It's Week 14 of the NFL season. Week 13 brought us monumental upsets when Washington stunned undefeated Pittsburgh and the New York Giants shocked Seattle. Which just goes to show that any given Sunday, fantasy managers can win too. And it's playoff time. Never count out your team. Crazy things can happen. Matthew Berry's Love/Hate is here to help you negotiate the first round of the fantasy football postseason.
"Hello?"
"Hey. So ... I tested positive for COVID-19."
"Oh wow."
"Yeah."
I am on the phone with my parents.
Or my younger brother. Or my boss. Or Stephania Bell. Or my oldest son. Or my sister-in-law. Or one of my friends. Or my Fantasy Show producer. Or the producer of Fantasy Football Now. Or Field Yates. Or ESPN HR. Or Daniel Dopp. Or my next-door neighbor. Or my editor. Or my primary care doctor. Or ESPN's VP of production. I don't remember. They all bleed together. I had the same conversation last week a million times over.
I found it best to just get right to it and not try any small talk. Just let whomever I was talking to, right out of the gate, know that I had tested positive for the virus that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has claimed the lives of over 285,000 Americans.
"Hey. So ... I tested positive for COVID-19."
There's a pause, always a pause, and then the questions follow a familiar pattern.
How am I feeling? How did I get it? How's Beth? How are the kids? And while the questions come, the tone is the same. Quiet, hushed, serious, concerned. The unspoken words of the tone. "You're not, uh, you're not going to die, are you?"
I don't know.
I'm being asked a zillion questions about a virus that not only do I know very little about, everyone knows very little about. New information comes out every day, and there are definitely some bad actors out there trying to spread misinformation, which makes keeping up with the most accurate and latest information a challenge.
What does this mean for my family? For my job? For my health?
I don't know. And as someone who has made a living of research, of stats and probabilities, "I don't know" is pretty %$&#^ scary, you know? But it's all I got.
Phone call after phone call ... "I don't know."
Here's the stuff I do know:
It all started with a text, an acquaintance of Beth and mine who was experiencing symptoms and was "contact tracing" to let everyone know, just to be safe. So, out of an abundance of caution, call in at work. We notify the kids' school and pull them out, just in case. I start looking for a way to get myself tested. Finding a testing facility on short notice was its own ordeal, and while I won't bore you with the details, suffice it to say, my patience was tested long before I was.
My wife somehow manages to schedule a rapid test the next morning. I tag along with her, hoping I can talk my way into getting one with her at the same time. They are amenable, so there I am, as my wife and I watch each other get cotton swabs shoved up our noses. True love.
After about 45 minutes, we are asked to step into Room 2. My wife and I look at each other. We had seen others come in for their results and they were just handed a sheet of paper. But no sheet of paper for either of us. We needed to step in Room 2. And it's there the on-call doctor tells us what we'd feared. We have both tested positive.
Over 15 million cases across the country, and here in Connecticut, where I live, we are now two of the 19,504 new cases over the last seven days. We are now a statistic.
My wife and I are staring at each other, the reality starting to hit, as the doctor is telling us what to expect. He needs to report our positive diagnosis to the state board of health, we need to quarantine, obviously, for 10 days, and there's no drugs he can prescribe, but we should get some Tylenol and Robitussin, he suggests.
He asks about our symptoms, which are mild for both of us. For me at the time, I have a runny nose, a cough and a scratchy throat. My temperature is fine, I still have my sense of taste and smell, and I have no issue breathing.
The doctor nods. He tells me that he has seen a lot of cases. Sometimes, the people have no symptoms. Sometimes, the people have mild symptoms and then after two weeks or so, they're totally fine. And sometimes, he says, people are fine for the first 12 days and the next day they are in the hospital with a tube stuck down their throat.
"I don't know," he says.
There are those three words again. He hands us our test results and some paperwork and tells us someone will call to check in on us and to contact them if our symptoms get worse.
Beth and I shuffle silently out of the office, stunned and speechless. On the car drive home, we start making the calls. Over and over again, the same conversation, with all the important people in our lives.
How am I feeling? How did I get it? How's Beth? How are the kids?
Early this week, I tested positive for COVID. I am experiencing minor symptoms & continue to isolate at home while I recover. I consider myself extremely fortunate.
— Matthew Berry (@MatthewBerryTMR) December 5, 2020
I won't be on #FFNow tomorrow but I look forward to returning to my normal schedule soon. Love you all.
People are kind and concerned and say all the right things, but having to make that call, over and over again, saying "I have tested positive for COVID" and then hearing the silence, is just awful. I'm not trying to minimize the awfulness of the many other aspects of COVID-19, but just ... it's one thing to sit there with your own knowledge, you know? But having to repeat it, over and over again, is so incredibly depressing and demoralizing and awful, I can't take it.
I don't know how to describe it, really. I feel like I'm letting people down when I tell them, worrying them, making them worry about themselves as well as me, that I have somehow done something wrong, even though I know that's not true. My kids call me "Corona Cop" because I'm so stringent about everyone wearing masks, washing hands, not letting people come inside, etc., etc.
Back to the car ride home and first and foremost, for us, of course, is what to do with our kids. I'm not going to get into how we decided to handle our children, their health or anything like that other than to just say they are safe and healthy, thank goodness.
And so the quarantine began. And while my symptoms got a little worse during quarantine before getting better -- headaches and chills at night were added to the cough, nose and throat issues -- if this were any other year, I probably wouldn't have thought much of it beyond just a bad winter cold. Same for Beth.
So physically I ended up fine, and I'm very grateful for that, but mentally? Man, this messes with you. Basically cut off from the world in many ways, thinking dark thoughts, it was a challenge for me. But it was during that dark 10 days or so, away from everyone, worrying about my health, my family, my future and going to bed every night not knowing if tomorrow would be the day I woke up in a hospital with a tube down my throat, that I finally found something I only thought I knew.
That I was loved. Incredibly lucky and loved.
Other than the initial flurry of calls to people who needed to know, I had kept it quiet. But after missing episodes of the podcast and The Fantasy Show on ESPN+ and knowing I would miss last week's Fantasy Football Now, I had been getting a lot of questions about where I was. So I wanted to just let folks know what was going on. When you announce something like this, you are never sure how people will react to you. Social media being what it is these days, I braced for the worst.
And I couldn't believe the incredible outpouring of love, concern and well wishes. Friends upon friends, including many I hadn't talked to in years. So great to reconnect -- co-workers, NFL coaches, readers and listeners. People whom I've known for a long time and people I've never met. So many emails, texts, DMs and comments on social media. It took me a few days to respond in some way to most of them and there's probably a few emails and Instagram DMs I'm not going to find time to respond to, but know that I read every single one and it meant so very much to me.
Kind, uplifting, thoughtful, they all brought a smile to my face. Loved them all but a special shoutout to Katie Nolan, who texted an incredibly sweet note but then added, "Silver lining: When you beat this thing you can use it as proof that you're not an old man yet!" Made me laugh very hard. You're the best, Nolan.
I can't tell you how many people I heard from who had gone through something similar themselves or had someone in their life currently dealing with it. Awful stuff. I recognize I am insanely lucky and that many have an experience much worse than me, but as all of us deal with this going forward in some way in their life, just know this:
When you are frightened and scared, it's an amazing thing to know you are not alone.
Thank you.
Love you all.
Let's get to it.
