COVID case progressions in real time

The Quarantine Zone
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This thread is about at least one COVID case, and how the disease has progressed in my Missus (lifetime smoker who just turned 40) and me (7 year smoker, 53 in June). This is not about attention seeking. I don’t particularly want well-wishes, I already know the majority of you kids are swell folks with a ton more empathy than I will ever have. This is more for documentation, and hopefully to influence decision-making and perspective regarding safety measures recommended by medical professionals (as opposed to social media, and conspiracy theorists, and politicians). So to get right to it:

March 6: I feel like crap, feverish mostly, little cough leave work early and sleep from noon until morning
March 7: I feel better for a bit, but sleep most of the day
March 8: I wake. I am Superman. Fully energized. Do tons of chores around the house. You’d never know I’d been sick.
March 9: I call in sick to work. Fever, general foggy brain, some diarrhea.
March 10: I’m good. Nagging cough but otherwise I feel great. I go to work and shut myself in my office (I have exactly the sort of job you’d expect if I’ve made any sort of impression on you here: I can go an entire day without speaking to or seeing another person. I crunch data.)

Never really though it was COVID, but followed the suggested precautions at the time–clean hands, discreet coughing. And the cough was unremarkable because I always have a touch of bronchitis in the winter months. But even as I write this, I am only just regaining smell/taste as of this morning. That seemed to fade gradually until I noticed they were gone maybe a week ago. But I still feel fine.

Mid March: The boss tells us we can work from home if we want to. BECAUSE THE CDC HAS NOW RECOMMENDED IT. Missus and me set up shop in the home office.

April 7: Missus feels fine. Hits the pet store for supplies for her dragons.
April 10: She gets fever, cough, diarrhea, persistent headache. We know what this is, because now we’ve been paying attention.
April 13: She calls her doc after a rough weekend, doc agrees she needs to be tested. Doc sends a referral to a testing site, tells her where it is.

  • We live in south Denver. The test site is about an hour away. Why is that? I dunno, but it was an awful journey for her to make. She was too sick to drive so I took her.
    April 14: Test is a nasal swab pushed nearly up to the eyeball. Doc at that clinic says the test returns false negatives (you’re sick, but the test says you’re not) about 30% of the time. And that’s if you’re tested within a day or two of first symptoms, and then reliability drops from there. Missus is 4 days with symptoms. Chest Xray is clear. That night she has a coughing fit for about 15-20 minutes, There’s a good amount of blood (she told me later). I’ve described this event elsewhere. It was terrifying to watch, and had to be worse to experience. She couldn’t even cry because she couldn’t breathe between coughs/gasps.
    April 15: Video chat with her doc, Doc says blood is common.
    April 16: Test = Negative. Fever, aches, coughing, headache–all continues.
    April 18: She can’t say more than 3 or 4 words without gasping, now she’s got abdominal pain, Tylenol isn’t touching the fever (she’s had a 101-103 fever for over a week). I take her to the ER. ER protocol these days is: say goodbye at the front door. The expectation is, next time you see your loved one they will be well, or they will be in a bag. Turned out there was a third possibility (which leads us to right now): While you’re in the ER for 3 hours (we’re not getting hammered here just yet), you hear several other people come in via ambulance, coughing hard and wheezing for a while and then they get intubated and moved off to wherever. Xrays are not clear anymore, they are diagnostic for COVID. But you’re not sick enough to stay, so go home and come back when you are really fighting hard to get a breath.

To be clear, the standard for the ER for this thing when the facility is NOT inundated is not ‘breathlessness’, it is straight up ‘you’re dying’. There is not a damned thing they can do for this disease. They can ease your passing, they can induce a coma and put you on a respirator (if there is one) to buy you some time to heal yourself, but they got nothing much more than you have at home, apart from some expertise. No drugs, no magic cure. This is all about you get better, or you die. You get some choice in the death part–at home in misery but saying goodbye, or in a hospital in a drug coma–no closure for family.

I welcome any medical types with firsthand experience with this virus to come in here and tell me I’m wrong. I want to be wrong. Meanwhile I’m going to spend my time with the Missus because I don’t know how much we have left. I’m not going to post in any other threads, I’m not going to have a go at people who think they need to get back to work, or who want to mock distancers and mask wearers. I don’t have time for that.

Also: Please, if you are going through this, or are watching someone go through this, feel free to give us your timeline.

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Please keep us updated and please check often on her Temp. Consider this a good wishes bump.

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:frowning:

For what it’s worth, here’s my timeline. I’m 52 and never smoked. Normally healthy as a horse and I live alone. The place where I work closed middle of March because we’re a nonessential business so I was rarely out of my apartment except to go to the grocery store and a couple of other places. I didn’t wear gloves or a mask because those weren’t recommended then, but I was washing my hands a lot and cleaning everything I brought into the house.

Dates are approximate because time kind of lost its meaning for a while.

Last weekend of March, I feel a little off color. Headache and a little wheezy but I blame it on allergies.

That Monday the headache is pounding and I have a hacking cough and a fever of 101. I think GOD DAMN IT and call my doctor. She says basically yep you’ve probably got it, self-isolate, take ibuprofen for the fever, based on my overall history says not to go to ER.

That week the fever wobbled between 99 and 102 but never really broke. The hacking cough is still here though the headache finally goes away. I spent most of it flopped on th4e couch answering texts from people who were under orders to keep texting me and if I didn’t answer call 911 at once. I’m glad you and the missus have each other because going through this alone just fucking sucked.

By Friday I was starting to feel human again, to the point where I actually took a shower and put on actual clothing instead of a nightgown. I finally think I’m gettin gover it. Still cough and fatigue but nothing like the rest of the week.

Saturday night, whammo. Fever is back and I had a bad coughing spell that brings up blood so I freak out and call 911. At the hospital I feel like ET with the men in white suits after him. I got my brain probed with the giant qtip up the nose and a chest x-ray that showed something they didn’t like so I got a breathing treatment, I don’t know what, and prescription for azithrimyacin for the lung crud. Sent home because I wasn’t actually near death. The test came back positive so yep I’m a statistic.

A few days later the fever finally breaks and the cough is now bringing up mutant alien snot so antibiotics are working.

April 10 I had a slight relapse with low fever and headache. April 11 I slept all day and since then I have a lingering cough but no other symptoms except I freak out and panic whenever I feel a little bit off.

Fuck this virus.

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I should add that the antibiotic was for the secondary lung infection and not for coronavirus itself.

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Bumping, in the hopes that there is some good (or at least hopeful, or not-too-bad) news.

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I hear ya, so let me do it for you.

All you people who are whining about how the lock down is destroying lives are correct but you know what else destroys lives? Dying.

On the news yesterday were a bunch of yabbos here in Arizona copying the equally large yabbos in Madison earlier this week complaining about the lock down. I don’t know if he was selected because he was more coherent than most or because he’s taken the Most Punchable Face in America prize from Martin Shkreli but one interviewee was particularly obnoxious about “sending a message” to the governor about how “the people” have had enough.

I wish I’d been there to spit on my palm and offer to shake hands. “'sa matter? I don’t have Covid, I think, but I don’t really know.”

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Best wishes. Here’s my maybe-covid story, much milder:
March 6th, a middle schooler from a town with some known cases (back when were basically weren’t testing) coughed in my face. I removed some drops of spittle and went to wash my hands. I didn’t immediately wash my face with lots of soap, which I now regret. But when I got home I quarantined myself, just in case.
March 10th I develop a sore throat and I sneeze.
March 11th I develop a cough, and my temp is up (but not feverish – 99+ when it’s usually 97.4)
Over the next several days I felt like my lower lungs were full of goo. I took guaifenesin and drank herb tea, and slept a lot. I felt like shit, had no energy, and a headache.
March 17th my lungs were a lot clearer, my temp was normal, and I no longer felt like I needed drugs. Still no energy.
March 24th I felt like I could do things for the first time in weeks. But still weak, still a cough, still a headache and loose stool that smells wrong. (I never lost my sense of smell.)
…
Today, April 20th, I still feel unwell, still have a low-grade headache (that I’m afraid to treat) still have more phlegm than I should, still have (or have again?) a mild sore throat, and still have mild bowel symptoms. But I had enough energy over the weekend to fix some stuff around the house.

My daughter seems to have caught it from me. My husband maybe didn’t? If he did, he had an extremely mild case. No, none of us has been tested, and this could be something else.

My mom keeps begging me to visit her, but I’m afraid doing so will kill her. I can work from home, and I’m mostly well enough to do that, so this hasn’t been an enormous problem yet, beyond the problems we all have from distancing guidelines. But when I go out for a walk I wear a mask and stay at least 20 feet away from the neighbors, because I REALLY don’t want to share.

Inigo, I have some advice for what it’s worth. A lot of hospitals are “proning” covid patients. That means putting them on their stomach instead of their back for a lot of the time. Partly, the prone position is easier on the lungs, partly, it helps if no section of the lung is always down, because the down portion is sort of drowned, whereas the up portion gets drained a little and can open up some. It’s actually expensive for hospitals, because it takes a team of people in PPE to flip a person, but if your wife can roll over on her own, it’s cheap and easy to try at home. I also got a lot of relief from guaifenesin, (which helped me cough out stuff) but I had thick goo, which maybe isn’t her problem.

Also, check her oxygen with a pulse oximeter (you can buy them at any drugstore or online, if you don’t have one. They are cheap.) That will give you some indication of whether it’s worth taking her back to the emergency room.

And here are two sites primarily for doctors, but they have some info you might find helpful:

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Update: Missus went most of yesterday without a fever and was able to keep solid food down. Still coughing blood, has quite a bit of pain in her lungs and back/ribs from coughing. It’s essentially an untreatable pneumonia. We understand staying still is the kiss of death, so she’s been forcing herself to get up and move around. The more she moves, the more she coughs. It’s kind of like picking which stick to get beat with.

I’m still doing pretty well. Just learned the sinus pressure I’ve been dealing with is another potential COVID symptom. Still coughing, still a little pain in my chest. Not getting better, but not getting worse.

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Damn, but at least the no fever is good and the keeping solid food down is very good.

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Wish you and your spouse the best. Hopefully you both will make it through this.

This may not be the right time to ask this question…if so, please ignore it.

Why did you at age 46 in 2013, decide to begin smoking? I can’t seem to wrap my head around that detail.

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It’s a fair question. I’m pretty smart about some things, pretty reckless about myself (that’s it’s own Oprah). I married a smoker and picked up her habit in a mild way, just a couple in the evenings while watching the world from the back porch. I find it relaxing and it replaced alcohol for me–which was a net positive. For what it’s worth we’ve both quit recently. :smiley: I don’t miss it, didn’t have withdrawals, don’t have an opinion about starting back up or not.

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Good to hear. Again, best wishes with your family’s health.

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This article in the NY Times suggests that testing with a pulse oximeter is the most useful way to check the progression of the disease. You likely don’t have one at home, but might be able to check at a clinic or pharmacy.

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You underestimate the depth of my weirdness. Not only do we have a pulse-ox, I have competitions with my boys to see who can register the lowest heart rate without compromising O2 saturation. I still lead at 58 & 95% :smiley: So an update: Still nowhere near out of the woods, but with the fever gone we can at least believe she is on the path out. I have a feeling recovery is going to be measured in months, and that full recovery isn’t realistic.

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2 days without fever is a good sign, but from what I heard during recovery she might become feverish again for a short time or two. Best of luck and best wishes.

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Why do you think full recovery is unrealistic?

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There is actually quite a bit on the internet about long-term damage. Here’s one article. Google “covid permanent lung damage” for more.

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From your link:

Yes, some people’s lungs are damaged. Some of those may include permanent damage. The people in that article were people who had required hospitalization.

His wife is probably more prone as a lifetime smoker, especially if she doesn’t quit after this. But she’s only 40. Don’t think it’s inevitable.

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He didn’t say “inevitable,” he said “unrealistic.” I don’t see those words as equivalent. Maybe you do. <shrugs> Maybe “overly optimistic” suits, but that would be putting words in someone else’s mouth-- rude at worst and unsanitary at best.

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Wtf? Are you agreeing with him that full recovery is unrealistic or what?