PSA: Don’t Get COVID

I realize that (hopefully) most of you already know it’s generally a bad idea to get COVID, but I wanted to complain a bit more than I did back when I said I was on the mend. Going into my bout with the disease, I reasoned I would be generally fine even if I caught it. I’m under 50, not overweight, not diabetic, not asthmatic, double vaxxed and boosted. I expected it to be like a small cold, if I even had any symptoms at all.

I came down with the beginning traces of symptoms 3 weeks ago now. At the time, I didn’t think much of them. Then they got bad enough that I had to stay in bed for about three days. I also isolated from my family, because I didn’t want to give them this. But once my 5 days of total isolation was up, I assumed I was going to be better soon. And indeed, for a while it seemed like that was the case. I went back to work once I tested negative, and I even went to graduation.

However, after that flurry of activity, I realized I must have tried to do too much too soon. I was hit with a bucket of fatigue, a constant headache that ibuprofen didn’t do much to stop, and just generally felt poorly. I worked from home three days last week, using sick time to spend much of it in bed. Thursday, I finally felt up to taking some walks, which still left me tired, but didn’t seem to be totally terrible.

Then the cough kicked in. A steady, dry cough that was with me all the time. If I had a cough drop, it would go away, but other than that, I was hacking all the time. Even when I’d tried to fall asleep, I’d cough and wake myself up.

Today’s the first day that the cough has died down. But the fatigue is back. Not as bad as it was, so I’m hopeful I’m slowly spiraling up to feeling normal, but it’s still a pain.

I’m not saying this to say my life has been crushed by COVID. I’m still counting myself as having had a positive outcome with it. No hospitalization. No loss of taste or smell. But plenty of people keep dismissing the disease as no big deal. I’ve had the flu before. It didn’t knock me out this much, and I recovered much more quickly. There have been a million deaths in the US in two years. If someone had raised that number back in March of 2020, they’d have been horrified. (If you want to be depressed, check out the waybackmachine for pretty much any news organization you like back in March 2020. I’d forgotten there was a time when people were hoping we’d be over this by Easter 2020 . . .)

Anyway. I’ll get off my soapbox before I really get started. I just wanted to put my experience out there. I’m glad many people are symptom free or have very mild symptoms. I had medium symptoms, which made me start to seriously think what having high or extreme symptoms would be like.

No thanks.

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