Well I managed to play the piano for 25 minutes today so my brain is starting to get back on track so I thought I’d have a go at writing something.
I’ll start with the COVID symptoms. As a former medic it has been an interesting process to go through. My husband and I obviously got infected with the same dose at the same moment. So I have been able to compare his symptoms with mine, day by day.
Overall, I would say that we had the same level of unwellness, like a dose of flu moving into a very heavy, unpleasant cold. In the past I’ve struggled with being ill, often beating myself up about whether I am just “being lazy”, is it “all in my head”? so it was nice to have a mirror image in front of myself to compare and contrast.
Medically interesting facts about the passage of illness: my husband fell ill 24 hours before me and got better 24 hour before. Our unwellness levels fluctuated on a daily basis, thankfully we WERE out of synch so took turns to look after each other on the bad days.
We had a very similar set of symptoms but with a different emphases. (e.g. he had more of a cough, me more sinuses) I could have predicted that from how colds have affected us previously.
One thing I hadn’t expected was to observe how our moods were affected. My mood fluctuates so much on an ordinary day so I wouldn’t have noted anything specific about mine, so it was very interesting to see my husband’s mood fluctuate and to see that irritability or low mood coincide with stages of the illness, in both of us, mirroring with 24 hours difference. Different specific types of moods at different stages, presumably related to the effects of circulating cytokinins on the brain?
It was also interesting to note how getting better was not a linear process at all, it was much more of an up and down progression with symptoms moving in and then out again, good days and bad days.
This has been a very medical post, probably too much for anyone’s interest!
Overall it has been an interesting experience getting covid, I’m glad in a way to finally get it after all this time and thankfully although it was been an annoying 14 days I’m very glad not to be more severely affected. I’m getting much better at just accepting illness, reading, sleeping or watching Netflix and listening to my body’s requirements so that is a positive.
It is now roughly 3 weeks since the day we think we got infected. Timewise it fits with our rail journeys, symptoms appearing 5 days later. Now we both have a bit of (fluctuating) residual brain fog, tiredness and the odd bout of coughing, but are functioning in a far more normal way.
Fingers crossed now to not have long covid!!!
