COVID Finally Got Me

 

The world seems upside down right now. Things can only get better.

It’s sort of like Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. You take all of the precautions to avoid getting the plague, but it still gets you in the end. I think that the culprit was a trip to the emergency room to get my spouse treated for some tick bites. Lot’s of Lyme’s Disease cases going on in my neck of the woods.  At any rate, there was a family there with a little boy and the fellow had a horrible hacking cough. We were sitting across from them and we didn’t move away from them at first; you know, I didn’t want to be That Prejudicial Guy. Stupid me, as Harry Flashman would say. In this age of Covid the prime directive is to look out for oneself first.  We moved across the room after awhile, but it was probably too late for me.

We returned home from the ER at 4:30 AM on Saturday morning and I probably slept in until about noon. Later that afternoon I started to feel a minor pressing sensation near my breast bone. That evening I could feel a sore throat coming on. So I went to my local CVS Pharmacy and bought some Covid home test kits and tested negative Saturday evening.

Sunday morning I felt better and the sore throat did not seem to be getting any worse, if not actually feeling better.

 Early Monday morning I felt like I had a bad cold - lot’s of wet coughing, nasal congestion and sore throat. I took another home test and again tested negative, but in the back of my mind I was thinking that regardless of what the tests were saying, I likely had Covid. Really getting tired and run down by the end of Monday. I made an appointment with my spouse’s doctor to get a drive through Covid test, reasoning that this would be a more accurate test.

The results were positive for me and negative for my spouse so we went into full quarantine mode. I called my own doctor and (bless her) she got me on a regimen of Proxlovid medicine. I slept for a good portion of Tuesday. At night I had to sleep propped up at a 60-degree angle so that “stuff” would not get into the lungs and send me off into a fit of hacking coughing.

Wednesday, I was feeling a bit better so the Paxlovid must be working. The meds do have some side effects, all of which I will not detail here, but one of them was that there was a metallic or bitter taste in my mouth for awhile after taking the pills. I thought that perhaps this was the “loss of sense of taste” Covid symptom, but it gradually went away. Spent most of Wednesday laying on the couch listening to WSCR sports talk and after getting bored with that, I watched some television and got hooked on some reality TV show “Master Distillers” I think that it was called. It was knock off of the Forged In Fire show on the History Channel. It starts with 6 people in a moonshine making contest and the contestants get whittled down over the course of several shows. It was silly, yet fascinating. It seemed that all of the contestants had to wear bib overalls, wear funny little pork pie hats, or have names like “Tater”. I did learn a bit about making moonshine and something called Cherry Bounce.

Watched a little Chicago White Sox vs. Kansas City Royals baseball, but the Sox still couldn’t get their offense rolling which means that it was a bad game to watch. Switched over to the end of Chicago Fire in time to see that Stella and Severeid were finally going to tie the knot. Chicago PD came on next. This is probably my favorite of the “Chicago” trio of programs that NBC runs on Wednesday nights.

When I went to sleep that night, I discovered that I had spent too much time on my back during the day to the point that my back hurt and so I tried different sleep positions. The hacking cough really took off during the night and wouldn’t stop unless I was upright, but I couldn’t stay upright because it hurt my back, and so on and so forth…  Finally fell asleep sometime after 4:15 AM this morning. We had a power outage at 6:45AM so my white noise machine, AKA an electric fan, shut off and this woke me up, much to my regret. Sent an OUTAGE text to the power company and an hour later we had power again. I slept until 10AM this morning.

 Feeling better this morning. One thing about my version of Covid is that one can’t get too cocky about thinking that you are feeling better, because as soon as you do, that painful hacking cough returns. I’m typing this blog post from bed. I have one of those hydraulic lift devices that raises and lowers the angle of the mattress at the touch of a switch. This is really the first time that I have even used this feature on the bed mattress since its purchase two years ago.

One thing that is helping me pass the time is picking up some of my Sharpe’s book and rereading them. I’m currently working on Sharpe’s Sword, which takes place around the time of the Battle of Salamanca in 1812. I think that I will read Sharpe’s Company next so that I can get reacquainted with Obadiah Hakeswell, whose probably the best villain in the Sharpe series of books.

I thought that I might be able to “go to town” on painting figures, but I just can’t stir up the gumption to give it a try. I’m always too tired to paint.

The Cons of Covid are quite obvious so I try to think about the Pros of the whole thing, you know, those unexpected nice things that can happen during the process; 1) I haven’t had much of an appetite so I’ve lost four pounds which gets me closer to my desired weight; 2) getting reacquainted with books; and 3) best of all having a new appreciation for my wife. She has been the best.

I just want to get rid of that hacking cough.