An oral history of a three-month battle with Covid-19.

By the time 49-year-old Paris dragged himself to the emergency room on April 3, 2020, he was unable to breathe, let alone explain to the intake staff what was happening to him. While gasping for air, he was whisked away by emergency medical workers who’d become all too familiar with the telltale signs of the novel coronavirus. Paris would later learn that on arrival his “lungs looked like they were made of stone.” “I had always wanted abs of steel,” he recalls, “instead, I got lungs of cement.” It is with this self-reflective sense of humor that Paris tells his story of surviving the horrors of Covid-19. In an oral history format, he, along with friends, family, and medical personnel, details the 88 days that he spent in the hospital fighting to stay alive. For 32 of those days, he was in a medically induced coma, during which he says that he experienced a series of intensely vivid dreams and nightmares. He describes them in lucid detail that gives readers a glimpse into the mysterious planes of the subconscious. Some of the dream accounts feature illustrations by artists Shepherd and Avdeev that, like the text, are amusing and frightening, by turns. Overall, Paris examines his time at the edge of mortality with gratitude and levity. His frequent, flippant quips about his prognosis (“ventilators seemed even scarier than lawyers”) are balanced by sobering accounts of his terrors; during one of his many hallucinations, for example, he was convinced that drug-dealing pirates were hunting him. Later, he describes his tearful sadness and frustration as he realized that he couldn’t put on his own sock. Overall, the events in this memoir will present readers with much-needed reminders and warnings about the fragility of human life.

A sometimes-harrowing, sometimes-humorous account of one man’s struggle to survive.