You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a little dizzy and fatigued. Somehow, I caught Covid with a twist of strep throat. I’m as surprised as anyone to finally have Covid come home to roost in my body. I have no fever, though at first felt feverish with chills unlike I’d ever known lasting for hours. I figured I had a bad sinus infection. The home Covid test was negative.
Over the phone, my doctor’s nurse asked 20 questions & then sent me to the ER pronto. I didn’t think I was all that sick. But it did take everything within me to get out of bed, throw on some clothes, and drive over to one of those 24-hour emergency medical clinics. They poked my nostrils and scraped my throat and left me in a patient room freezing even with my coat on. It took a long 45 minutes for the labs to come back positive for Covid and strep.
“Wha?!!” I exclaimed through raspy vocal cords.
The ER doc looked at me like I was unconvinced and went back to the nurse’s station to show me the results were indeed mine: POSITIVE Covid, POSITIVE strep.
OK I knew I was real sick, about as sick as I’d ever been with the unstoppable chills and dizziness when trying to walk. Covid got me. It really got me. And because I’m 60, the doc pointed out, he highly recommended I stay and receive IV treatment. So I was going to be in the ER awhile, shivering all along. I asked for the heat to be turned up; doc pointed out no one else was shivering & I was very sick. They let me keep my clothes on, poked deep with the IV needle until hitting blood, covered me with a couple of warm blankets, and I laid back on the bed still shivering.
I felt I was clear headed; I could communicate with everybody. It’s not like I was delirious. I didn’t feel I was near death or needed a night in the hospital.
But the medical team dealt with me seriously. No sense of humor or treating my situation lightly … at all. Got it.
I was in trouble. Covid kills and is still killing and is hard on the elderly (the senior age of which I’ve crossed). And Covid diabolically flows directly to our weakest organs and can wreak havoc with our reduced health conditions.
I didn’t understand how this happened to me. I got the vaccines as soon as possible a couple years ago plus a couple of boosters since. But I put off the latest booster to guard against the latest variant because of my previous booster in late July. I was trying to maneuver through this pandemic just right. Missed it by that much.
Well, I assume at least I won’t need to be hospitalized or die from Covid. I’ve been put in quarantine (yeah, there’re still doing that), and more than anything else I hope my husband does not come down with this. Through the pandemic, he must have been tested 15 times—always negative. But this time, IDK. (Ooops. Too late. He’s caught it, too—right while I’m writing this.)
To your health
I take lots of supplements to stay relatively healthy, even eat a handful of blueberries every morning. So, again just super surprised to come down with the 21st century’s politically convoluted pandemic. Shoot. I guess I was playing around not wearing masks anymore. I never got sick one time during the two years of mandated masks at work. No sore throat, no sniffles, not sneezing. Makes you think.
There’s still all this misinformation, and half the country not vaccinated, and most not going for the latest vax either. Then there’s that home test that was negative when I really had Covid.
My main concern about getting this disease-come-lately is the long-term symptoms. A colleague said she had to return to work way earlier than her sickness went away, and this was with the mandatory isolation.
I’m also wondering now that I’ve got Covid despite all the vaxes and boosters if I’m immune to it—like in the olden days. That’s how our ancestors dealt with disease before vaccines. People lived, people died, people lived through diseases they caught, some ended up with lifelong disabilities like weirdo polio.
Since coming down with Covid, I’ve had a really bad back spasm, like a knife right in the center of my back. Looked it up, and yes backache seems to come from the omicron variant along with the bad congestion I experienced. I could not breathe through my nose as if my nostrils were sealed shut.
I gotta hand it to the ER team. The IV meds got me feeling about 50 percent better, that and the nose spray they gave me. Breathing is priority one. And even though I got mixed messages about whether there’s a round of oral meds to take or nothing works and the virus must run its course, I ended up with a home pack of pills: 3 in the morning, 3 in the evening. There’s a round of something to treat the highly contagious strep throat, too.
Through it all, I’ve got to try home delivery services and must say this era may be the best to come down with a quarantinable illness.
So let me get back to resting here and try to get well, and by all means get myself back to work. Hate being cooped up.