Nurse the Hate: Covid and an MW Exam

 

After dodging it for two years, I finally got covid.  At this point, seemingly everyone has had it.  There is nothing more boring than to hear everyone's covid story, yet we feel compelled to tell each other our individual experience.  It's like talking about a dream you had the previous night.  To you, it was the center of your world.  To everyone else, it's just something to endure until it's their turn to talk again.  I took a film making class while I went to college, and the professor's area of concentration was making these surreal films about dreams he had experienced.  I remember watching a few of these in class thinking "this doesn't mean anything to me".  Thus, I am aware of how dull this is, yet I am still unable to prevent myself from telling you about my covid experience.   

I am vaccinated and boosted, so my thought was that when I got it I would be like most people I know and feel sorta shitty for a couple days and then shake it off like a cold.  Instead I felt sorta shitty for a few days with a nice little fever, and then felt crappy for a week.  I have since snuggled into a few weeks of feeling "eh" with a two-four hour window each day where I feel decidedly crappy.  The real excitement for me has come from my loss of sense of smell and taste, and the elusive "covid fog".

I am supposed to take my Master of Wine Year One assessment next Monday.  This is a very challenging exam in the best of circumstances.  I believe there is a 10% pass rate, but this might be a legend floating around the program, something like Bigfoot, but scarier.  The aim of the exam is for a candidate to demonstrate that he or she is at a level to be able to proceed to the next exam, the "real exam" if you will, the following year.  I have been grinding away studying for about two to three hours a night six or seven days a week for all of 2022.  While you have been watching Netflix, I have been figuring out what the advantages and disadvantages of crossflow filtration systems have over membrane cartridges in final wine bottling preparation.  You want to talk about canopy management modifications and clonal trials made in Burgundy due to climate change?  Of course you don't, but if you did, I'm your guy. 

I have been diligently tasting wines blind for months, dialing in not so much as being able to just identify wines, but be able to differentiate quality levels within classic regions.  Three weeks ago, I could nose a wine and have a pretty good idea if it was premier cru level+ Burgundy or a more modest village wine.  My sense of smell is so muted now that when I smell that same wine I can't be sure of what the primary fruit aromas are on it.  The last week of June I could tell you a wine had "fresh green apple with nutmeg and cinnamon on the nose with a hint of custard suggesting fermentation in oak with battonage" and now that same wine "smells kinda like lemon... or maybe apple?".   It's not ideal.

The real problem though is this covid fog.  I feel like you do when you are hungover a little bit, but not crushingly so.  Maybe you hit it hard on Saturday night, feel sorta dodgy when you wake up and think you can blast some coffee down your throat and feel OK, but it turns out you feel like someone took a wood planer to your skull and shaved off the first two layers of brain.  You just can't put all the pieces together.  I am on five second tape delay, like a wake n' bake college kid in a dorm.  I walk into rooms and forget why.  I can't put together complex ideas when explaining them.  I will forget key words as I am in the middle of sentences.  I was writing a tasting note and couldn't come up with the term "ripe".  "What's that called when fruit is really squishy and sugary?  It's a short word.  It's like when a cherry is really red...  what the fuck is that again?"  In short, I've become Leo.

I remember having an awful cold a few years ago.  In the days before The Plague, it was expected that you would go to work no matter if you were bleeding from your eyes.  Sure, you might get everyone else in the office sick, but they'd all have to suck it up when they were sick too, because godammit, we have to sell more units!  I discovered a combination that would let me get out the door and function, although with decidedly mixed results.  I would take Mucinex, DayQuil and wash it down with a double espresso.  It was basically a cold medicine speedball.  It might have been what killed John Belushi.  However, I could walk around and appear normal despite the world around me being like The Beatles "Yellow Submarine" cartoon.  I couldn't really engage with anything.  I remember saying to Leo, "Man, I feel like you.  I never really know what is going on and it feels like I'm buzzed all the time."  Leo smiled and said, "It's great, isn't it?". 

This is where I am right now, but the downside is I'm not taking cold medicine speedballs.  I'm all buzzed up and confused organically.   I started writing this blog entry two days ago and have had to edit it three times just for it to make some linear sense.  This would have normally taken me about 25 minutes.  I'm really in a quandary here.  I am faced with the decision of having to defer this exam for a year, losing yet one more year to fucking covid, or taking it and flaming out so fabulously that I am excommunicated from the program entirely.  "Hey Roger, did you see this student's paper?  He thought that $300 vintage Champagne was a cheap grocery store prosecco, and in the essay referred to a concrete fermentation vessel as "a thingy".

Fucking A.  This covid shit is really fucking me over.  Again.