COVID-19 Chronicles:Three Weeks With Coronavirus

Woke up this morning

That’s it, that’s the tweet

Three weeks ago I was too sick to get out of bed, thought I might only have five days to live

Now I’m still fighting symptoms, still surprised day after day by weird new feelings I’ve never had before, What Fresh Hell is This

This is why COVID is so different from the flu, so many moments where you just freeze like WHAT just happened inside my face? Is that an actual beetle crawling up my sinus or does it just feel that way?

Had night terrors again last night, woke up standing next to the bed like someone out of Paranormal Activity, woke my husband up, but then that’s probably just me, not COVID

Finally getting my sense of smell back, guess what are the first two things I smelled

Damp towel, garbage can

Confirming my claim that most smells are not a value add

Right now, after these three weeks, I finally feel like I just have a bad head cold/sinus infection

Rather than someone who is still crawling off her deathbed

Now, way back on March 15, the day I was exposed, we didn’t have all the information we have now

At that time, four days before the stay at home order, not even the bars had been closed, that was later that day, we weren’t doing anything wrong

We had all stopped shaking hands or hugging a week ago

Our state had 334 cases, six deaths

As of today, over 33,000 cases and over 1200 deaths, just here

My hubby says “that’s a two orders of magnitude increase WHILE you were sick”

Good point babe, thank you

The US as a whole had 3500 cases and 62 people had died

For a history student, that was a problem, for most people, eh, that’s like E. coli rules

We’re starting to get the idea, but most of us still don’t understand the difference between linear progression and exponential growth, the penny on the chessboard problem

It doubles every week, this should be bothering people more than it does!

COVID-19 has already killed more Americans than the Korean War

IN TWO MONTHS

(Remember our first fatality was Feb. 29)

For me there have been three problems while I have been sick

1. Knowing I infected my husband, that he might die and I might have to live without him, guilty forever
2. The actual physical symptoms, minute to minute, feeling it get worse
3. Watching the news in horror

Understanding that my friends, my family, my neighbors might have to go through what I have, partly because people are out there claiming this is “just a cold” or “just the flu”

Right now, if the statistics are right, not even 1% of Americans have been exposed yet

It’s easy not to believe it’s real or that it will come for anyone you know

Three months from now that probably won’t be true anymore

One of the problems when we first became aware of coronavirus was the impression that it only killed elderly people, idea got out there that young people are immune, this is false but it cost us

I’m 44, I have zero pre-existing conditions

I had a “mild” case

The first week I was so sick, all I could do was sit perfectly still, if I moved my head even half an inch I would get vertigo, too sick to read, too sick to watch tv

It wasn’t until the second week that I thought I would die

Only 1 in 5 people on ventilators were surviving, at least at the time there were no treatments

No pills, no vaccinations, not enough tests, no convalescent plasma, no antibody tests

Hopefully that will all change soon, but for at least the first wave, it was bad enough to be sick, even worse knowing there wasn’t much anyone could do to help

A lot of people seem to think COVID-19 is nothing to worry about, I want to ask them, do you have three weeks of sick leave at work? Or do you think you could just push through?

I don’t have kids, my husband did 100% of the cooking and cleaning, took care of me while working 60 hours a week, for three weeks, he barely got sick, not everyone has been so lucky

Here is a list of all the symptoms I had, supposed mild case:

Weakness, fatigue, malaise, tremors, dizziness, vertigo, headache, chills, the rigors (look it up), stomach pain, feeling faint, ears ringing, lost my voice, complete loss of sense of taste and smell for three weeks, memory problems, confusion, shortness of breath, heart palpitations

Fun, right?

Now add in the high fever, cough, sore throat, body ache, vomiting, diarrhea, or fainting and loss of consciousness for days on end that the moderate cases have had

Did you know that some of the severe cases have had blood clots, organ failure, seizures, or strokes?

A lot can happen to someone who doesn’t die

All of this will start to sound more and more familiar as more people get sick, sorry to say

I said sometime back that I don’t think people will really start taking the coronavirus seriously until the third wave

But I thought there would actually be separate and distinct waves

That we would genuinely think we had it beat, no new cases, before it cropped up again

Now someone has gone and opened the beaches back up when cases are actively still climbing

I don’t get this at all, if none of the businesses are open, there is no economic benefit, just people canceling social distancing and not even buying an ice cream cone

We’re still in the first wave

That “flatten the curve” graph made us think the first peak would be over quickly

I was exposed before my state’s stay-at-home order, in fact before any state, it was the same day the CDC suggested no gatherings of more than 50 people, I was in a group of 7

I’ve watched this thing unfold mostly from my sickbed

I’m under quarantine until I have been symptom-free for 72 hours, so far my record is about 12

I’m just one person, sure, but I could probably still infect someone, makes me feel disgusting and ashamed

It’s very weird to think that by the time I feel well enough to get fully dressed and leave my apartment, I might be able to go out for dinner and a movie, that will be fine for me if I wind up with antibodies and immunity

I do worry about everyone else, I worry a lot, all I can really do is share my personal experience and hope it is convincing, love to all