Stuck at Home: A COVID-19 Story

Stuck at Home: A COVID-19 Story

Amelia Tisk, Contributing Writer

I felt like I was dying.  I couldn’t focus on anything and I could barely get out of bed.  My mom was constantly checking in on me to make sure I was okay, and I just wanted to feel better.  We went to doctors and they said I was fine since I didn’t have a fever, but I still felt like I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t focus on anything.  Half the time I had no idea where I was.  Part of me felt like I had the coronavirus, the virus that started to plague the nation.  I was scared and none of the doctors would take me seriously.  

I didn’t get out of bed for a week.  I felt paralyzed.  I was sweating and coughing and the doctors didn’t care.  My mom was so worried, she was calling them everyday until they sent a prescription of antibiotics, hoping that would help. 

I wanted to feel better.  I wanted to go back to school.  And the antibiotics helped a bit.  I started to regain my strength and feel like myself again.  I felt like I was going to be okay, and that I didn’t have the coronavirus that was killing people.  I was ready to go back to school, but then we got the call… school was going to be closed for two weeks.  

I was upset.  I had already not gone to school all that week and I really wanted to catch up on all the work I missed.  But now I couldn’t go to school.

The first two weeks weren’t that bad.  I figured that we’d be back to school after those two weeks, but then two more weeks were added. I started to worry.  What if we didn’t go back to school?  It’s my senior year, I want to be in school for the rest of my senior year.  

It’s possible that my last day of high school was March 6th and I didn’t even know.  

I started to worry more as I watched the news more, and saw Governor Cuomo closing all businesses.  My job furloughed me, saying that only managers were allowed in the store.  I felt like the world was starting to end.  

My parents tried to make things normal.  My parents are divorced and my little sister and I spend certain days with my dad and certain days with my mom, and we continued to go back and forth between houses.  I felt like that wasn’t a good idea, because if one person in one of the houses gets sick, so does everyone else in the other house.  But we still go back and forth between houses, so we are getting out of the house so that it doesn’t really feel like we can’t go anywhere.  

But even though I have that sense of normalcy, nothing else is normal at all.  The school play was postponed and now I’m pretty sure it’s cancelled…it would have been my senior play, the last one I was in (and I’ve been in the drama club since 7th grade).  It’s really disappointing because we worked really hard on it.  

I’m starting to feel like everything I’ve done for the past three years has been for nothing.  I’ve worked really hard in school, and now there’s a chance that we won’t even have a graduation.  I worked so hard that I became salutatorian, and I was looking forward to making my speech in front of all of my peers and family, showing that I worked hard and that I achieved what I achieved even with all of the obstacles I’ve faced throughout high school.  

I’m feeling hopeless.  And I’m really trying to not feel hopeless, but the more I watch the news, the more I feel like this outbreak will never end.  

I feel selfish, being upset about missing out on my senior year.  People are dying, and it’s horrible.  But all I can think about is the fact that there might be no prom, no graduation, no senior trip, no other senior activities.  Everyone else had their senior year, and now our class, 2020, is getting nothing.  

I watched my brother have all of his senior activities, prom, graduation, etc. 

I watched my boyfriend have all of his senior activities as well, even though he decided to not go to prom.

I was promised by my boyfriend that we would go to my prom together since we didn’t go to his, but now it looks like my prom won’t even happen. 

I’m just really upset and I really wished that all of this happened any other year.  I know it’s selfish, but every other senior around the world is feeling the same way that I am.  It’s not just Amityville that’s being affected.  It’s the entire world.  

Every day I wake up and I wish I was going to school.  I miss my friends, I miss my teachers, I miss life being normal.  We took life for granted, and now almost everyone is suffering, whether they are sick, unemployed, stuck in an abusive house, etc. 

Us seniors were born into a world that was healing from 9/11, and now we are graduating in a world plagued by a virus that we don’t know when it will end.  

At the end of the day, the coronavirus is affecting everyone in different ways.  As a senior in high school, it affects me differently than it affects a senior citizen in a nursing home.  But we all just want this pandemic to be over, and we all want the world to go back to normal.  

Hoping that everyone is staying healthy, and we’ll have more updates about living in a world with the coronavirus!

Stay safe!!