive impairment. Outka writes about Clarissa Dalloway, “Clarissa is caught in a state of living death, her body weakened, and her own agency diffuse. While at times she revels in the life and energy of the London day, her body is exhausted, and thoughts of death are never far from her mind.” Diffuse. What a fun word. The kind of word I can't remember any more. Later in her book, Outka writes about zombies and their connection to memories of the pandemic. I love the idea of Mrs. Dalloway and zombies.I always wanted zombie movies to slow down and spend time on zombie culture. How zombies thought of zombie life, of what relationships zombies had with each other and the business of eating brains. When my daughters were interested in Monster High, my favorite monster was Ghoulia Yelps, the nerdy zombie. Now I feel like my brain is being eaten by my own body and I am living in zombie culture. My hungry, hungry brain, now starved for oxygen instead of feeling desperate for color, for excitement, for something new.My big, beautiful brain, of which I was so enormously proud, a Lisa Simpson through and through, is gone. I catch glimmers, a flicker of synapses, on good days. The thing that I thought made me be me, isn't. There is something else that is beyond intellect or imagination. Kindness? Animal instinct? An urge to keep breathing and move toward the sun? Like a plant?I can't read Woolf any more. Not because I don't want to. Because my brain won't process her sentences. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am! The words form an impenetrable wall on the page. To look at a wall of its text is to see not just a language I don't know, but an alphabet I don't know. Klingon. Linear B. I always judged people who write rather than read. Now I'm one of them. It feels like cheating, like I am talking without doing any listening. Not that I've done any writing, other than making my pieces of notes for this essay. Words have lost their shine.What I've lost is Mrs. Dalloway itself. I might get it back. Some people with my medical conditions do improve enough to read complicated texts. I might also lose my ability to read even as much as I have it right now. I can read newspaper articles and medical tweets and even some genre novels, the kind that have zombies or dystopias rising out of a pandemic-destroyed planet. Between climate change and the pandemic, they feel more real than anything else anyway. There is a yellow haze from Canadian wildfires as I finish writing this sentence.What a wonderful way to infect people a party is. Or a city. Which is to say, a gigantic ongoing party. I don't live in a city. I live in a small college town in West Virginia where I teach English, sometimes things like Mrs. Dalloway. This is why I was teaching in person in the fall of 2020. Apparently, Mrs. Dalloway is essential.The day before I got sick, I went for a bike ride along the C&O Canal. It was the day after Labor Day. I thought, yes, I am scared to do my job, and yes, this semester will be hard, but I have to keep living and enjoying the things I like to do, such as bike riding along the Potomac. I have a picture of me on my bike, the Potomac glittering down below, taken by my friend. I then had to tell her to test for the virus. Now I am an indoor cat. I have purchased two fainting couches. If I have to be Victorian, I will be as Victorian as I can be.One of the conditions I have now as part of my Long COVID experience is called POTS, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and it was first described in Victorian times. The original term for POTS was soldier's heart. The doctor who named it, Jacob Mendes Da Costa, saw that soldiers in the Civil War had a hard time marching after a fever. Chest pains, palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness, fatigue that went beyond what was expected based on their exertions. Because I live between Harpers Ferry and Antietam, in Civil War Land, I am always seeing ghosts out of the corner of my eye, an army of unhappy Septimuses. It's POTS that makes it so hard to stand. It is the POTS that pushes me toward the fainting couch. When we stand, our brain does not receive enough oxygen.When I look up the POTS hashtag, there are always pictures of pots for cooking and pots for plants, as well as player-of-the-season tweets about soccer. The pictures of the plants come as a relief. Pots are so pretty to look at. The problem is when the player of the season vote happens during premier league soccer, and I have to dig through pictures of all the pretty young men who have had good seasons to get to what I want.To determine you have POTS, they put you on a table and tilt you. You might pass out. You might throw up. Those symptoms show that you have passed the test. There is humiliation built in to the procedure. You pass the test when your body fails to perform normally. To pass is to fail. The tilt table is the opposite of the fainting couch. When I had my POTS test, I was so disoriented I had no idea whether it was over or not. I thought we were waiting for the next round. There was no other round. The kind nurse was waiting for me to be able to get up and walk myself out, while I kept lying there wondering what was next.To write this essay, I had to stop whenever my brain hurt. I mean literally. My brain, my hungry, hungry brain, does not get enough oxygen. If I push myself to write, which is what I have always done, stay in the chair until the work gets done, stay in the chair until the work happens, I risk pushing myself into a crash. When I crash, I have aches and chills, can't remember words, forget what I'm saying in the middle of a sentence and trail off, feel dizzy, nauseous, and feel like I am about to be acutely, as opposed to chronically, ill. My other diagnosis is myalgic encephalomyelitis, what used to be called chronic fatigue syndrome. If I crash too often, I run the risk of moving from being mildly ill to moderately, and from moderate to severe. Mild means I pretty much go to work and hang out at home. Moderate means housebound. Severe means bedbound. It's terrifying.I knew I was becoming Clarissa when every time I would reread the book, I would become closer and closer to her age. I used to be obsessed with the flashback scenes like it was a teen soap opera, waiting for moments about Peter or Sally or Clarissa's beautiful dead sister, killed by a tree branch at the family estate. The sister never makes it out of the flashbacks. Was Virginia trying to get rid of Vanessa, so she didn't have to write about her in this book? As I became middle-aged, Peter and Sally and Clarissa now, in London, in June, were what interested me, and how you could both be yourself now while still being your past self. I thought of the book as a kind of class reunion. When I was planning my 2020 syllabus, before the pandemic started, I was thinking of my 2019 college reunion and my own Peters and Sallys and what it was like to see them again, to dance with them to “Groove Is in the Heart” in the courtyard one more time. It was in college after all, where I read Mrs. Dalloway for the first time.I read it on my own, a used paperback with 20 cents handwritten on the cover in marker. Like Virginia Woolf is something you'd pick up at a garage sale, like Valley of the Dolls or Stepford Wives. I knew to be afraid of her. I'd heard about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf before I'd heard of Virginia Woolf. We read To the Lighthouse in my freshman literature class, not Mrs. Dalloway. Over the course of my lifetime, Mrs. Dalloway has now become the Woolf book, and not To the Lighthouse. (I am rooting for Orlando.) I still have a soft spot for To the Lighthouse. Do we like Clarissa more than Mrs. Ramsay? Is it that we dislike Mr. Ramsay so much? More than we dislike Peter, or Richard? Also, we like Septimus, and there is no Septimus character in To the Lighthouse. Is it that we never get to the lighthouse? We do get to go to the party at the end of Mrs. Dalloway, even if we don't get the reunion of Clarissa, Sally, and Peter that we have been promised. We were promised a lighthouse, and that something would happen once we were there.Is it that we can just not conceive why we never get to the lighthouse? I have always liked to make jokes about not going to places we never seem to reach as “going to the The that has that always to be when we go the trail Harpers Ferry with that we never up enough for. the pandemic started, like the to me. The The The we don't like to be that we are never going to get to go to the the way we wanted to, even if we do get to We won't get to go when we and some of the people we want to go with won't be along for the If it is a some of will have along the Mrs. and Clarissa's sister used to is has might parties an but they as as Mrs. Ramsay or It more fun to be both of them. Also, more fun to be Peter or Or even Septimus, who has and that are beautiful even if they do to wanted Woolf to write about more like me, young and was Clarissa so If I now that there is a novel about a woman in her at being in my one from the itself. the novel had so flashbacks. It to me that Woolf could have it into an novel about who Clarissa to I didn't see that Woolf was the of the plot, a I didn't see that when you are you can live at two or more at was in did Virginia Woolf make Clarissa than she she just feel like she is that an Clarissa is closer to the of dead and in the novel The is where Clarissa first up Mrs. Dalloway is in a reunion. the dead is. Woolf become Clarissa but she is up to just as I did.I used to like Peter a I would go so far as to I had a on My students saw as a man on young I don't like Peter not because of the my students I don't think they are about Peter both as a man and in the way feels to Clarissa in the but because as a who did not do what out to do, closer to me than Clarissa until I got sick. Peter wanted to write, and When I was Peter to write was both like me and also what I wanted to when didn't write after all, and I my own as a who never got that I see myself in as who moved from to out. I had every in the to make myself into the I wanted to every before I got sick. I just thought I had more time.I didn't know I would become Clarissa, but trapped within a feels to say, about her or about me. It is also the flowers is she this be feeling I risk doing I might have to in I might The I in are to in at the My my and my oldest Elizabeth age. My would love to ride a in the city. to the in to by is planning an is Clarissa to go her own flowers on the day she is a during the and her her to sit but she is doing too in one day. has the she won't does Clarissa and move around her I used to be so good at I have all of where I am as if it meant to stand. A party and but I can't get past all the she have to How can she walk up the to her with the where she so she have to with she about from A read while she makes her own I keep on thinking about how Clarissa in It is but in what Is Clarissa to with to become to even want to become she in before she became sick, so it a Long COVID people me with know how to to and is no Because Clarissa before she was sick, her is something in Clarissa's Now I like I am her for being the kind of person who would become from and never get Like Virginia own Or me, wondering whether a of reading about has me to my life on the fainting that this was the life I and not something that happened to on I flowers for I down the of the small town in West Virginia where I I flowers for myself on because after living for in two in and one in I them. I knew was going to be I was the that I knew it was from the pandemic, and we were was about to be a Like Harpers one town from which kept and then became a so instead of you could into the of made up to look like a Harpers Ferry is where his and one of the they you walk into is the of his the where his out during their that called The is so It is like a to think through where they could all day, like a of what life was like before the is my I can't or make about what to The I make do not form in a The I make do not become I a Those of with Long COVID and POTS and might have something with our If a is just one more thing I can't tell in to is I used to teach all the time as an of a way to write about the around and our own as if they were what is writing about is the down of the What happens when we can't tell the we tell the to keep from To and Because our can't but the of our Do we tell the because a life without is a life without If what happens when we are the with the idea that writing has not her see what it In other words, she did the the essay, and to make the but writing her We have the essay, and we the might make but has been both and for her with as well as the that the make it I been able to write I got sick. I can't even which I've always and then the of is of a in of the I used to teach his of until I to why the and then the a the and then the a of was and then the is not much of a The and she didn't but she never got for and was a but because she was a and not a she a was a was an was a woman out on a fainting couch. was a woman on a trying to read about from woman buys then has to her own party because she the a it is a for of with chronic woman buys flowers and has a but never to talk to her to oldest until the book is a else the naps in the park and her a (I would read a novel about Elizabeth Dalloway riding on her every all over London. it an and make it a family to make enough time to get to the they will they We the will never get The for Woolf her about the of in in the Mrs. Dalloway was and as she was writing To the Lighthouse. I can't reread this essay. sentences. To try to reread it makes me feel like I am again, or in a crash. is probably to her Woolf writes about the to be soldiers in the army of the we become I have become a with my soldier's heart. I have become Septimus, much of what she writes about is what she has read about or what she to read when she is sick. I can't but be that she can even if she is to instead of even if she is to instead of are for me now, It is that is the end of the essay, Woolf is a she read by about the of two in one in one in has into as she the death of the and the of Victorian your in so from reading into so into can't The that I have named my own daughters and the of the two to me, but in the of my own morning, I am trying to my own on to words the way Woolf we do when we read while into her diagnosis with but she never know whether or not she did to experience the symptoms of the or not. My students wanted to know, did she get it or I had to I didn't know. In of read a of I didn't know whether she did have Now we know she was with it, and she as but she to read the without the her diagnosis without a feels like off, trying to perform what I can still what my brain can still do, about what I've lost when so people have lost so much their own to this virus. If I have a this me two to I don't I it while I was writing other I it was the thing I've I got sick. It is the thing I have to write I got in 2020. I am not able on days to read what I have My body is My soldier's is I am than I have I am to be now. I am to It always was something that could becoming a who is can always become who is will become If I am a I am a with two fainting couches. My feels Victorian because it is There are people feels Victorian because of I am I know I am I still for the and I could have If I make something it will not feel like such a but I might not be able to make anything I to make both for the and the I have something when I am I feel so from my own life that it is like a that I am When it happens when I am I the if the students think I am when I am just being much of teaching is anyway. won't know I am not in the When it happens and I am it feels like I am enough to be by the of When it happens and I am with my it is It is like and for each other when is in the I do not want to be a for them. I want to be that means right I making notes for this essay, it was a and I was to I was Clarissa's age. I had always thought I would reread Mrs. Dalloway as I got closer and closer to her age. I had read more than one and about reading this book at It is a thing that I it will be after Clarissa's I should to write this until next for the of it all, but I don't know if be able to next I might be a I might be a or a or Or the in this It's one of There is no way to know We tell in to the I writing writing this year, when I got I was with the I still have at the of my a makes it but it is a The is me, I have your brain is a I can it out at any time.I writing the this Now I will be this into my year, as Woolf put it. It is It is after I might be the or We might be the or it is always we might have the

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