Annika Taneja speaks about the eight surreal days that she had while waiting for a COVID-19 diagnosis, and how the days alone with herself changed her relationship with her body and with illness. Who is the master—the body, the illness, or the mind she's come to identify with? Who partners up with whom?

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

It started with a fever. 

Normally, I would not have worried over a simple temperature. But as anyone reading this knows, life hasn’t exactly been normal for some time now. And so I dutifully set into motion the process of isolating myself from those I love. I messaged on the family group, a short and sweet “have fever, will be in my room”, before sending off a longer text to my father. There were a number of things to be done. I would need a bunch of supplies for my room, like water, paracetamol and sanitiser. I would also need sole ownership of our shared, second-floor bathroom. One last thing: it would be convenient to put a small table outside my room, for contactless delivery of food and other items. 

Once all of this was over, I locked my door, sat on my bed and began to wait. A born pessimist, I felt it was only a matter of time before the other symptoms showed up, trickling in like guests at a house party. Some too early, and some so late they may as well not have bothered. But by the time the sun had begun to set, no one else had showed. I reached for my thermometer for the 18th time in 9 hours, stuck it in my mouth and waited some more. 

A pitiable 99F. My fever hadn’t budged since I first recorded it that morning. It hadn’t gone up, but it hadn’t come down either, leaving me in a sort of liminal space between perfectly healthy and potentially doomed. It was— or so it felt to me— the longest day of my life. Everything about it, from my fever to the anxiety it caused, was slow-moving, sluggish, unending. It felt like I had a very important case to solve, but only one, rather useless clue. I had to get more information if I was going to uncover the identity of the killer. 

The next day I listlessly watched the sun come up through my window. Sleep, as it turned out, was also a no-show. But I was hopeful: today could only go one of two ways. Either my temperature would go up or it would go away. The investigation resumed. I swallowed emphatically every few minutes, mining my throat for a telltale itch. I moved each limb slowly and purposefully, waiting for one of them to protest. I pressed my Vitamin C supplement down on every inch of my tongue, almost disappointed that it tasted as sharp as ever. 

A steady 99F, even as the sun went blazing down and the night settled into a cool indifference. Another day, another dead end. 

On day three, I was determined to find an answer. I began to Google the dozens of symptoms that had been reported from around the world, trying to learn more about my mysterious-but-actually-not-mysterious-at-all, it's-probably-that ailment. 

I rejected the incoming pep talks from my concerned friends and my well-meaning family. I knew there was a good chance that it wasn’t that; but even then, there was that infinitesimal, insistent chance that it was. I couldn’t trust their diagnoses. After all, the only one who had complete access to the patient was me. But yet again, all my efforts turned out to be in vain. My temperature stayed a cool 99F even as my conversation with my boyfriend heated up into a full-blown argument (apparently, pulsating pain in one’s left elbow is not globally recognised as a symptom) and I went to bed a weepy, defeated mess. 

I’m guessing you’re starting to sense a pattern at this point. You might even say, as my frustrated boyfriend did, that it’s beginning to sound like I wanted to have it. 

I didn’t. 

I just wanted to understand how, in a matter of hours, my body had gone from being my companion and my strength to being a medically inscrutable time bomb. You see, before that fateful day, I was like any young woman in 2020. I worked out, I ate consciously and I believed in the power of self-care. I wore sunscreen, I avoided refined sugar and I moisturised my legs every day, even if I had nowhere to go. My body and I had left the turbulent times of my teenage years and early adulthood behind. We had reached an understanding. I daresay, we maybe even loved each other. But now it felt like my body had rebelled, gone rogue, turned on me—the list of uninspiring turns of phrase is endless. 

So I did what I’ve always done when I’ve had trouble comprehending the world: I turned to books. 

Now, there are a number of disciplines dedicated to the human body. Some, like medicine, are pure science. Others, like body studies, take a more sociological and cultural scalpel to the corporeal form. But while I wasn’t interested in determining the precise location of my stapes, I also wasn’t interested in state regulation of the racialized body. What I was interested in was my body, or what used to be my body and what it had become: kind of sick. 

In an essay titled ‘Body and Self: A Dialectic”, Sally Gadow breaks down the many relationships between the self and the body which, by turn, enables/contains it. If that sounds complicated, well, it is. 

A healthy body, though not endlessly capable, is the desiring self’s vessel in a vast, exciting world. It allows us to do the things we wish to do: legs, walk forward; mouth, take that shot; face, for the love of God, do not cringe. It is, as many dialectical relationships are, a master- slave relationship. What happens during a time of illness, she goes on to argue, may feel like a role reversal but it is simply our body’s assertion that its needs and values are equal to those of the self. 

For Gadow, our assumption that our bodies are subsumed to our selves is an illusion powered by health and youth. When we are young and capable, our bodies represent life. The moment we begin to age—or we fall ill—they begin to represent inaction, inability, and, in terminal cases, death. It feels as though our body no longer follows our commands and we have lost mastery over it: it revolts, it protests, it ceases to function in familiar ways and acquires a new, inscrutable character. It begins to have a temperature of 99F every few hours for no discernible reason. That temperature comes with a headache and your rebellious, rebellious body forces you to close your laptop and give in to its demand for sleep. 

On day five, sitting cross-legged in the liminal space of my isolation chamber, I resumed my readings on the afflicted body, turning to a more familiar name. In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote a slim volume of critical theory titled Illness as Metaphor. She dedicates it to deconstructing the linguistic and metaphorical clutter that has obscured honest conversation around earlier TB and now cancer: what she refers to as “mystery” illnesses. (This was the ’70s after all). Both these afflictions, Sontag finds, have simultaneously fascinated and terrified people through history: each has come to have a sort of mythology around itself. A key part of this mythology is shaped by its vocabulary: “a delicate constitution”, “a long illness”, “a prolonged battle”. 

By contrast, Covid-19 offers just a single word: positive. In fact, it swallows other words into its event horizon, shifting symptoms on the daily: headache, fever, fatigue, soreness, congestion. Each one becoming a synonym for “positive”. I begin to wonder how we will speak of this time once it has passed. Or indeed how, each of us in our private isolation chambers, speaks of it right now. Some may choose to speak in hushed, near-reverent tones, as though addressing it directly is akin to summoning it. Others still may prefer to cut it down to size with nicknames like Miss. Rona (a name I first encountered in memes and have found myself using since). What will the metaphors and synonyms of our modern illness be? I think about the way my loved ones react when I voice my fear of having it, and I decide silence–the very refusal to speak of it at all–is perhaps the strongest contender. 

There is one voice, however, that dares to puncture the silence: the baleful beep of my faithful companion, my digital thermometer. It offers a half-hearted attempt at variety: tonight my temperature is 98.9F. 

By day six, I must confess, I was unravelling. I was restless. I was worried. I had stopped moisturising. Why, my common sense begged of me, should I bother treating kindly a body that was mistreating me? Your common sense may inform you that I was still Covid-maybe. Yet, isolated from the world and imprisoned in my mind, it did not feel as though there was much difference between having it and not having it. The idea that I could have it was enough. After all, there were those who are asymptomatic: their bodies had betrayed them without leaving a clue. 

For comfort and companionship, I turned to Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. Lorde wrote these journals between 1977 and 1979, putting into words her struggle to reclaim her self from her body, and her body from a world that now saw her as a victim of breast cancer. The only path to such a reclamation is, as Sontag insisted, articulation: Lorde names her cancer. She is scared, but equally determined to speak to her fears, to match their gaze and walk alongside them. She is not content to simply let them follow her down the street or enter a room before her. 

By attempting to reconcile her self with her inflicted body, Lorde is doing what Gadow so ardently advocates at the end of her essay: to her, trying to re-slave an ailing body is a doomed endeavour. As Lorde exemplifies in her emphatic rejection of a prosthetic breast, one cannot pretend nothing has changed and hope it will return our past to us. Instead, one must acknowledge the body’s changed reality, its new form, its new value, however “diminished” or “incapable” or “unsexy” it may seem. We must love our body for more than how we use it or how the world views it; contemplate it as more than the sum of its functions. A leg does not cease to be a leg simply because it can no longer walk. But what is a leg that cannot walk? That is up to the self to discover. 

It was, of course, easier said (well, paraphrased) than done. But I began to see something of myself in Gadow’s writing. I had, for the past several days, subjected my body to intense scrutiny, incessant reproach, and immense impatience. I wasn’t trying to deal with my fever. I was trying to play Sherlock, MD. I would know soon enough whether I was positive or not; my father had scheduled a test for the next day. But no matter its outcome, there was nothing I could gain from continuing to treat my body as a problem, a burden. 

It is impossible not to feel vulnerable in the age of Covid-19. The virus is a master lock- picker and our bodies have multiple entry points: our mouths, our noses and, if some Google articles are to be believed, even other, less visible orifices. It is difficult to not let the fear and the paranoia turn us against our own bodies. To make our most constant companions feel like our greatest liabilities and, if infected, our own worst enemy. As I began to unpack my own judgement of my body and how I could relinquish it, even whilst in the throes of uncertainty, I came across a project initiated by three academics, Ines Olza, Elena Semino and Veronika Koller, titled #ReframeCovid. It invites Twitter users from around the world to “collect alternatives to war metaphors to talk about coronavirus and Covid-19.” I scrolled through the crowdsourced list; most were in languages I do not understand but one caught my eye: 

Like glitter, it gets everywhere. 

I daresay Sontag would not have approved. But at a time when The Lancet is more quoted than the Bible, a sparkling simile may well be just what the doctor ordered. 

On day 7 I got tested. On day 8, I was negative.

Annika is a freelance writer, editor and translator based out of New Delhi. Her interests include books, cats and over-researching Covid-19.