I have a theory. Nothing original. But it’s formed as I’ve wandered the coast after dark, under clouds or stars, past frog-filled swamps and thickets sheltering crickets, surrounded by sound waves. The pleasure I experience in these corridors of resonance makes the presence of humans with earbuds seem mysterious: they hear a different world. In mine, the music of the land induces altered states, dispels tension and pain, massages my energy field, rewires my brain… No crazier than attempting to banish fear of death and the unknown by transforming myself into a walking extension of a phone-cum-torch-cum-camera-cum-library-cum-lifeline.

Eventually I’ll drop the topic of the ‘pandemic’. But it turned the world inside out. During round one of lockdowns, I left public housing for a new abode: on a main road, yet blissfully quiet. The only hitch was token council restrictions: a swimming ban on ocean pools and bays, enforced by ranger patrols all day, despite no proof of Covid transmission via water. Which left open sea with real risks (strong currents, big swells, sharks) or my choice: a swim in darkness.

The hand sanitiser regime posed more of an issue. After one day of use as prescribed, while I shopped for food, deep cracks crazed my fingertips: a genuine infection risk. I’ve never used it again. But I kept my hands off things in public space, because though no-one I knew, or who they knew, had knowingly suffered symptoms, I still entertained the possibility that a dire new virus existed, even if we’d all been told it was kin to the common cold and some things didn’t add up. My partner tracked sewage surveillance, and suburbs yielding traces didn’t match the spread of cases. But even if, as my GP said, sewage bore evidence of past infection, the pattern still didn’t compute. Nor did mainstream-media fixation on the heroic global quest for a vax. Where were useful tips on natural immunity (Vitamins C and D, zinc, less booze, enough sleep, fresh air, sunlight, exercise)? All the scare tactics had folk stressed to the max.

So the news of salvation so much sooner than predicted struck me as not just anticlimactic but sinister. Almost as if it had been waiting in the wings. Yet to voice such misgivings got you dismissed, if not yet disowned, by hitherto shrewd folk living in dread of an unseen menace – as if they’d never heard of fake news or corporate-captured governments; as if a global pandemic were such an unprecedentedly grave shared threat that all the usual suspects would magically act with integrity. ‘We’re all in this together’ ran one Covid catchcry, even as social distancing forced us all apart and top-down-orchestrated messaging marginalised dissenters.

The other day, my doctor said lots of folk still fear Covid because they’ve yet to get it. How was that possible? No pubs, restaurants etc. (As if supermarket queues are better?) I resisted noting the irony of the fact that most, if not all, of the fearful are vaxxed, having trusted my doctor and their colleagues. My doctor had a head cold, they warned me, like I could care less. They caught it in a crowd, having forgotten their mask. (Cold? Covid? Often only a RAT or PCR test can tell them apart. Has too much social distancing wasted human immunity?)

And then my doctor revived a conflict I’d shelved. Reviewing my file, they asked what I’m doing about ‘the infusion’ (of a drug that disrupts the life cycle of bone cells). I said the doctors to whom they’d referred me had masked their knowledge gaps with metaphors. My doctor said they lack time, not knowledge, and suggested I go back. I said I doubt that research relevant to my questions gets funded. They asked what exactly I want to know. My severe osteoporosis (found after a car knocked me down and X-rays revealed bone resembling Swiss cheese) concerns them. That the drugs may be bad for my body bothers me. They frame the issue in terms of risk: fracture odds worsen if bone loss (a natural life-long process but way advanced in my case) continues. Drugs arrest, even slightly reverse, it; ergo (eventual) slightly less risk. Hard to justify without talking worst-case scenarios. Speculation.

That my bones would no doubt be denser now if I hadn’t taken their advice for years to forgo Vitamin D got discounted when I once mentioned it. So we ignore the fact that doctors who terrorised hordes of folk into getting vaxxed don’t want to be held responsible for adverse consequences. Yet to gauge from their gently patronising tone, my distrust is less a sane response to error or insincerity than a sign of delicate mental health. So I got up to go. ‘This is important,’ they retorted. What, they asked, do I need to know to be convinced to get the infusion? How, I asked, could it be good for bones? Their metaphor involving canals, locks and ships didn’t help, LOL, so they asked me to clarify. But here’s the thing. If I were to take their advice and live out my life with no further fractures, they’d credit the treatment. Whereas if I rejected it and yet remained intact, I’d be ‘lucky’. Yet if I were to reject it and get the outcome the experts threaten, I wouldn’t be ‘unlucky’ – just ‘non-compliant’. Which would, completely illogically, increase their faith in the treatment.

Well, I said, the risk of ‘atypical femoral fractures’ after five years’ treatment, hence the need to take a break (pardon the pun), suggests it’s unhealthy. My doctor brightly countered that, now, treatment stops after three years. So it’s more harmful, I asked, than previously thought? No, they assured me. So what happens after three years? You don’t need any more, they said. I said that didn’t make sense, since bones would still lack density. They said it’s too soon to tell, so they’re monitoring it. ‘So it’s still at the trial stage?’ I asked. ‘No!’ they said, aghast.

Of course, the benefit of any drug – especially for those already dependent on multiple drugs with wide-ranging side effects – calls for debate. But Big Pharma lobbies to shape legislation. And its power is expanding. Re the Covid vax, only Pfizer and co have immunity – they can’t be sued – and good luck suing governments. Yet Oz is funding research into long Covid – which, coincidentally, could make a good defence. According to federal MP and neurologist Monique Ryan, long Covid symptoms are ‘protean – more than 200 are described’. There’s ‘no accepted case definition and no diagnostic test’. Experience of it differs. ‘Some GPs don’t believe in it; about two-thirds are reluctant to diagnose it’. So it’s ‘a largely unknown condition’ with an ‘uncertain prognosis’. And yet… ‘The economic cost of long COVID is significant’. So Ryan calls for ‘escalation pathways to multidisciplinary specialist clinics’ (like those affirming and saving teen trans lives?). To sum up, it’s a ‘new, complex and severe medical condition. We don’t yet know how common it is, how to diagnosis it [sic], treat or track it.’ Like vax injuries – and the more cred the long Covid diagnosis accrues, the less chance those harmed by the jab will be heard, let alone recompensed. How expedient – while taxpayers foot the bill, not the multinationals profiting off a vax that’s proven unsafe and ineffective.

Researchers, my physio said, once lay awake at night trying to work out how to heal people. But now they lie awake at night wondering how to get funding. In other words, the answers to some questions can’t be monetised, so no-one attached to status or a salary ever asks them. Yet if I opt to act on fear, as my doctor would advise, my life force will contract and recede from the body I seek to fully inhabit – because I don’t want a brain-washed, hand-sanitised existence in a mediated, medicated, monitored environment stacked sky-high with 15-minute-city fellow cyborgs who’ve forgotten how to listen with their whole being and sacrificed all sorts of subtle faculties for the convenience of surviving hygienically sealed off from muddy vibrant swamps and swarms of insects thrumming harmonies under the stars.