One of these days, I plan to tell you the whole sordid story -- the details of how my healthy, active husband battled COVID-19 for eight days at home and then nearly a week in the hospital, and about the road to recovery ahead.

I’ll tell you about my own COVID infection, which seemed to be a million times milder than his, but still gave me a litany of uncomfortable symptoms and days of dread and fear. I’ll try to capture the crushing anxiety of the past month.

I’ll also tell you about my beloved aunt and uncle --like second parents to me -- who both contracted COVID. As I type, my uncle is fighting for his life in isolation in a hospital.

I plan to share these personal stories once we are past the worst of all this.

But right now, the wounds are too fresh and the endings still unsettled. At least 200,000 Americans have died with COVID-19, and the fall surge of cases has begun.

So for now, I’m going to talk about the weirdness of it all.

At first, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how my husband, who had followed safety protocols above and beyond, could have contracted the virus. It reminded me of all the conscientious people who follow all the “rules” for healthy living and still get cancer.

Unfairness and bad luck are as much a part of life as serendipity and good fortune.

But the difference between this terrible disease and other ones is that no one is out in the streets protesting that cancer is fake. I haven’t seen viral videos of people calling cancer a political hoax. You don’t hear too many sane people saying we need to defund cancer research or ignore doctors when they talk about it. You certainly don’t hear political leaders saying barely any people have died from cancer.

We all know these bizarre reactions are largely political. But the virus itself is weird, too: Why did I get off relatively easy and my husband get hit so hard? How did our children manage to avoid infection? Why was my aunt spared while my uncle suffers?

When many people get over an illness without major consequences, it’s tempting to write it off as no big deal. But you don’t know who the unlucky patient will be -- it could be you, or someone you love dearly. It’s virus roulette.

That brings me to the strangest part of the whole deal.

A few weeks before getting sick, I took Frankie to the dog park. A man a few years older than me struck up a conversation, which soon came around to the virus. He said a close friend had inadvertently infected her father, who recently died from it. She was devastated, and he felt very sorry for her.

This all seemed like normal human thinking, so far.

Then, he said that he’d been exposed at work, but he didn’t want to get a test because he “didn’t want to be cooped up for two weeks.”

Now I was bewildered. Having just told me about his friend’s father, he clearly knew the virus was real, deadly and easily transmitted. But for him, two weeks inside was too big a price to pay to possibly save someone’s life, or prevent long-term disability or suffering.

Now, for those without paid sick days or the ability to work from home, I can understand the hesitation about getting tested: Two weeks at home means bills won’t get paid.

But that wasn’t this gentleman’s concern. He just didn’t want to be “cooped up.”

I wondered if he realized he sounded like a selfish sociopath.

My kids -- teenagers with busy, active lives before everything was upended -- know about “cooped up.” They had to quarantine for 24 days when their parents were sick, and haven’t been inside their school building since March.

I know this pandemic has dragged on for far too long. Many people have dropped their vigilance about social distancing and masking, especially around family and friends. We want to believe we are safe around these people.

But we’re not out of the woods yet. Not even close. And it seems like a lot of people who accept the reality of the virus, like the man at the park, don’t seem to care about doing their part to get us there.

And that’s the weirdest part of all.

When I heard the recording of President Donald Trump admitting to Bob Woodward that he wanted to downplay the threat of the coronavirus, which he knew was far deadlier than the flu, I was waiting to hear an update on my husband, who was hospitalized with COVID-19.

Woodward’s forthcoming book is aptly named “Rage.”

Indeed, for the first time in the nine days since my husband had been gravely sick with this virus, I felt something other than overwhelming anxiety and fear. I felt rage from the core of my being.

It was the vaunted investigative team of Woodward and Carl Bernstein whose coverage of the Watergate scandal helped bring down President Richard Nixon. This same journalistic legend sat on tapes of Trump saying in February, “This is deadly stuff,” while later telling the American public it was a Democratic hoax no worse than the flu.

The pandemic has now killed more than 190,000 Americans.

Many have argued that the earlier release of tapes would not have changed this administration’s or its enablers’ response, and I tend to agree with that. But it might have convinced even one Fox News viewer to take this deadly virus more seriously. When Woodward heard the president telling the public a story entirely different than what he had said to him, while death and disease ravaged through the country, he faced an ethical decision.

He chose his book over the public’s right to know during a severe public health crisis.

If I had to pick a person least likely to get COVID-19 based strictly on their behavior, I would say my husband.

Since the pandemic began, he has not eaten inside a restaurant, been in a crowd or entered a single store without a mask. The only trip he’s taken was a weekend of camping. He works in hospital administration, so he has gone to work each day as an essential worker. Even when he’s working alone in his office, he wears the medical-grade N-95 given to hospital staff. He’s worn that mask at least eight hours a day, every weekday, for six months.

On the eighth day of his illness, which has been a hundred times worse than any flu and made him sicker than I’ve ever seen in 20 years of marriage, I drove my formerly healthy husband to the emergency room.

He received steroids, an experimental antiviral drug and convalescent plasma in a COVID isolation ward.

We discussed the Woodward tapes via text, because no one was allowed to be near him while he fought his health battle.

There’s no way for us to know exactly where he got the virus. He works in a heavily Republican county that never issued a mask order. We live in a red state run by a governor who followed the Trump approach to handling the pandemic: Gov. Mike Parson left it up to local counties to handle -- or mishandle -- their response, much like Trump left governors scrambling. Missouri has been among the top states with new confirmed cases per 1,000 residents, according to Johns Hopkins data at the time he got sick.

But while I didn’t have any expectation that Trump or the leaders who support him would behave any differently than they have, I would have expected something better from a member of my own tribe of journalists. With someone I love fighting for his life, the news of those tapes hit like an intense betrayal.

I’m focused on my husband’s recovery and grateful for the medical team taking care of him. He is showing hopeful signs of improvement, and recently came home from the hospital with oxygen. The doctors told us to expect a lengthy recovery.

Our country has collectively lost so much during the long months of this pandemic. People have lost their lives, loved ones, livelihoods, education and sense of security.

Now, I’ve also lost any shred of respect I had for Bob Woodward.

When my daughter was in third grade, she Googled “hypoallergenic dog” after years of hearing me tell her that our severe allergies prevented us from fulfilling her wish for a puppy.

She created a presentation on a rare breed, the Coton de Tulear, highlighting a list of reasons why this no-shed pup was the perfect dog for our family. I found images of this fluffy white dog with dark, expressive eyes whenever I opened my computer.

At the time, I used the classic parenting delay tactic -- “we’ll see” -- instead of an outright rejection. I knew that with two young children and a career, I did not want to take on the responsibility of another living being. My husband had zero interest in acquiring a pet. Neither of us grew up with dogs. We both come from traditional Muslim families who believed dogs should be kept outside the home for reasons related to ritual purity when praying.

Fast-forward seven years: The kids are both teenagers, my daughter’s desire for a dog hasn’t abated, and I’m starting to feel a little anxious about how quickly the years of child-rearing are passing. I’m more susceptible to an adorable creature that needs nurturing.

I struck a deal with my spouse that the dog would stay out of certain areas of the house, and we got on a waiting list with a reputable breeder.

When picked up our 10-week-old Frankie (short for Franklin D. Woofevelt), my maternal instincts kicked into overdrive.

For the first few nights, I moved an air mattress into the kitchen near Frankie’s crate and slept in front of him, so he wouldn’t cry at night. I reverted to familiar concerns from when our kids were babies: I worried he wasn’t eating enough, though the vet assured me he was growing just fine. I wondered if he would ever get potty-trained. I wasn’t sure how long his separation anxiety phase would last, or when he would outgrow his teenage rebellion. Sometimes he reminds me of the kids as toddlers: When I use the restroom, he sits right outside the door, anxiously awaiting my return. I entice him to eat his grain-free kibble by adding bits of apples or green beans. The first time I left him with a pet sitter overnight, I typed up a page of instructions.

I could tell I was becoming one of “those” dog people. I was reminded of an essay a reader sent me in 2017, in which the writer warned apocalyptically that pets were replacing children in America. Several such screeds point to the rising rate of dog ownership among millennials, the increasing amount pet owners spend on their animals and the delayed birth rate among this cohort. The reader who sent me the link seemed angry -- at her kids and the culture that has encouraged pet worship -- but she also seemed sad. Would she have to settle for grandpups instead of grandbabies?

Once I scoffed at people who described their pets as “furbabies,” and now I monitor the livestream feed of Frankie’s doggy daycare on my phone. I had to stop myself from calling the center when I witnessed a large goldendoodle bullying my baby -- er, dog.

It’s easy to mock the more ridiculous aspects of pet culture. But had I known the unconditional, enthusiastic love a dog offers, I would never have waited this long. Frankie is way more excited to see me than my kids have been -- outwardly, at least -- in years. And while raising a dog is surprisingly expensive, they never go to college.

I’ve been surprised by my intense bond with this furry creature. Even my daughter said recently that she hadn’t expected me to fall so hard for Frankie. I’m trying to be as objective as possible here: He is legitimately the cutest, sweetest, most lovable dog I’ve ever seen. If I had gotten a puppy 20 years ago, I can easily see how I might have put off having babies for a while.

I guess we found each other at the perfect time.

Frankie turns 1 this weekend.

You’ll have to excuse me; I have a cake to order.