With the recent day and night shift changes, I knew that I was wrecking my immune system, and I was almost certain that I would catch some viral illness towards the end of March. When I first started getting symptoms, I thought... yep, that was coming!
I figured that if I would get this, it would be from a patient. However, it turns out this is pretty unlikely. I started getting symptoms on Monday evening, and the last time I saw a patient (due to my board reviews) was around Tuesday night. While it's certainly possible that I got it from a patient, none of my patients had any symptoms (like I do) and were not hospitalized with COVID. Thus, the likelihood is rather small.
Not to mention, the timing is inconsistent with the transmission of COVID.
(Sourced from an article in Nature journal)
Most of these viral shedding / symptom curves are pretty similar, and it's pretty much accepted that viral shedding begins about 2-3 days before symptoms start. Viral shedding only occurs when someone is infected. Therefore, someone has to have caught the infection 3-5 days before symptoms begin.
3-5 days before Monday night would be around Wednesday - Friday; the Friday corresponds to when I was participating in our board review sessions.
So either I caught it from someone at the board review session (I don't recall anyone symptomatic) or from someone on the public transport that I was using to get to and from the board reviews. We have a lot of ill homeless people on the subway and buses, and they tend to be quite crowded, so I wouldn't be surprised if I got it from there. Homeless people are inherently more vulnerable to health problems compared to someone who has the ability to take care of themselves in a cleaner setting, so I would not be shocked to know that they carry around more infections than the average person.
So most of my symptoms were uninteresting: subjective fever (I didn't bother measuring it, which was a bit silly, but ultimately didn't make any difference), severe chills, muscle aches, pounding headache, significant weakness, congestion, coughing.
One interesting one happened towards the beginning of my shift yesterday. Fortunately, it was not a busy shift and I was able to hide away in our resident lounge and sleep.
Well, this was not a normal sleep. You know those fever dreams that you get? The very strange ones that make no sense and are more active and different than your regular ones?
Well, I was having those dreams and was waking up multiple times as I napped. Many of the times I woke up, I found myself muttering 1 or 2 incomprehensible words (which at the time made sense to my feverish brain), and would promptly fall back asleep. I don't remember the words at all, but I definitely remember muttering. I'm glad nobody else was there because that would've been a bit freaky for them to see.
Well, since the COVID is confirmed, I'm going to be home for at least 5 days. It's something I'll be confirming with my hospital's occupational department. I'll retest myself in a few days and see whether I can return to work, where I'd have one more night shift before transitioning back to daytime.
In the meantime, I figured it might be better if I already start transitioning back to a daytime schedule. A single change back to a night shift in 5 days is going to have less of an impact on me than maintaining a night schedule now. Plus, I don't even know yet whether I'll test positive again in 5 days... it's possible that if I am still positive, I won't have anymore night shifts. Thus, I'd rather go for daytime again.
More importantly, I'll be trying stringently to avoid contact with my family for several days. Living in a small apartment, this is going to be difficult, and given the fact that we had close contact the day I started developing symptoms (when viral shedding is very high) it's likely I've already infected one of my family members. Crap.
Anyway, I'm feeling better now, but still very weak, congested, and with throat pain. The chills, subjective fever, and pounding headaches are decreasing. I can walk much better than I was walking yesterday, but still not for a long period.
I'm confident I'll get better quickly; I tend to recover rather rapidly. These days off will be a good opportunity for me to get back into an exercise routine which I have neglected for the last 3 weeks or so. I'll give it another day or so of recovery before I resume exercising because I don't want to strain myself right away.
