I searched for images for “sick” and this one made me laugh, so it wins. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com
As noted previously, being sick sucks. I had forgotten how much through the benefit of not being sick for a long time, but now that I am reminded, here are a few aspects of the misery I wanted to record for posterity.
5 Worst Things About Being Sick
Lousy sleep
Nose gets sore from all the sneezing/being stuffed up/runny
Semi-accurate example of how I am currently feeling. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
My history of illness changed quite dramatically with the pandemic, because the combination of no commute and working remotely meant I had so little exposure to other people, I never got sick. Observe:
January 2020: I and many others in Langara’s IT department were felled by one of the worst flu bugs I’ve ever had. In all the time I worked there, I’d never seen so many people get so very sick. Looking back, many of the symptoms match what people reported in the early days of COVID-19, with the loss of taste and smell, for example (which happened to me). Whether it was actually covid or not, it was definitely nasty. It was also the last time I’d have a cold or the flu for the next three and a half years!
April 2022: Jeff got COVID-19, and before he knew he’d been infected, it made the jump to me, so I got what felt like the equivalent of a head cold for a few days, my first illness in almost two and a half years.
June/July 2023: Right near the end of the month Jeff got sick again (not covid), likely a flu bug and after a few days of feeling fine, I thought I’d dodged it, but this past Wednesday evening I could feel the first tendrils of it in me, and today I am in the fourth day of being confirmed sick. It’s pretty much a head cold for me–stuffed up like crazy and a bit of a headache. Friday I felt surprisingly good, so I went birding Saturday (yesterday) and overdid it with 25,000 steps walked. I slept in a little today and have dropped a massive 1.8 pounds overnight. Being sick is always good for the waistline!
Today I am taking it easy. The weather is warm and pleasant, I kind of want to test some new settings on my camera, but in reality, I really just want to sleep, then wake up and feel normal and healthy again. So yes, I can confirm that getting sick still sucks. I will be quite happy to not have to mention this again for another few years. Or decades.
UPDATE, April 7, 2022: A fitting (?) coda to this post: This morning, a week after my first symptoms, I tested again and still came back positive. Boo. This is not unusual and I'll test again tomorrow or the next day, but it's still a bummer.
For the last two years, I have considered myself an observer of the pandemic. I was affected, of course, right from the early days when toilet paper suddenly became scarce, to working remotely, to facing mask mandates, and restrictions on where I could even go.
But in all these things, I was just like most everyone else: Inconvenienced, maybe a little annoyed, but ultimately understanding why things were happening as they were.
But that changed this week when I felt a scratchy throat and a few days later, with the symptoms of what felt like a head cold settling in, I tested positive on a rapid response test for COVID-19.
There is always a chance that the result was wrong. In fact, just after the scratchiness began, I took my first test and it came back negative. I read today that about half of cases similar to mine (Omicron variant, fully vaccinated) can produce false negatives if tested too soon, because the virus takes a little more time to show up in these kinds of less-than-lab accurate tests. My partner had been sick and had tested positive, so I did entertain the idea briefly that the negative was a legit result, but I know now that’s pretty unlikely.
And so I have now had the virus and become an active participant, a statistic, if an uncounted one. How does it make me feel?
I’m not entirely sure yet. My immediate concerns were getting better and minimizing risk to others by resisting the urge to run into the street and randomly hug strangers (ie. self-isolate). Now, as the symptoms have largely cleared up (hooray for being fully vaccinated + booster) I ponder.
How likely is it that I’ll get sick again? What will it be like if I do? Will I experience “long covid”? Will I just be fine and dandy?
I suppose in a way I feel…unclean? Uncertain? I thought I would escape the pandemic without getting sick and now that it’s happened, I realize it was a bit of a faint hope once the variants started getting more and more infectious. In the last few months I’ve gone from knowing no one who had COVID-19 to knowing…more than a few. And that quiet little part whispering about my mortality—that’s there, too. I think of how it would have gone if I’d gotten sick before the vaccines had been developed. I’m not in my 20s anymore, even if I mostly act like I still am (I don’t know how to act “old”, but maybe I’m just fooling myself and I’m six months away from lapsing into “How do you do, fellow kids?”).
I may have further thoughts on this, but that’s all for now—other than hoping this whole stupid pandemic wraps up (for real, not just in some people’s minds) by the end of the year or something.
Good news: My sore throat is no longer sore today!
Bad news: My nose is stuffed up, and I’m now coughing intermittently. But I think I am overall on the mend.
Not surprising news: Once again, getting sick is a great way to lose weight. This morning, I weighed in at 175.7 pounds, my lowest of the year. If only I can keep it off. Without getting sick again, that is.
Appalling news: I took another rapid test tonight and this time shoved the swab far enough up my honker to make myself sneeze (I am glad this didn’t take place in a clinic), so I think the result was more accurate. And it was positive for COVID-19. Boo.
Two lines is bad. Unless you like viruses.
Day 4 and 5 of self-isolation are tomorrow and Monday, so I’ll test again on Tuesday to see if I am still unclean. If I am, I will curl up in a ball and weep quietly. And then probably stay home for another day to be on the safe side.
I was hoping to escape the pandemic without getting sick, but despite working from home since March 18, 2020, no such luck. It was a good run, though. The last time I was sick was in January 2020 (with symptoms that were suspiciously COVID-like in retrospect); I don’t think I’ve ever gone 26 months of my adult life without getting sick with something.
Right now it’s a sore throat–scratchy and all gummed up, so I’m constantly clearing my throat, to no avail. I’m hoping this is the worst of it, and will be on the mend by tomorrow morning.
Here’s the sequence of events:
A few days ago, Jeff gets sick and stays home
Yesterday, and after he has largely recovered, he describes his symptoms, which make tiny alarms go off in my head
I advise him to use one of the rapid response COVID-19 tests we have (five total). He does. It comes back positive.
At this point, my throat is feeling very lightly scratchy, but I attribute it to singing loudly with the earphones on earlier in the day. I take the test. It comes back negative.
My throat gets worse overnight and remains sore today. I start canceling outings and planning out five days of isolation.
I am tentatively planning on taking a second test tomorrow morning to see if my negative result persists. I strongly doubt the sore throat is a coincidence and unrelated to COVID-19, but you never know!
But yeah, being sick for the first time in over two years reminds me how much being sick bites. Bleah. Do not recommend. If it is COVID-19, I suppose I can take solace in escaping it for so long and being triple-vaccinated by the time it caught up with me.
On the plus side, I went out today to Hume Park and took pictures of birds, which was a nice distraction. I stayed clear of other people, feeling a strong Typhoid Mary vibe happening. Some shots are pretty decent, too. Woo!
In January of last year, I detailed having a terrible case of the flu (first referenced in this post). This was pre-pandemic and hardly surprising, as I usually don’t get a flu shot and rode public transit five days a week and worked in a large, open office at a college. People were constantly around me, and people are fantastic at sharing horrible things like cold and flu bugs.
When I wrote on February 16th about the cold I had, COVID-19 was not on my radar at all. I knew of it, but only on the periphery–it was yet to reach pandemic stage. But looking back, the symptoms I had match up almost perfectly with COVID (while acknowledging that they also match up with having a cold or flu)
Loss of smell/taste
Coughing
Fatigue
Sore throat
Body aches
Sinus issues (plural, because I hit both extremes of plugged/unplugged)
The loss of smell is a real red flag here, because it’s so specifically tied to COVID-19. In the end, it doesn’t really matter much, as I recovered with no apparent long-term symptoms and have been successfully dodging the super-contagious Omicron variant as I await my booster (third) shot, expected sometime in January. But it’s fun (?) to think that as I worked to avoid catching the virus, I may have actually been one of the first to have had it.
Anyway, here’s hoping the pandemic actually ends in 2022. That would be nice.
Even though I am mostly recovered from the cold, it still persists in annoying, lingering ways, such as an occasional cough and a still-present feeling of (light) congestion in the chest. Maybe I was using this subconsciously as an excuse to not exercise, but it’s still an excuse.
So tonight, just shy of 10:30 p.m., I got on the treadmill and did a half hour workout with the usual settings.
Results, with previous workout in brackets below. Of note, my pace was a bit sluggish, but this probably helped my BPM to be a bit lower, too. I felt like I recovered faster, too. Overall a bit meh, but at least I did some exercise.
Speed: 6.5 km/h
Incline: 10
Pace: 9:17/km (9:09 km/h)
Time: 30:08 (30.05)
Distance: 3.24 km (3.28 km)
Calories burned: 294 (301)
BPM: 139 (142)
The miracle is that after a day of coughing, feeling generally sick and above all else, indolent, I actually got on the treadmill tonight and did a half hour workout.
I did not cough once during the workout.
I started coughing immediately after completing the workout.
I also noticed my heart rate was much slower than normal to recover. Not that it was crazy high or anything, it just took a few minutes longer than usual to get back below 100 (which is the arbitrary point I’ve chosen for when I stop the treadmill and get off…the treadmill).
The stats in brackets are from my previous walk, just a little over a week ago, completed during the small window between the bad flu and the bad cold. As you can see, everything is slightly worse, but actually not too bad considering the coughing, congestion and general unwellness I continue to experience.
Here’s to a healthier week. At least it is mercifully one day shorter than normal.
Speed: 6.5 km/h
Incline: 10
Pace: 9:09/km (9:06 km/h)
Time: 30:05 (30.04)
Distance: 3.28 km (3.30 km)
Calories burned: 301 (298)
BPM: 142 (140)
Last Sunday I got on the treadmill and had a good ol’ workout for the first time in weeks, finally recovered from The Great Flu of 2020.
The next day at work I was feeling a little phlegmy and at first dismissed it as some lingering effect from the flu. I felt fine otherwise. That night I went to bed thinking that this was something. I woke up in the night, my throat raw and inflamed, my sinuses itchy and annoyed. It was something. Something bad.
I missed a day but seemed to bounce back quickly, so returned to work on Wednesday. Thursday I realized that I had not actually recovered, but was simply entering a different phase of what now seemed to be a cold. The most delightful part was getting to experience a whole different set of symptoms compared to the flu.
Thursday was the “running nose” day and when I say running, I’m talking Olympic-caliber sprinting here. It was awful. Also my sinuses began this back and forth of being clogged and unclogged, like a dam that was constantly releasing water, the shut back up, over and over.
I missed another day on Friday. It was now the long weekend and I was sick again.
By Friday night the first of the coughing began. The nose ceased its running and choose instead to just clog up permanently. I tried drinking some water while it was in this state and the experience was weird and unpleasant. Go ahead, try drinking something while holding your nose shut. Do this over a sink or outside, though, because you’re bound to spill. Turns out that breathing is important.
I kept waking up Friday night with my mouth bone dry, because I was breathing through it rather than not breathing at all. Saturday the stuffiness seemed to wax and wane again, but the coughing continued. My voice began to grow hoarse. The cough medicine did nothing or produced an effect that I could not measure with my working senses.
Speaking of senses, the last few days I have lost both my sense of smell and taste. I lifted a garbage bag with a day-old fresh chicken wrapper in it that had to stink to the hills, but smelled not a thing. That was kind of nice. But eating food without tasting it kind of sucks.
By tonight–Sunday–my nose is now officially only half-plugged, a major breakthrough. The coughing is worse when I sit or lay down, so my voice has also gotten worse. I don’t talk right now so much as croak. My voice cracks like I’m revisiting puberty. Once was enough, thanks.
But my sense of smell has returned a tiny bit. I had some mango passionfruit tea tonight and if I smushed the dry teabag right into my nose I could faintly detect a pleasant aroma of fruit.
Tonight I will take NyQuil and hope that my nose stays partly-functional through the night. Tomorrow I hope I “turn the corner” on the coughing because it wears me out, almost as much as getting sick with a cold right after recovering from the flu. It’s silly and wrong and I wonder what karmic payback this is for. Or maybe it’s just riding public transit every day.
Anyway, I thought about complaining about being sick and how it wouldn’t really change anything or make me feel better, but it got me writing, so there’s that. Here’s to better health for the rest of 2020 (pretty pretty please).
Yes, given how awful and lingering this flu has been, I am now dividing my life into pre-flu and post-flu.
Every night for about the past week I have intended to post something to the blog–maybe a haiku, or a comment about the weather (done), but every night, after dinner and by mid-evening I find I have no energy left. The idea of laying down becomes immensely appealing. The idea of engaging my brain while sitting upright seems like far too much work.
That said, I’m forcing myself tonight, as you can now see. So here’s a haiku on the flu. A fluku, if you will.
The flu strikes swiftly Energy sinks like a stone Weeks later, still blah
Okay, not exactly my finest work, but it’s a start. Of something.
Of which I gained back 1.8 pounds overnight, after eating the world’s most calorie-rich homemade French onion soup (it was very tasty, however).
Here’s the final chart showing the max just before the flu hits and the bottom where I still had very little appetite. As of this morning, post-soup, I am 169.7, so already I am perilously close to edging above 170 pounds again, which is BAD.
The secret to the weight loss was not actually getting sick, of course, it was not eating. Having no appetite due to the ravages of the flu (P.S. get your flu shot) just expedites the process.
The tricky part starts now, as my appetite returns to normal. For the last week I have not done much of any snacking because the idea of snacks has been grossbuckets. Now, though, food can once again return to something I find comforting, reassuring–a welcome distraction from whatever is happening. And therein lies the return to the fat.
But I’m going to try. I really want to stay under 170 for the rest of the month and build on that. I have five days to go and snacks in the pantry.
