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.