Coronavirus Tales

Well, it's probably fitting that I got this far before I ended up getting COVID. My fault for moving closer to NYC.

I should be out of isolation tomorrow. Pretty gentle all around; a good reason to take (half) days off work, though remote meetings make it too easy to work when you feel like garbage.

Nothing substantial for me or my girlfriend (knock on wood).

Daughter (14) tested positive on Tuesday, had three days of light coughing and runny nose then back to normal. Wife and I have had a few sort-of symptoms but still testing negative. Pretty much any illness I’ve ever had has been worse. I guess it still has time to develop into something.

Prederick wrote:

Well, it's probably fitting that I got this far before I ended up getting COVID. My fault for moving closer to NYC.

Day 1 of Self-Isolation: Put together the bookcase in my new apartment, only to discover that in the move I lost two of the support pegs. Blergh.

So far, it's just been the flu. I'm vaxxed and boosted, so really all I've been dealing with has been some fatigue, an occasional cough and some mild congestion, and a very persistent and annoying headache.

Prederick wrote:

So far, it's just been the flu. I'm vaxxed and boosted, so really all I've been dealing with has been some fatigue, an occasional cough and some mild congestion, and a very persistent and annoying headache.

After Mrs Sorb contracted Covid early last week, she also pretty much had "the flu" with the added bonus of not being able to taste a lot for a couple of days. She was pretty wiped out for about 2 days, and then started to recover. However, she only returned a positive result for those 2 days she felt really ill and has been Negative since last Wednesday.

Last Thursday I went down with the same symptoms - pretty bad flu, although I retained my sense of taste. spent Thursday in bed feeling very sorry for myself, Friday not much better and Saturday recovering. Today hasn't been too bad. Throughout I've had negative LFT results. We're still not sure if it was actual covid or not but we've been cautious about going out and mixing (while reacting with slight puzzlement that unless she tested positive, Mini-Sorb continued to go to school last week. She didn't test positive.) and all that, and generally not doing a lot.

We're out of LFT's now and you have to pay for more in the UK annoyingly. So it's pretty much back in the lap of the Gods. At least I feel well enough to return to work tomorrow though.

SallyNasty wrote:

How you holdin up, Roo?

Thanks for asking.

I do not like how I'm still feeling. Tired. Sleepy. Stupid. Can't focus very well.

Thankfully, we had holidays in Greece, and I basically had a four day weekend to recover. But I am still not ready to go back to teaching this week, even though I will. Hoping this improves soon.

9 year old came home from school with a fever and no appetite. Home covid test positive, awaiting PCR results.

mudbunny wrote:

Welp, the youngest just tested positive for the 'Rona.

She called me to pick her up from school, she had a sore throat and a mild headache.

A couple others on her cheerleading team also have it, one of whom is in her stunt-team, so it was pretty much inevitable.

She's fully vaxxed + booster, so I expect mild headache is the worse she will get, but I figure sleep will be scarce (due to worrying) for the next 5 days.

So after a little over a week later, her only symptom is her eyebrows hurt a lot.

No-one else in the house has any symptoms at all, but we are all staying masked up.

Sorbicol wrote:

After Mrs Sorb contracted Covid early last week, she also pretty much had "the flu" with the added bonus of not being able to taste a lot for a couple of days. She was pretty wiped out for about 2 days, and then started to recover. However, she only returned a positive result for those 2 days she felt really ill and has been Negative since last Wednesday.

Yeah, today I woke up (symptoms initially hit Friday night/early Saturday) and it wasn't even the flu anymore, just an annoying cough and some fatigue. Broadly, I feel okay.

However, I will absolutely be taking some of my 90+ hours of sick time to stay out of work through Thursday, since I'm 100% sure that half the damn reason I caught COVID was because my job forced me to move closer to the office in NYC.

Gotta admit, was pretty cool getting that official "STAY YOUR ASS AT HOME" email from the Health Department.

Well 9 year old has it. Everyone else in the household is fine so far.

COVID Day, like... 6?

I'm fine. Day 1 and 2 sucked, 3 kinda sucked, and I've been broadly fine since. REALLY glad I got vaxxed and boosted. Took the whole week off of work though, because what white-collar job on earth is going to risk the blowback of forcing an employee who literally has The Plague to come back to work?

All of them? I mean they are telling nurses to come back to work if they aren't showing symptoms after just a few days...

Well I tested positive yesterday. My wife and 6 year old are still negative somehow. Symptoms are all over the place. One hour congested, next hour feel fine, then tired, then headache, then stomach ache, then fine again. I've definitely been sicker but this one is all over the place.

The child now has covid. Fairly sure they picked it up from school. The rules here now just mean 3 days of isolating. Vaccinations covering their age group only became available last Friday, typical timing really.

Symptom wise they’ve got a headache, nausea and mild cough. Mostly looking forward to a few days off school.

So I had a couple of days of being tired, run down, and bad sore throat but things seem pretty calm today. My wife and 6 year old are still negative. So we're dealing with 3 separate isolation schedules: (1) 9 year old tested positive Monday, (2) me tested positive Thursday, (3) wife and 6 year old still negative but "exposed" since my positive test Thursday.

I am three weeks post-covid, and I can literally feel my brain slowly working better. Frustrating as f*ck. I don't have much stamina, and yet going for half hour walks seems to be helping me get some energy back. Still very thirsty if not hydrating a lot. My doctor just reassured me last night that if I keep drinking a lot of water, taking a lot of vitamins C and D, and walking, it will all be good soon.

Still...seriously not liking how I feel.

I found studying another language(spanish for me) helped strengthen and reactivate some of those pathways. Honestly, it took about 2 months.

Our household went through an omnicron infection early February and only within the last week or so is my head feeling relatively normal. Working felt like sprinting up a very steep hill from a cognitive standpoint.

So only a couple more days of mask wearing around the house. So far my wife and 6 year old did not catch it.

I didn't lose taste or experience any brain fog (outside of the 2 days of being exhausted). A little stuffy and scratchy throat in the mornings and on ongoing cough is where I am now.

My household finally caught COVID last week. We've been in isolation since last Monday. We are stuck though until at least Thurs as that will be a week from the date when the PCR test came back positive.

From a family gathering where the positive cases were symptomatic but tested negative on RATs. They didn't inform us and so we went in unmasked. Other households also got infected for the first time. Let me say I was terribly disappointed.

Very different experiences in the house.

Youngest (9) with only one vaccine shot vomited twice and hit 39.6C (when she couldn't keep liquid paracetamol or ibuprofen down) but bounced back the quickest once her fever broke. She still coughs.

Oldest (12) had 3 jabs I believe. He hasn't had much symptoms, only light fever for two days, sore throat and coughing. We had worried about him since he had childhood asthma but he's also mostly shrugged it off.

Both the wife and I have had similar experiences although I had 3 jabs and she had 2. Sore throats, coughing, mild fevers, the dreaded headache, a sense of feeling not up to scratch for work and for me an uncharacteristic sense of lethargy.

Still, the overall sense of feeling off is abating however slowly.

I've heard a few stories about a flu going around Sydney. Not going to be an easy cool season here.

19 of the 150-odd students in my wife's school have caught COVID since they discontinued masks. It is mostly the youngest kids and all are doing fine. Students and teachers are being asked to mask again to slow the spread. Omicron's teeth are definitely not as sharp, but it looks like we are all going to be bitten at some point.

Our school is required by Greek law to report cases to parents, and kids were doing self-tests twice a week but this has dropped to once a week. Cases must be doing down, because there used to be cases reported in almost every grade, K-12, along with bus drivers and teachers. Masks are required inside, but kids are not terribly...giving a crap. Our school is down to 2-3 cases per week, and it used to be like 20...

So I finally decided to brave a movie theater... at 10:40 in the morning to try to minimize the crowd. When I bought my ticket 2 hours ahead, there were only 2 other in the room. I choose an empty row several rows back to keep a solid buffer between us only to arrive and find that someone else had chosen my row, with only one chair between us. I was -so- uncomfortable. I think I would have been okay with a 2-seat gap, but with a virtually empty theater and so many empty rows, why did they have to opt to be basically right next to me. I knew my personal comfort bubble had grown over these years, but this was some pretty clear proof of just how much. It made the whole time and my first attempt out so much worse. I simply may not be ready for "normal"

One coworker and two close friends tested positive yesterday. In terms of my social circle, I'd say as many people have caught it in the past month as have in the prior two years.

Antichulius wrote:

So I finally decided to brave a movie theater... at 10:40 in the morning to try to minimize the crowd. When I bought my ticket 2 hours ahead, there were only 2 other in the room. I choose an empty row several rows back to keep a solid buffer between us only to arrive and find that someone else had chosen my row, with only one chair between us. I was -so- uncomfortable. I think I would have been okay with a 2-seat gap, but with a virtually empty theater and so many empty rows, why did they have to opt to be basically right next to me. I knew my personal comfort bubble had grown over these years, but this was some pretty clear proof of just how much. It made the whole time and my first attempt out so much worse. I simply may not be ready for "normal"

You know you could have moved to a different seat, right?

Even if it was assigned seating.

After my two bouts of COVID last October and January and months of talking myself in and out of the idea that I might be dealing with long COVID issues, I think I lost the argument. There’s just too many things that all changed at basically the same time after COVID.

It’s 90% mental issues for me—my brain is slower, more prone to overwhelm, unable to hold onto large or complex ideas the way it used to—and the effects are spilling into every part of my life. I’m slower at work, seeking distraction and rote tasks over tackling critical solutions. My weight has shot up significantly as my depression has deepened and I turned more to junk food and soda just to cope. I get upset with my kids far more often and over smaller things. Projects and hobbies I loved are just too complex for me now and despite a deep wanting to get back to them, I just can’t manage to—writing, in particular. Everything I want to change or improve in my life struggles to move from desire to planning to attempting. I’m chronically overspent and mentally exhausted, leaving me listless at the end of basically every day.

My struggles have interlacing and compounding factors unrelated to COVID, but I just can’t ignore any more how limited I feel mentally, and how powerless I feel to do anything about it despite desire and occasional sparks of motivation. I mean, even this has taken something like 20 minutes to type out to this point.

And it just wasn’t this way pre-illness. I keep thinking I’ll feel normal one day and I’ll be able to get back to my life and my self again. But that hope has gotten dimmer and dimmer as the weeks and months have stretched longer and longer. And I catch myself thinking that if I could just start -something- again—meditating, writing, exercising—I could start to rebuild myself. But the more I think on it, the more my mind starts constricting and my desire starts to suffocate.

I just don’t feel like myself.

Sorry to hear that. If you haven't yet, talk with your doctor and/or therapist and see what they can come up with to get you through this.

Had a work travel onsite meeting last week. Works been doing a lot of them the past 3 months. No issues. Well we were a super spreader event with 4 people positive during the onsite and knocked out folks after. I got it but my booster is kicking butt. A light cold at max and no fever. Family is feeling good and we got notifications early so I could isolate safely.

It just ruined my already slightly ruined anniversary plans. But we rescheduled to next week.

Got my booster yesterday late afternoon, after finding out a friend in a similar health situation (and of similar caution socially) put off his appt and got the 'Rona. I got Moderna instead of my usual Pfizer so was ready for the worst.

My upper arm started aching before bed, along with my shoulder on that side. I was tired early and went to bed on time without, like, reading in bed or anything.

Slept very well. Woke up refreshed (unusual for me with all the cancer drug side effects). Arm and shoulder still hurt but not yet any other weirdness. Well, my blood sugar dipped low a few times in the night, which is unusual, but not for long and I am putting that down to my body burning energy to react to the vaccine.

I will see how the day goes but it's a good start.

My wife is doing well with work trips and covid mishaps.
Last year, she flew to Tampa for a business meeting and someone had covid. She ended up having the meeting from her hotel room.
Today, she's on another trip for meeting and the main reason for the meeting had an exposure and is not coming. My wife found this out as the plane pulled away from the gate.
I'm glad people are responding properly each time, but still amusing if annoying.