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I’ve Had COVID Four Times. Here’s How It Affected Me

As a new wave crests, here’s what it’s like to keep contracting the virus


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Contracting COVID four times heightened the fragility of life for Tom Allon.
Photo Collage AARP, (Source: Getty Images)

For the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic, I managed to dodge the pathogen. Friends and colleagues fell sick left and right, and two of my college classmates died from the disease, as did a beloved fourth-grade religion teacher. I felt like I was walking between the raindrops, doing what I could to avoid contagion and getting whatever vaccinations were on offer.

But in September 2021, my turn came. Or should I say, my first turn, out of four ... and counting.

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My stepdaughter fell ill with the Delta variant while teaching nursery school. Two days later, I woke up coughing and feverish, and I knew that my lucky streak was over. I went to a local urgent care center on Long Island, and it took the nurse two minutes to confirm that I was positive.

I’ll admit, I panicked. Although I’d been otherwise healthy, I have hypertension, and I knew that put me at higher risk of COVID complications. This was three months before the antiviral drug Paxlovid was approved for emergency use, and monoclonal antibodies were the gold standard of treatment. So I asked my primary care doctor to prescribe them, and I drove myself — coughing and gasping for breath — to Mt. Sinai Queens to get these miracle antibodies.

Did they work? Who knows? I recovered from my COVID symptoms within a month, but shortly afterward, during a routine physical, my blood work indicated that I was dangerously low in platelets. That condition landed me in the hospital four times over the next six months with bleeding episodes and has put me on a long-term treatment schedule.

Every 37 days, I have to get a platelet transfusion so my blood will be able to clot if I injure myself. To this day, no doctor will definitively say whether it was COVID or the monoclonal antibodies that caused this chronic blood condition, but I am convinced it was the virus. That month of uncontrollable coughing and wheezing traumatized me and changed my body.

Despite my caution, I caught COVID again in May 2022 — including a rebound case that lasted six extra days — and then yet again that December. Each time, likely thanks to Paxlovid and vaccine boosters, my symptoms were less severe and my recovery time was shorter.

Then, this past June, I was watching the news and suddenly had a sneezing fit, the kind my kids make fun of because of how loud it is. I took a Zyrtec, sprayed Flonase in my nostrils and wrote it off as seasonal allergies. But the next morning, I woke up with that now all-too-familiar scratchy feeling in my throat.

The dreaded two little red lines on that plastic test strip confirmed my fears. There’s a new variant out there, and — like President Biden — I was just one of many Americans to be hit by the recent uptick in cases.

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The timing was pretty bad (although when is a good time to get COVID?), because I was scheduled for a platelet transfusion the following day. If you have an upper respiratory infection, you’re not allowed into infusion centers, because so many of the patients are immunocompromised due to chemotherapy. They certainly don’t need anyone putting them further into harm’s way.

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Fortunately, I was able to get my transfusion at the ER, where germs are not an obstacle. Once again, my COVID symptoms were mild and resolved quickly. So I guess you could say I’m getting good at having COVID.

When the history of the 2020s is written, there will be countless stories like mine — people who survived the pandemic but whose lives were severely impacted by it. The disease has altered my health, my work life, my ability to plan for the future.

It has also heightened my sense of the fragility of life. Even still, I know that it could have gone worse for me, as it has for so many others. And especially now that I’m in my 60s, I know that there are plenty of other health challenges lurking out there — more raindrops to dodge.

While I have no desire to catch COVID again, I am no longer scared of it. I will do my best to stay well, and that’s all I can do.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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