![]() ![]() I didn't mind doing those things for him. The whisssska of the Old Milwaukee can and the tiny escaping bubbles that tickled my palm filled me with pride every time I popped one open. His fingers and wrists were so tangled in pain that I was his designated beer-opener. Grandpa suffered from severe arthritis-among lots of other ailments-so I became a shuttle for the things he needed around the house: his pills, his drink, the remote. Ostensibly, he was supposed to be watching me, but I was the one who did most of the caretaking. This new development provided a serious upgrade to the hours my grandfather and I spent together after school, before Mom came home from work. It was a happy accident (for me) that it also delivered cartoons to the rural farmhouse. My grandfather bought the satellite dish so that he could watch his games: the Pacers, the Hoosiers, the White Sox. The cold automation of hard, beige metal moving against the blooming countryside: it almost didn't seem real. I would follow its arc with my eyes as it inched from a White Sox game to the evening news. Nesting deep in his brown La-Z-Boy, Grandpa had changed the channel. ![]() On many afternoons when I was outside, helping Dad feed the animals, I would hear the growl of its motor, shifting the dish from one side of the Indiana sky to the other. In the summers, heat would hover above its concave face, bending the fields behind it into a green vapor. I remember the colossal shadow it cast across the backyard, where it stood planted behind the limestone exterior of his single-story, ranch-style house. Who would do this to me?ĪLTHOUGH TODAY I QUESTION the legitimacy of my own claim, for many years I believed that Grandpa Elliott was the first resident of Jay County to own a satellite dish. ![]() Surely they'll know-I was just a kid I couldn't have done this. About as low as it gets.Īs my body folded over the arm of the couch, my mind struggled to make sense of these bizarre numbers. My score of 380 placed me in the second percentile of all scorers in the United States. For a merciful second I thought maybe that was good. That was the year my parents' identities had been stolen. The first line of credit had been opened in 1993, when I was eleven. Pages of numbers and dates as foreign as a language I did not speak. Instead, I found the report, with the bulk of a term paper, full of fraudulent credit card charges and collection agency entries in my name. I did not find any instructions inside the envelope. And then, as sure as the sharp edges of paper in my hands, another existence took its place. Sliding my finger under the thick flap of that envelope, feeling the adhesive give way and the paper tear in jagged intervals-those were the last indelible sensations of an existence I understood. There have been a few moments in my life when reality has skipped in front of me like a broken television-and I remember this one in slow motion. Most of me wanted to drop it by the front door and forget about it for a while, but I leaned against the arm of my hand-me-down, green-floral-print couch with my legs crossed and tore it open instead. Must come with a lot of instructions, I thought. It was a lot bigger than I had expected a credit report to be. With a groan of resignation, I yanked it from the box. The manila envelope I found folded over and jammed in my mailbox was the last thing I wanted to deal with. There were hours of homework in my immediate future but as I walked through the parking lot of my building, I wistfully considered a nap. The survey results showed that as of February, around 11% of adults who'd ever had Covid were experiencing long Covid.IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY at school and the roots of a headache had planted themselves near the outer corners of my eyes. have reported post-Covid symptoms that lasted three months or longer, according to an NBC News analysis of data from a household survey conducted by the Census Bureau. Since the start of the pandemic, nearly 38 million adults in the U.S. ![]() Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the Veterans Affairs St. That reinfection is absolutely consequential, and you’re pretty much doing Russian roulette again," said Dr. "You may get long Covid the second time around, the third time around. Most said it's fair to assume that the current risk for vaccinated people is 10% or less, and some thought the odds were smaller - 5% or lower.Įven reinfections bring a risk of long Covid, they added. In the absence of definitive data on long Covid risk, seven researchers investigating the condition's prevalence in the U.S. ![]()
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