I don’t like to be left out of things, and now I can at least say I was a genuine participant in the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020.
Reluctantly.
I didn’t want to have coronavirus. I thought I was being reasonably careful without hiding out all year in my house. I was working, I was going to church, I was doing what I had to do, but I was taking precautions--wearing my mask and carrying sanitizer in my purse and my car and using it frequently.
I had given up traveling, avoided places where I might run into large crowds, and kept a social distance of 6 feet or more from other people. I had given up most of my shopping.
So I didn’t think much about it on August 2 when I started coughing. I had exposed myself to a little too much fabric dye the day before, which often makes me cough (okay, I HAD to shop on Tax Free Day). I was coughing again on August 3.
Later that night, I began to feel as if I might have a fever, though that happens to me so seldom that I couldn’t remember what fever felt like. But I got very familiar with the sensation as the days went on.
Instead of losing my sense of taste and smell as have many victims of the virus, those faculties became acute in me, to the point where I couldn’t stand to smell food or taste it: it had too much smell and too much taste. I told my husband I could taste the oil something was cooked in. I stopped eating.
For me that’s major! When I was pregnant and experiencing morning sickness, I could eat, throw up and go straight back to the kitchen to make another hamburger, rejoicing in being able to eat a “two-fer.”
Not this time. One bite of cracker made me queasy, so I stopped eating altogether, but I never had the full-blown nausea that some complain of.
On Aug. 6 my husband convinced me to get tested for the virus. I was reluctant because I already knew what I had and also knew that health professionals really can’t help you much. Because they still know so little about the disease, they can only treat the symptoms. But to satisfy him, I dragged myself to the clinic, sick as a dog, and got tested.
The result was negative.
As I had anticipated, I was given a prescription for a handful of over-the-counter medicines that treat the symptoms, like cough medicine and allergy pills. You can also get an injection of steroids, but I have found that this just makes me feel better briefly before I have to go back to being sick, so I opted not to take the shot.
You also get bottles of vitamins to boost your immunity so that you don’t get the disease you already know you have, whatever the test said.
I was tested later in the week for flu, which was negative. After another week of fever, complete lack of energy, just feeling “sick,” some coughing and little eating, my husband, the eternal optimist, insisted that I go to another clinic, where he thought they might have some magic to work on me. They also retested me.
And finally, after being “dog sick” for two weeks, I tested positive for COVID-19, although that was at the very point that I began to feel better after finally submitting to a corticosteroid injection.
I’ve made rapid progress since then. I’ve had no fever for almost two weeks. I am eating, I am back to doing some housework (the downside of recovery, as far as I’m concerned), I taught my Sunday school class Sunday and I’m back at work today. But I don’t feel completely normal.
I am not going to be tested again because after my experience of testing negative when I obviously had the virus, I don’t completely trust the test.
From my own experience, I can say that if you go into the virus as an otherwise healthy person, you will probably come out alive and well on the other side. Or not.
I can say that you may never know where you picked up the bug, but the less you are out and about the better, and the more often you wear a mask and use sanitizer the better, though I thought I was doing those things.
I can say that there is probably no typical case of coronavirus. I had no breathing problems, no nausea and no bodily aches and pains. I did not lose my sense of smell and taste, but the opposite was just as difficult to deal with. I did lose energy, and I did have fever and feel awful. I know others who only lost the sense of taste or smell or had no symptoms whatsoever. And still others who wound up with pneumonia and other serious lung issues.
If you’ve been thinking that you sort of want to get the virus so you’ll be immune henceforth, be careful. No one has promised that after having it for almost three weeks I am now immune to COVID-19. I wish that was the bright spot in all this, but at this point, we just don’t know.
I do know that I will be careful because I don’t ever want to have it again. I have not enjoyed being just another statistic.
