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‘Please please PLEASE take this seriously’: man with COVID-19 shares his day-by-day struggle

“Protect the people you care about as best you can. I love you all.”

By

Tperry

By  Tperry
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It’s important for the world to understand the seriousness of COVID-19. It’s not “just like the flu.” It’s not like a “bad cold.” It’s a serious virus that kills, especially elderly people.

Michael Bane, a 42-year-old Vice President of Client Engagement at Deighan Law, LLC, wanted the world to know just how serious the coronavirus is so he posted a brutally honest, harrowing account of his first eight days with the disease on Facebook.

Bane is a healthy man who two weeks ago did “13 pullups and ran a sub-seven mile” and has ran six miles with a torn tendon. So, he assumed that the coronavirus isn’t a serious concern. ” I am in shape,” he says in his Facebook post. “I am a tough guy.”

But over the course of eight days Bane learns that COVID-19 is a serious, life-threatening condition that everyone, regardless of their age, should take seriously.

The account published below goes through March 20. As of this article’s publication, Bane is still in the hospital’s ICU unit and is hopeful he will recover.

Here’s his original Facebook post, below is an abridged version.

For all those who have asked the question “Does anyone even know anybody that has gotten the coronavirus?”, if you know…
Posted by Michael Bane on Saturday, March 21, 2020

For all those who have asked the question “Does anyone even know anybody that has gotten the coronavirus?”, if you know me, you do now. My positive test for COVID-19 has been relayed to me, and I wanted to share what my experience with this illness has been.

Thursday, March 12.

I’m at home eating spicy Chinese food (ignore any apparent irony) and my nose starts running, very mildly. I’m assuming it’s from the hot and sour soup. I don’t have to wipe it, blow it, or anything. It goes away within an hour and wasn’t something that would have registered if not for the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Friday, March 13

Nose is slightly runny in the morning. Clears up shortly, nothing else. I have no need to wipe my nose or use a tissue.

Saturday, March 14

Slight sore throat. No sniffles at the moment, but I assume it’s from post-nasal drip or possibly due to sleeping without the humidifier, which is normally on at night.

Sunday, March 15

My cough is more persistent. The sore throat is worse, but it goes away quickly again. My nose has stopped running. My Google searches tell me it could be COVID-19, but it could be any number of other things. I am slightly worried and try to trace back to where I could have been exposed.

I can’t sleep. For whatever reason I just cannot get comfortable. I keep tossing and turning trying to alleviate this backpain on my left side, but nothing is working. At 1 am, it occurs to me this might not be normal backpain. I’m sleeping in the guest room at this point, because I don’t want to keep my wife up. I take my temperature. It’s 100.5, a slight fever.

Bane decides to schedule a virtual appointment with a doctor.

Monday, March 16

Scheduling a video appointment is difficult, as I keep getting the “we’re at capacity, please try again later” message. I finally manage to secure one ($49, pre-paid), and find myself face to virtual face with a physician’s assistant about two hours later. She reviews my symptoms and circumstances (worsening cough, annoying fever, bad pain), and due to potential for exposure, says I should get tested. She puts a request in with the hospital and says it will be 1-5 days. I should head to the ER if I start having trouble breathing.

My fever is 102.5. My left hand is tingling, my oxygen saturation is down. I tell myself this is because of an increased respiratory rate due to the fever, not because corona has attacked my lung function. I’m right, but the thought still worries me. My wife tells me to take Tylenol or Advil. I tell her no; I’m going to kill the virus off with heat. I tell the virus to buckle down, because it’s about to burn in Hell.

My wife hears me laughing at something. I don’t know what. She asks me to take my temperature. I adjust myself on the bed and an arctic blast hits my body. My skin is on fire. This doesn’t feel right at all. I run various death scenarios through my mind to see if this situation fits. I feel that bad. I check the thermometer, and my wife again presses me for the temperature.

I wake up at around 1:30 am with a sudden desire to use the facilities. As I’m sitting on the commode, I smell something bad. I realize I’m also soaking wet. The smell is me. I have sweat so much my shirt is drenched like I’ve just done the polar bear plunge. It’s disgusting. I strip out of my pajamas and find another pair.

Tuesday, March 17

I need this test. The fever is back, 100.8, and the cough is worse. I feel better than yesterday, but I am dreading what’s to come. I shower and get my daughter ready for daycare. I don a mask and drop her off.

Bane arrives at the hospital.

A hospital employee steps out in a mask and motions for me to get out of the car. My own mask is on, and I do. He immediately instructs me to put my hands in my pocket and not to remove them. He unlocks a door, and I follow him inside. I am again told not to take my hands out, and it’s added that I shouldn’t touch anything either. This seems redundant, unless he is telling me not to touch the insides of my pockets, in which case, I am not in compliance.

The doctor at the end of the hall is dressed like she’s about to enter Chernobyl.

She explains the nasal swab process and says that the probe is going to go in REAL DEEP. She repeats it for emphasis. I nod, and cough. I weigh whether knowing is worth this nasal intrusion. I lower my mask below my nose and look up. It’s mildly uncomfortable, but not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

Tuesday, March 18

It’s been two weeks since I was exposed. I wake up drenched in sweat again and take a 5 am shower. I go back to sleep for a bit and am rudely woken up by an alert on my phone. My test results are back already. That was fast. I go to the app to find out that I am negative for Influenza A and B.

Around 6 pm I have a horrible coughing fit. Every one of my shallow breaths is met with a corresponding respiratory spasm as the air is forced back out of my lungs. It goes on and on and on. My wife asks me if I need to go the hospital. That seems like an overreaction, but my coughing doesn’t allow me to reply. I wave her off and continue hacking and wheezing. I’m fighting for air, but I believe it’s going to pass

Thursday, March 19

I wake up freezing cold, and in horrible pain. My left lat seizes up, feeling like it’s trying to rip itself in half. As I attempt to figure out how to relax it, my foot cramps painfully as well. I am massively dehydrated. I’m drinking a lot of water, but the lack of food is keeping me from retaining much.

When am I going to turn the corner? When is this all going to end? To everyone who said it was just a bad cold or like the flu, or that people were far more likely to be asymptomatic: fuck you.

Friday, March 20

I get into a few arguments with people on social media regarding the term “Chinese Virus” and the inherent racism behind it. My opinion as an Asian-American is quickly and skillfully invalidated with well-crafted lines of reasoning such as “Just another snowflake” and “KISS MY ASS” (caps not mine). Clearly, the only thing I have proven is that I still haven’t learned what a waste of time arguing on social media is.

Later that day, Bane drove himself to the hospital.

My phone rings. The Illinois Department of Health calls to tell me I’m positive for COVID-19. I laugh and reply that I could have told them that.

I text my family, a few close friends, and my boss. Everyone is very kind. My boss lets me know they’re going to have to inform the office someone tested positive, but they’ll keep my anonymous. I tell him to use my name. It’s a scary message to get, and if people have questions maybe I can help. People may take social distancing protocols more seriously if there’s a face to associate with the illness. By the way work people, expect a message sometime soon.

I get into the ER and they take a chest X-ray. I have bilateral pneumonia. This explains the crackling sounds I’ve been hearing when I breath. My fever is 102. I’m admitted, stuck with an IV, and a host of medications are prescribed to me both intravenously and otherwise

So here I am, in the hospital on the 13th floor with a lovely view of the city. Take that isolation! The coughing won’t stop, and I’m waiting for the drugs to arrive. My prognosis seems reasonably good, I don’t need oxygen yet, and the monitors will keep an eye on my levels.

The point of all this? It’s not real for some of us until it happens to us or someone we know. I appreciate the well-wishes I’ve gotten and am bound to get, and don’t want your sympathy. Please please PLEASE take this seriously. This could kill me. Practice social distancing.

People have died. People will die. It might be people you love. Please stay inside. This is horrible, brutal, devastating and it feels l might be cashing my chips in. Protect the people you care about as best you can. I love you all.

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  • It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect
    Photo credit: Jutta Klee/fStop via Getty Images – Babies – whether boy or girl – look to adults for care and comfort.
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    It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect

    A sweeping review finds no inborn social gap at birth.

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    Lise Eliot

    Lise Eliot

    Girls and boys are equally social at birth.

    This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.

    But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.

    Mining the neonatal research trove

    Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.

    Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.

    We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences..

    As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.

    Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.

    a blue and a red distribution curve overlap almost completely making it look mostly purple
    Newborn boys and girls are similarly attentive to faces, with the distribution of time they spend looking almost completely overlapping. Data from Karson et al. plotted using tool at sexdifference.org.

    The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.

    Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.

    The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).

    In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.

    Boys, too, prefer faces

    Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.

    The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.

    Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.

    This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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    Licensed therapist shares 6 signs you’re doing a lot better than you think you are

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    For many people, it’s easy to overlook progress because it often lacks clear milestones. There can be increased anxiety and stress from feeling like they’re still catching up or even falling farther behind.

    In a recent Instagram post, licensed therapist Jeffrey Meltzer points out six signs that people are doing better than they think. He breaks down a pattern of achievements that tend to be easily missed. How individuals interpret their past, how they presently handle their relationships, and even asking simple questions, reveal a very different story about where they’re at in their lives and where they’re going.

    @therapytothepoint

    6 Signs You’re Doing Better Than You Think. #personalgrowth #personalgrowthjourney #gratitude #selfgrowth #selfgrowthjourney

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    Surviving the unsurvivable

    Meltzer begins, “You’ve survived everything that once felt unsurvivable. Every hard season, every moment you thought you wouldn’t get through. You did. That is no small feat. Your brain forgets those victories the moment they pass, but they still count.”

    Learning how to cope with life isn’t just about “toughness.” Resilience is a measurable, multi-layered process tied to effective coping strategies. A 2025 study in Psychology Today points out that rising above adversity isn’t the simple solution. Having support systems that function well enough means you don’t have to.

    Becoming what we desperately want

    “You’ve changed in ways you once desperately wanted. Think back to who you were three or five years ago. Some of the growth you desperately wanted back then, you’re living it now.” Meltzer adds, “However, your brain likes to move the goal post without telling you.”

    People constantly face an adjustment to satisfaction because expectations rise over time. A 2024 study in Springer Nature Link explored the hedonic treadmill. Even after massive achievements, the boost of happiness doesn’t last as long as people expect.

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    Knowing what we don’t like

    “You know what you don’t want.” Meltzer continues, “That might sound like a consolation prize, but it’s actually hard-earned clarity. A lot of people waste years chasing the wrong things. But knowing what drains you, what doesn’t serve you, what you won’t settle for anymore, that’s actual progress.”

    Psychology emphasizes that self-awareness leads to better behavior and stronger emotional regulation. A 2023 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior found that this process brings a clearer sense of who we are and who we are becoming.

    An easy relationship to navigate

    “You have at least one relationship that feels easy. You’re at least one person that doesn’t require a performance from you. Someone who you can be a little bit of a mess around. You don’t need to be perfect around them, and it feels easy.” Meltzer explains the value, saying, “That kind of connection is rarer than people like to admit.”

    Strong interpersonal relationships are key predictors of mental health and well-being. A 2024 study in the National Library of Medicine found that secure attachment helps people experience fewer of the symptoms associated with anxiety and depression. Even one stable, supportive relationship is linked to long-term well-being.

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    Learning something new

    “You’ve learned something in the last year.” Meltzer explains, “Whether it’s a skill, a perspective, a hard lesson, all of it counts. Remember, a brain that’s still learning is a brain that’s still growing.”

    The human brain remains capable of learning and adapting throughout a person’s life. A 2025 study published in MDPI found that brain neuroplasticity allows traits such as emotional regulation and awareness to be reorganized and improved over time.

    Asking better questions

    Lastly, Meltzer offers, “You’re asking the right questions. The fact that you’re reflecting and trying to see your life more clearly, that’s a sign of someone who hasn’t given up.”

    Believing that change is possible shapes emotional recovery and motivation. A 2025 study in Springer Nature Link showed that a growth mindset leads to better psychological outcomes and improves a person’s ability to adapt to new situations.

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    People are doing better than they think

    These six signs shared by Meltzer helped viewers understand that they’re doing better than they think. As people flooded the comment section, some seemed to struggle with #4, having that one reliable friend. Still, most were just appreciative.

    “This made me feel so much better”

    “i don’t have number 4 unless my dog counts”

    “all I need now is the 4th one, I’m working towards it by socializing more it’s challenging but I’m learning”

    “I’m winning despite feeling defeated”

    “I needed this right now.”

    “Does Mom count for #4?”

    “I’ll give myself credit, it been rough recently, 5 out of 6 is better than I expected”

    “This made me remember how far I have become even tho I still work on things, it’s so good to get these reminders this genuinely made my day”

    Meltzer tries to help people reframe their perspectives. Often, things look like they’re “not enough” even though the actual evidence suggests otherwise. Psychology reveals growth is incremental and easy to miss. The fact that a person wants to do better is the clearest sign that personal growth is already underway.

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  • Reclaiming water from contaminated brine can increase water supply and reduce environmental harm
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    Reclaiming water from contaminated brine can increase water supply and reduce environmental harm

    Turning salty waste into a new water source.

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    Mervin XuYang Lim

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    The world is looking for more clean water. Intense storms and warmer weather have worsened droughts and reduced the amount of clean water underground and in rivers and lakes on the surface.

    Under pressure to provide water for drinking and irrigation, people around the globe are trying to figure out how to save, conserve and reuse water in a variety of ways, including reusing treated sewage wastewater and removing valuable salts from seawater.

    But for all the clean water they may produce, those processes, as well as water-intensive industries like mining, manufacturing and energy production, inevitably leave behind a type of liquid called brine: water that contains high concentrations of salt, metals and other contaminants. I’m working on getting the water out of that potential source, too.

    The most recent available assessment of global brine production found that it is 25.2 billion gallons a day, enough to fill nearly 60,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools each day. That’s about one-twelfth of daily household water use in the U.S. However, that brine estimate is from 2019; in the years since, brine production is estimated to have increased due to the continued expansion of desalination plants.

    That’s a lot of water, if it could be cleaned and made usable.

    How is brine disposed?

    Today, most brine produced along the coastline is released into the ocean. Inland cities without this option typically leave brine in ponds to evaporate, blend it with other wastewater, or inject it into deep wells for disposal.

    However, most of these methods require strict environmental protections and monitoring strategies to reduce harm to the environment.

    For instance, the extremely high salt content in brine from desalination plants can kill fish or drive them away, as has happened increasingly since the 1980s off the coast of Bahrain.

    Evaporation ponds require specialized liners to prevent the brine from leaching into the ground and polluting groundwater. And when all the water has evaporated, the remaining solids must be promptly removed to prevent them from blowing away as dust in the wind. This happens in nature, too: As the Great Salt Lake in Utah dries up, salty windblown dust has already contributed to significant air pollution, as recorded by the Utah Division of Air Quality.

    Brine injected into the earth in Oklahoma, including into wells used for hydraulic fracking of oil and natural gas, was one of several factors that led to a 40-fold increase in earthquake activity in the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, as compared to the preceding 31 years. And wastewater has been documented to leak from the underground wells up to the surface as well.

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    Emerging treatment technologies

    Researchers like me are increasingly exploring brine’s potential not as waste but as a source of water – and of valuable materials, such as sodium, lithium, magnesium and calcium.

    Currently, the most effective brine reclamation methods use heat and pressure to boil the water out of brine, capturing the water as vapor and leaving the metals and salts behind as solids. But those systems are expensive to build, energy-intensive to run and physically large.

    Other treatment methods come with unique trade-offs. Electrodialysis uses electricity to pull salt and charged particles out of water through special membranes, separating cleaner water from a more concentrated salty stream. This process works best when the water is already relatively clean, because dirt, oils and minerals can quickly clog or damage the membranes, reducing the performance of the equipment.

    Membrane distillation, in contrast, heats water so that only water vapor passes through a water-repelling membrane, leaving salts and other contaminants behind. While effective in principle, this approach can be slow, energy-intensive and expensive, limiting its use at larger scale.

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    A trailer containing a small water reclamation system. Mervin XuYang Lim, CC BY-SA

    A look at smaller, decentralized systems

    Smaller systems can be effective, with lower initial costs and quicker start-up processes.

    At the University of Arizona, I am leading the testing of a six-step brine reclamation system known as STREAM – for Separation, Treatment, Recovery via Electrochemistry and Membrane – to continuously reclaim municipal brine, which is salty water left over from sewage treatment.

    The system combines conventional methods such as ultrafiltration, which removes particles and microbes using fine filters, and reverse osmosis, which removes dissolved salts by forcing water through a dense membrane, alongside an electrolytic cell – a method not typically employed in water treatment.

    Our previous study showed that we can recover usable quantities of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at one-sixth the cost of purchasing them commercially. And our initial calculations indicated the integrated system can reclaim as much as 90% of the water, greatly reducing the volume of what remains to be disposed. The cleaned water in turn is suitable for drinking after final disinfection using ultraviolet or chlorine.

    We are currently building a larger pilot system in Tucson for further study by researchers. We hope to learn if we can use this system to reclaim other sources of brine and study its efficacy in eliminating viruses and bacteria for human consumption.

    We have partnered with other researchers from the University of Nevada Reno, the University of Southern California and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help communities in the Southwest secure reliable water supplies by safely reusing municipal wastewater to serve everyday water use.

    This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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