By Bakhtiar Ahmed

First published: March 2022 in Kindle Thy Embers Anthology published by Lit-light publishers, Pakistan

A Pandemic Journal, the First Few Weeks

Bakhtiar Ahmed

I woke up with a sinking feeling, a feeling of dread and hopelessness; I had an intense urge to flee but there was nowhere to go. I felt trapped, suffocated, claustrophobic. It was a cloudy, rainy morning on March 24, 2020, the first day of the lockdown, working from home, and the new reality of life with COVID-19.

Why this feeling of dread with only a few hundred cases in the country with minimum local transmission? This is sort of normal for someone suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and a very specific form of GAD at that – health-related anxiety.

What can be the worst nightmare of such a person? – a pandemic, with no escape – after all this is what a Pandemic is – it is all over the world, and there is nowhere you can go to be safe – and an airborne infection Pandemic to boot. It is not like Dengue or HIV if you take proper precautions there is a good chance of not getting infected. No, this one will hunt you, and little lapse here or there – touch your face before washing your hands, or going too close to someone infected – with or without visible symptoms – and you are done for, that is it, or so my over-thinking brain convinced me.

The nightmare starts – The first few days of work from home were, as expected, dreadful. The anxiety and stress levels increased – there were lots of unknowns out there and the unknowns are the major factor in anxiety getting out of hand. Anxiety caused acid reflux, which caused throat irritation – oh my good sore throat you are infected, my overactive brain screamed – anxiety gets into overdrive. Acid reflux caused chest pain – oh no chest tightening, you are infected, my mind tried its best to convince me. The unending circle of anxiety causing acid reflux, causing more anxiety, causing more acid reflux, continued. Then there were the other unknowns and unfounded fears. The markets will be closed, transport will be off the roads, and the shops will soon run out of supplies, what will we eat? How will we live? The hospitals will be closed, what if we need urgent medical care; and a hundred other thoughts like that – the overthinking mind spiraling out of control, causing more anxiety, and the vicious circle continued.

But then, after a few days, somehow the capacity of anxiety to increase any further was fully exhausted – the hectic schedule of working from home and the realization that all essential services are open and there is no curfew or an alien invasion, helped. The slow return to the routine of working, reading, etc. was instrumental in reducing the anxiety. Now it happened in phases: a few days of calm followed by three or four days of anxiety – but the anxiety was nothing like what it was in the initial days. By the second or third week, I started my daily walks, which were disrupted by the lockdown. I was calming down and settling into my new routine – or so I thought.

During the third week of the lockdown, I woke up stressed out, and then this routine followed – anxiety, acid reflux, blocked nose, mucus in the throat, more anxiety, more reflux. It continued throughout the afternoon and then everything started going away, by evening it would be all gone. At night, when I was in my bed getting ready to sleep, everything seemed OK and under control, as if nothing had happened during the day. However, the next morning, the routine would start all over again. This went on for about a week and then stopped as abruptly as it had started. 

We were now in the fourth week of the lockdown and my routine was something like this – a few hours of complete bliss and then a few hours of dread with some hours of struggling between bliss and dread. The calm almost always came around evening and everything seemed quite settled by night, which is quite strange considering most of the people get depressed around this time.

However, there were new developments that shredded my routine into pieces and sent my overthinking mind into a frenzy. I would hear about a friend, a colleague, or one of their relatives testing positive; that happened quite regularly after every week or ten days. Now, this was hitting close to home. Before, these were just statistics, 1000 cases or 10,000 cases, but now these were people that I knew personally. Every time I heard of a colleague or acquaintance testing positive, I would start feeling all the symptoms myself, it seemed so real that I would think that I was also infected, the anxiety increased and the cycle continued.

These internal feelings were nothing new for me, these were not ’caused’ by the Pandemic, this is what people suffering from health anxiety experience and deal with every day, the pandemic has only increased the intensity and frequency manifold.

Now I was waiting, waiting for what will happen next while dealing with all the demons inside my head.

Bakhtiar Ahmed lives in Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been writing poetry and prose from an early age. His work has been published in local and international Urdu and English language magazines including Poetic Sun, Children Churches and Daddies, Literary Yard, Down in the Dirt, and State of Matter. He is a passionate reader and likes to read fiction, philosophy, and history. Reading and wondering about the unknown and unexplained and above all, thinking are his other interests.