I'm gonna keep this a mostly serious post, as I just wanna document what happened to me while I was infected with Covid-19/Coronavirus towards the start of this month. I'm basically doing this to farm sweet, sweet Hive and make money off my pain and suffering to just kind of get things off my chest and create a bit of discussion around what you may or may not experience with the virus. I definitely had a more mild case than what some people are experiencing, which I am super thankful for. I'll start off by talking about how I got infected, which I have a good idea of how. Unfortunately, I have previous medical problems that I just started getting looked into in the past few months. One of the doctors I was referred to worked out of an office inside of a hospital, which is where I believe I got infected at. This particular hospital has a covid wing in it, and the time frame matches up with when I started displaying symptoms.
(Yes, this is a god tier masterpiece of photoshop work, I know)
While I can't be 100 percent sure that's where I got infected, I'm going to assume for now it was. You know, since I'm a fucking cave dwelling hermit basically. I was wearing a cloth mask at the time with a nursing pad inserted into the middle of it to act as a ghetto rigged filter. I knew that this would mostly just protect others from me if I was sick, but figured it may offer a small amount of protection. I honestly wonder if perhaps it reducing the viral load I was exposed to helped keep my symptoms on the more mild/moderate side, but I've no real way to know for sure. I definitely do wish N95 masks were more readily available at this point in time to the public, considering it's been 8 months since this virus appeared. But, there's no use in crying over spilt milk I guess.
So, what were my symptoms? The first 3 days of experiencing symptoms wasn't too bad at all, I honestly just thought I was having bad allergy problems. As that is something I deal with year round usually. I basically had a bad post nasal drip, a mild dry cough and a sore throat I had paranoid thoughts about being infected, but blew it off for those first few days since I wasn't getting any worse. I did make sure to continue to cosplay a cave bear, and stay inside my apartment though. However, on day 4 I knew I was definitely sick with something. I developed a mild fever of 99.5 that went up to 100. 4 that night, and also had a headache and a stuffy nose. I had yellow mucus developing, so I thought maybe I just had a sinus infection. Again, I just figured I'd stay inside to be safe and called my doctor about some anti biotics.
Day 5 I continued to get worse, I started having extreme fatigue and body aches as well as the occasional chills here and there. I had severe stomach problems where I had to go to the bathroom a lot, which was kind of like when I had Norovirus. The cough I had also worsened, where I felt a ticklish feeling in my chest nearly every time I took a breath. My symptoms basically continued on for another 7 days before I had any changes. I had a fever of 100.4-102 degrees Fahrenheit for 9 straight days before it finally broke. It definitely seemed like the fever dipped during the day then went up a lot at night, I attribute this possibly to my cortisol levels dropping at night, but I've no idea if that's why or not. On my 12th day of having symptoms, my fever finally started to go down and went away. My cough turned into a productive cough as well, where I started having sputum/mucus coming out of my chest. However, this is what it looked like for the first two days.
You might notice this looks pretty fucking gross. Well, that's because there's some blood in there giving it that rusty color. This only happened in the first two days after my fever broke. The following 4 days afterwards though I continued to cough up yellow/white sputum that had streaks and speckles of blood in it. This finally has mostly stopped in the past 24 hours, I can only recall 1-2 times where I've coughed up any blood today or last night, and it was extremely small amounts. So, I'm definitely hoping that this stage is over with. This was definitely the most alarming part of being sick besides the 9 day fever. I started thinking about going to the hospital at this point, but decided against it since most of my other symptoms had went away and the blood was reducing instead of increasing.
My cough is still around, and probably will be for the next few weeks according to my doctor. They put me on a second anti-biotics to help prevent any other secondary bacterial infection from happening. My symptoms started around July 30th/31st, so I'm now about 3 weeks out from initial symptoms. I definitely can tell this virus has spread my cheeks and chewed on my colon pretty hard. My lung capacity doesn't feel nearly as good as it did before I got sick. I would say I can hold about 70 percent of the air that I previously could. I feel super worn out and have difficulty breathing from simple things like going up and down 2 flights of stairs to get the mail. This only lasts for about 6 or 7 minutes before I start feeling okay, but I can definitely tell my body is very worn out still from being sick.
This is something I'll have to talk to my doctor about more in an appointment I have later on in the month. As I'm a bit concerned that there's been damage to my lungs leaving scarring. It seems like most people have the tired/worn out lung thing for a month or two before they start feeling better, so hopefully that'll just be the case for me. I'm also a tad worried about heart damage being done, as I had an arrhythmia previously and I've read reports of people having some organ damage to heart/kidneys/lungs even from mild cases. I guess I'll find out for sure once I talk to my doctor and see if they feel a CT scan/MRI should be done to look things over. I'm also wondering when I'm going to stop feeling so fatigued, as even 3 weeks in I still feel like I need to sleep all the time. There's a fatigue syndrome being associated with Covid, and I definitely feel like I'm suffering from that. If I am, it's definitely not the worst it could be though, as I've seen some survivors are literally so tired that they're sleeping 14-16 hours a day after recovering and not able to work/be active.
Another thing I should touch on is the weird symptoms I did experience while I was sick. As many others, I lost my sense of smell during my time being sick. It came back thankfully after about 4 days, but holy shit was it weird not being able to smell anything. I noticed I couldn't smell food at first, and then started testing it out by smelling cleaning chemicals and other things. My fiancee was a bit shocked that I was shoving my nose into a bottle of kitchen cleaner like I was trying to get a fat whiff of an asshole, while even a mild smell directly under hear nose made her start coughing. The other weird symptom I got was a strong burning sensation in my left nostril anytime I coughed. That went on for about 5 days, and I really don't get what was going on. Touching my nostril and breathing through it were fine, but anytime I coughed it felt like when you accidentally snort pool water up your nose or something. Thankfully that has also vanished.
I'm very thankful that my symptoms never got worse, which I was concerned about since I have a few medical conditions that could have influenced what happened to me. Sadly, my fiancee ended up getting infected as well. I'm not sure if I infected her or if she got ill from coming to the hospital with me, not sure we will ever actually find out. Her symptoms are entirely different than mine though, she has no sense of smell for about a week now, vomited once or twice, has no fever and feels like she has the flu with how her body feels. This virus is definitely a luck of the draw type thing, though comorbidities definitely seem to determine what your outlook will be like as well. I'm hoping she'll begin to feel better within the next 2 or 3 days.
So, there's a brief outline into what happened to me and how I've been feeling. If you have any questions or are curious about anything, feel free to ask questions. I hope none of you end up being infected with this shit, and that everyone is staying safe out there. I'm definitely going to be looking into getting an antibody test done, though I've seen some stuff come out today saying that even if you don't have any, your T-cells can create a new batch of them via bone marrow cells/B-cells to fight the virus if it re-enters your body within several months of initial infection, which is somewhat comforting to hear. Hopefully I'll be safe from it for the next few months, so I don't have worry about this shit while going to any doctor appointments that I'm forced into going to.
Anyways, I'm working on a game review and maybe recording some random riffs/music here soon. I'm hoping I'll be back to my old self sometime soon, and also back to a normal posting schedule here. But, I guess we'll see if I just morph into a half dead sloth or anything, I guess. But, until next time, doods.
Later!