Yeah, the C word. Somehow modern humans found a way to come up with a worse C word than what we already tiptoed around (except in the UK, where it’s cute and sassy for Ricky Gervais to say it!) prior to 2020.

So why are we not going back to the cove this weekend? I didn’t bury the lede. On Thursday, July 18th, 2024 I tested positive for Covid-19 for the first time.

But let’s go back. A year ago I decided to start running (well, jogging) around my new neighborhood. Doing this sort of thing was a fanciful thought when we were living in a little condo and enduring a five year long home search. I told myself back then I’d start running if we ever bought a house, so what was I waiting for?

I decided to see how much running I could do right away instead of pacing myself. If you know me well you know I hate reading instructions. And I often regret it. I’d been doing daily walks around the neighborhood after work, but running in the hills of NELA would be a different experience. I managed to give myself shin splints by using the wrong shoes to run the wrong way up the wrong hill, according to a friend that runs marathons. I did it just in time to hobble around Yosemite National Park in leg braces.

The shins healed up eventually but I was still walking. Things happened. I got laid off. I got a new job. Suddenly I was working later with less free time than before. It was time to run. I was armed with my fancy Brooks shoes and the knowledge to not start uphill, to pace and slowly add distance over time.

And it worked. Over the last two months I improved on my times and distances (jogging vs walking).

So when I had a bit of leg muscle ache after three straight days of pushing myself farther than ever in 80-90 degree sunshine this week, I assumed it was my poor legs begging for mercy.

Of course the accompanying chills were strange. And the nasal congestion. But sure enough, if you google hard enough you’ll be able to justify anything. Plenty of runners have exercise induced nasal issues. I was running with my mouth open, so sure enough, that must be it.

In fact, this had happened last month. I’d woke up with a bit of congestion and worried it was covid. But the tests showed it wasn’t, and it was gone in 24 hours. Runner induced rhinitis!

So it was only out of a sense of duty to my community that I took a covid test Thursday morning. I had a dentist appointment later that day and I wanted to reassure the good doctors that my sniffles were simply a result of my hill climbing ambition, not a communicable disease.

And then the Blue Line appeared. A blue line I’d never seen. I opened another pack and diligently swabbed and turned and squeezed and dripped and waited. But I didn’t have to wait. The Blue Line – the COVID line – shows up before the control. And there it was again. Not fuzzy, not weak. I had Covid.

How? That’s up for debate. Sam tested alongside me and came up negative. I quarantined myself immediately and set up a teledate with the first available doctor.

So, after more than four years of hand wringing and precautions, I had it. Somehow.

You’re rolling your eyes, I know, but let’s consider the facts:

• I work from home
• the last house guests (who wore masks) left ten days ago
• I had only left the house since July 8th to do four things:
  1. take out the trash once a week
  2. run around the neighborhood (and/or walk with Sam)
  3. snorkel in the pacific ocean (including 10 mins masked in a grocery store)
  4. consume Thai food outdoors at an empty restaurant

It’s not necessarily the shock of getting it eventually, it’s why now? and how? I rode all over Paris and London on their subways next to Christmas colds and new years sneezes. And the N99 held.

The most likely culprit is the waitress at the restaurant, the person who got closest too me (not married to me) in the last week while breathing. But even then, Sam was closer to her. But we were unmasked, which is the danger zone and eating out like this, even outside, is playing with fire as variants get increasingly good at latching on.

I’ll never really know how it happened.

But what I will do is document my symptoms in case I need to relay this later. I may come back and update this daily or I may not.

Wednesday 7/17/24 – 8pm slight dizzyness and slight nasal congestion. Sneezed twice (I don’t sneeze much).

Thursday 7/18/24 – 2am chills, more congestion, and muscle ache in legs, headache (but probably from lack of sleep)

Friday 7/19/24 – Nyquil got me through the night with a gaping mouth, so less headache. I noticed the leg aches started wisping away when the Paxlovid and Nyquil kicked in (not sure which one was responsible) about 45 minutes after taking it last night. By this morning the aches and chills were done. The bitter acid taste from Paxlovid had definitely arrived. I added Claritin D to the cocktail in the morning and after a few hours it cleared a bit of the congestion, much like Dayquil usually does. I did buy Dayquil at the pharmacy yesterday but I’m holding off on that so I can give my liver a minor break and still take NyQuil at night until the congestion is gone. Generally feeling better than yesterday so all the drugs are doing…something… The worst part is the isolation. I’m used to seeing Sam during the day and spending some time (at least) in the evening together. Now I’m just stuck in my office all day. Feels a bit like those depressing days in the valley when I lived alone. Folks at work keep telling me to “step away from work and rest” … as if there’s anywhere else (other than my bedroom) I can go. I’ll be in front of the computer the next ten days no matter what (I’m not even supposed to exercise!) so I might as well work more while I’m already miserable. The bright side is this quarantining is working and Sam is still testing negative so far.

Saturday 7/20/24 – At some point in the early hours the throat lump arrived. It was stronger by morning, but weaker than other swallowing pains I’ve had in the past with other infections. Of course I wasn’t bombarding those other infections with a protease inhibitor and Claritin D. (side note: does this mean we should all start taking Claritin D when we get a regular cold?)

The larger change today was just how my day was spent. There are often times of the year when Sam and I don’t see each other much on weekdays because of work, but that’s never true on a Saturday. And since 2020 she hasn’t had to go to China for work, so it’s a strange lonely feeling to isolate all day from your wife when you know she’s just in the other room (or upstairs, or downstairs, or in the upper upstairs, or on the roof). She still made pizza and chicken soup and a fruit smoothie for me, though. I just had to put on an N99, pick them up, and scurry back down to my mancave.

I never noticed how uncomfortable this office chair was before and how comfortable our couch, which I cannot sit in until I test negative, is. On the positive side with all the drugs I’m on now it feels like a pretty weak cold. The other strange thing is not being able to exercise. I’ve read that because Covid is busy busting up cells all over your body you need to NOT exercise until the virus has been killed off and your body can attempt to fix up the damage. Exercising too soon, which creates minor cell damage already, may permanently prevent cell repair or greatly prolong the repair period. This, of course, is for cells that can be replaced and repaired. Many cannot, and that’s how long-covid enters the picture. Since I’d already exhausted my legs without time to heal before the virus set in I’m especially anxious about this effect now. I’m not doing myself any favors by reading horror stories online of runners that got covid and have permanent myalgia in their legs.

So I haven’t done any of my workouts since Thursday morning, and it’s weird what happens with this change. Firstly, you recapture two hours of your day, so mornings and evenings seem to pass by much slower. On Friday I wasn’t in a big rush to get to the team “stand up” meeting like I normally am after working out and showering and gobbling down a quick oatmeal cookie. I normally have to get up two hours before my first meeting in order to fit everything in, which these days means going to bed at 8:45 and getting up at 6:30. On Friday, I slept as much as I could to “get some rest” and still ended up lumbering around at 7:30 with tons of time before my meetings. Of course the other strange thing about not exercising at all is calorie counting. Under normal circumstances stopping exercising but keeping the same diet would cause me to blow up like a balloon. However, these are not normal circumstances. The body fighting an infection uses up more calories than its normal resting state. By a lot. A basic cold can require 20% more calories a day for stasis metabolism. I also know that exercise, for all the good it does you, does NOT actually burn a ton of calories (the benefits are in lower heart rate, muscle strength, etc.). The hour long jogs I do? Probably burn 300 calories. The morning upper body weight training? Probably 200 calories. Since the average man has a resting caloric requirement of around 2,600 calories the virus may be “eating” more calories than my exercising did. And of course my appetite is gone (though my taste and smell are still here, thankfully!) so my portion sizes have dropped. So the bigger concern, at age 43, is muscle atrophy. This is why, unless I’ve felt absolutely miserable, I’ve usually worked out at least a little when I was sick. But those infections weren’t attacking my heart muscle directly. So I will watch my pecs sag, my biceps shrivel, and my newly minted calves disappear again in hopes that the most important muscle is able to fully repair itself. But how long do I wait after symptoms abate? (to start working out, to go out, to take off my mask around the house?)

Nobody knows. The CDC gave up on acknowledging any of this exists years ago when Biden “beat” it, only to catch it again. So we’re left to “do our own research” to find answers. I’m not worried in the slightest, after all that approach always works so well for politics!

When can I kiss my wife again? She’s still testing negative and we want to keep it that way, but what does that mean? 5 days? 10 days? I read stories online of MONTHS of positive tests. (How do you even get months of tests now?) This is exactly why we didn’t want to get infected in the first place – in lieu of any real guidance everyone just does…nothing. Feel better? Then go infect the whole world. And that’s undoubtedly how I have it now. The waitress who should have stayed home another day instead of coming back to the Thai restaurant and serving the weird couple that wanted to eat outside or the soccer mom that should have sent someone else to the Laguna Beach Pavilions to pick up coffee instead of standing in line behind me. In some sense all the hard work and all the demands we’ve made of our friends and family for four years seem suddenly pointless. It was some anonymous person in the end and we’ll never know so maybe it’s not worth thinking about. But here I am, alone in my office, with nothing but time to think.

I’ve also already had someone suggest to me that “I’m sure now you’ll see you won’t take nearly as many precautions as before – you’ll be ‘over it'”… This line of thinking is very popular with folks that haven’t seen the studies that long-covid chances increase with each subsequent infection. So now I have more incentive to take even MORE caution as my long-covid risk just went UP. Which gives me another mind puzzle because my instant reaction is to become even more of a homebody and avoid things, but the randomness of this infection makes a discernible plan of action hard to comprehend. If we guess it was a waitress, well then eating outside is no good now. So no restaurants ever again? Surely that’s not what it will come to, will it? I guess that’s something I’ll look forward to working out when I can work out again.

Sunday 7/21/2024

This covid virus may be from a lab after all. It seems to run on 24 hour cycles, as if human beings created it to be able to release and know exactly when and how it would effect the victims. I’m kidding, of course, it’s highly unlikely the conspiracy theorists are correct, but the cycling of symptoms is ridiculous. It seems like every night after midnight this thing swerves in a new direction. We went from chills and aches day to sniffling day to lump in the throat day and now we’re at sore throat day, right on schedule. I woke up after midnight (pro tip, get the liquid nyquil, the gel tabs suck) and noticed it hurt a lot more to swallow, which is great because since I’m using nyquil tabs I had to take 2 more giant pills at 2am to get through the night. I put on my mask and went to the office, which since I’m isolating is now my de facto pharmacy. The good news is that I finally caught sight of the owls that usually wake Sam up in the middle of the night. This time one was perched on the beam jutting out from above my office window and it saw me even though I never turned the lights on in the room. It’s big head swiveled all the way backward to look back into the house and moved in sync with my head as I slowly approached the window. My jerky pained motions of gulping down the nyquil tabs scared it away and it glided off on big fluffy white speckled wings into the valley below.

By morning the throat was worse. My father’s bout with covid had ended like this, an extended visit from a sore throat that damaged vocal chords. I already sounded bad yesterday, but today I’ve been muted. I anticipated this and brought “Drill” tabs down to my pharmacy from our regular medicine cabinet yesterday. “Drill” is the brand of numbing cough drops I purchased from the pharmacy in Paris when I was having nasal drip from masking so much. I googled drug interactions for Drill and Paxlovid just to be safe. I found something very interesting: a study that showed the reduction in SARs-2 particles in the throat for people who sprayed chlorhexidine into their throat. That’s the active ingredient in Drill tabs. Maybe I should have started taking these on Wednesday.

The dizziness I experienced briefly while watching tv on the couch Wednesday night before all this began returned in late morning. This is a bad sign as it may mean the virus has reached elements of my nervous system. Or it’s my own cytokines massing around my inner ears. Hopefully it’s the latter but only time will tell. My ears are already bad enough with loss and tinnitus from listening/playing loud music my entire life, I don’t want covid to take the rest. I would rather lose my eyesight than my hearing, music is so precious to me. One of the reasons I fear death is that music produces emotional states for me, it changes my brain chemistry temporarily. And that’s a good thing. It feels like what religious people must experience when they feel the “spirit is in them,” your brain convinces itself it’s connecting to something intangible beyond the physical. I know it’s just a chemical reaction, but for me it’s an essential part of processing life and I want to keep doing it. Forever. Most of my memories are tied to melodies. The Bends isn’t just an album from high school, it was on repeat while I rode the bus to Indianapolis nursing a cold that I frankly hoped wouldn’t get better because it might keep me off the field at Grand Nationals. I don’t actually remember if I was forced to put on that big bass drum and march around an empty stadium or if I weaseled out of it. But I do remember “cracked eggs, dead birds…” in my ears while leering out an old scratched up bus window watching Indiana’s minor urban sprawl crawl by.

Or maybe I don’t. I’m educated now enough to know our memories as flexible and are reproductions altered by our brains to fit a need. Although it did happen. The internet can verify that now; Warren Local High School placed near the very bottom of its preliminary class on November 10th, 1995, perhaps verifying that I DID stomp around banging my drum bringing the score down. 23rd out of 25, that’s me! I don’t remember getting a participation trophy, but I do remember going to “The Old Spaghetti Factory” and misbelieving, due to my isolation in a tiny town, that it was a very special place and a big reward for our hard work. I remember feeling guilty about being there, which indicates I did not make it to the field and had not “earned” my spaghetti. Looking at the photos of the menu online today my older self might condescendingly consider eating there a punishment! But those were simpler times in a simpler place, and there’s a certain comfort in that that’s been lost over time and miles that I’ll never get back.

How did we get from tinnitus to spaghetti? To be clear, it’s not the inability to hear that I fear, it’s the inability to use my ears to fill in the gaps when I inevitably forget the melodies to these songs. At the moment I have the ability to play almost any song in my head if I want. However, over time I’ve noticed that I’ll forget hooks or bridges and whatnot and I’ll need to pull up an mp3 to refresh my memory. Once my ears are shot those melodies might be lost to me forever, and for reasons I don’t fully understand that’s terrifying to me, whereas losing the ability to navigate by sight would just be overwhelmingly annoying.

Of course the good news is that both auditory and ocular damage are becoming increasingly easier to fix for modern medicine, so the odds of me fully losing either of the senses (outside of a freak accident) are low. I just don’t like the feeling of sitting here waiting and sensing this virus pick at my body, testing the limits.

7/22/24

My sleep rhythms are strange and hard to judge on Nyquil, so I sleep in as late as I can before having to wake for a “stand up” (thank god it’s not literal). But there was less pain in the throat today. By dinnertime I almost forgot it was supposed to hurt. I might try sleeping without Nyquil tonight. Only two more doses of Paxlovid to go. Now that I’m starting to feel the spikes chip off the virus I’m girding for the infamous rebound. After five days of this with drugs I can’t fathom the folks who run into this malady with open arms and empty medicine cabinets multiple times a year. Perhaps doomscrolling predisposes folks to masochism.

7/23/24

I feel better. Last Paxlovid dose this morning and symptoms are definitely going away. Throat is almost back to normal, so much so that I don’t think about it. Voice is not 100% but I can fake it with folks (at work) that don’t know what I’m supposed to sound like. Isolating is still a drag. At the end of the day I got inspired and tried to lay down some drum tracks. Probably a mistake since I’m not supposed to exercise. I’ve read so many stories (and heard them from folks we know) about how post-covid even mundane things can produce a massive rapid heartbeat. I’m frightened of this and catch myself touching my neck to check my pulse after doing stuff like walking up the stairs. Super dumb because it’s too early to tell if there is any long covid anyway. I definitely still feel fatigue, though. I didn’t know what that “can’t get out of bed” feeling was people described before, but now I feel it all day every day. It’s kinda similar to how I feel when I don’t get enough sleep but deeper and broader, like it’s depressing the mitochondria in every cell, whereas sleep deprivation makes my nerves and muscles burn.

7/24/24

I went to sleep feeling better and woke up feeling worse. True to form the infection swerved again, or maybe it’s just free of the clutches of the protease inhibitor now. At 2am the cough came back and the congestion followed. I developed a headache, or maybe it’s sinus pressure. Hard to tell if it’s apnea lack-of-oxygen headache from congestion blocking nasal passages or just the sinuses hurting. Also still fatigued. I got up at 6:30 and then just went back to bed and laid there for another half hour. This is not something I normally do if I’m not sleep deprived since I’m not a “time waster.” Especially now that I have a boss that comes to work at 4:30PST (she lives in Georgia) and notices when I log in.

This all makes me quite sad because the main rule Sam and I agreed to before we could cohabitate again was that I would test negative – but also be symptom free. I don’t feel symptom free this morning. We’ll see how I feel by the end of the day when we were originally planning to first test me again.

I felt better by the end of the day, but testing showed a faint positive, so another day of isolating it is.

7/25/24

The guidance on the rapid tests is basically that you can’t trust a negative test unless it’s 48 hours after the last positive test, so I didn’t bother testing again today. I did feel a little better so I walked myself around the neighborhood in the evening. Was definitely walking slow and feeling the fatigue, though, which is a new experience for me. Also experiencing apparent loss of muscle mass and fitness. Hoping to start rowing again on Saturday with a negative result tomorrow.

7/26/24

Woke up with that headache again like on Wednesday. Despite not feeling 100% normal yet I was hoping to get back to normal life tonight. So much so that I jumped the gun and took another test at 2pm. Which was…positive. Sigh. I did NOT want to spend another entire weekend locked in my office. A lot of articles do state that people are “no longer infectious after 10 days” which pushes this out till Sunday.

7/27/24

Apparently I’m losing my mind. Yesterday’s update was marked the 25th and I said I tested negative. I assure you it was the 26th and unfortunately I tested very positive. Despite the Covid line showing stronger yesterday than on Wednesday, I felt better this morning (Saturday), so I went down to the basement and rowed for an hour with my mask on and the window open and the air filter on blast.

In the afternoon I took an hour long walk. I was still fatigued after a bit but kept on going. The last 15 mins or so I started to get a headache and my nose started running. And now, four hours later, it’s still running. Is it possible to restart a virus by walking? What’s going on? I feel like I just lost 3 or 4 days of recovery time. Is the rule that I can’t exercise at all until I feel absolutely normal? And how long with that take? It’s just great that the CDC has abandoned us and there’s no scientifically curated advise on any of this anymore (other than “go out in public again and spend money as soon as possible!!!”).

This is definitely not “just a cold.” Not even the flu. I’ve never had either of those swarm back into symptom territory after feeling better. All my previous illnesses have been an even trajectory with a few days of misery and then a gradual even paced improvement until you forget you were sick at all. And I was usually able to work out (not just walk, but work out) on all but the absolute worst days. Now I’m 10 days into covid and I can’t even go outside for a walk without hurting myself all over again? Why is everyone just going out and gulping down these particles with reckless abandon? I don’t ever want to feel this way again, let alone a few times A YEAR. WTH?!

7/28/24

Saturday night I took nyquil to deal with the sniffling and headache. I felt better Sunday morning, but definitely not normal. I rowed and took a walk and it didn’t knock me out as much as the previous day.

7/29/24

Well that sucked. The congestion came back at night and I couldn’t really sleep. I guess I should have taken nyquil again, but I’m hesitant to keep taking drugs that I know dull brain cells and punch the liver. But who needs to feel good to work all day. I’m only half joking, I’m so glad I work remotely now. I don’t have to “hide” an illness anymore and I’m hardly ever on camera. “You should rest” On day 12? Rest by doing what? All I can do is just sit in my office in this deckchair anyway.

Another side story going on with this infection is discovering how other folks treat it in different ways. Some folks claimed in the past they got it and it was nothing. Maybe that’s true. Maybe they just want it to be nothing. Other folks deny ever getting it at all. And never tested in order to ensure there was no proof. This should be known as the “Trump Method” for avoiding covid. Which is similar to every other Trump method, deny the truth, hide the evidence, and make ridiculous claims later. But more specifically, for those who’ve forgotten, back in 2020 or 2021 he suggested it would “go away” if we “just stopped testing.”

I know someone now claiming they probably never had covid and they must have had “something else” when multiple family members had it. Why? Another person is now claiming to have never gotten it in a scenario where their lifestyle would have produced thousands of exposure opportunities over the last two years (big house full of rotating cohabitators that take no precautions and go to the airport a lot, going to group events with no protection, children, etc.). As someone that did almost everything possible to avoid it and still got it it’s hard to listen to these folks with a straight face. But we’re all in uncharted territory and everyone has their own reasons to behave the way they do. And we’re finding out that some folks have genes that resist the virus. I knew early on that wasn’t me since my brother got it (working in a hospital before the vaccines). For a lot of the folks I mentioned it would be much harder to control for exposure. A lot of folks have kids, and America is abandoning its children to this virus.

I feel abandoned too. I haven’t seen much of my wife for the last two weeks because I have to isolate. I’m testing negative, but my mother had a good point yesterday that the RATs may still show a positive result because my body is pushing the inert broken viral particles, and the dead cells from my own body that were infected, out my nose. Inert virus isn’t going to hurt anybody. So what do I do? How do I know if I’m still contagious or not? And the fact that I read all the studies and pay close attention to this and I DON’T KNOW, means normal people don’t know (and in many cases don’t care). Their boss tells them to get back to work, so they go back to work. And this thing just gets worse and worse. Even on the “nocovid” reddit forum the majority of the posts on there in July were “got it for the first time in 4 years.” This indicates the latest strain is going to infect anyone not staying home and isolating and wearing goggles to the grocery store. We know how we got here, but where do we go now? As this gets normalized the drive for new preventative measures is dimmed, but more and more people are going to get long covid.

Or maybe not. Latest studies show the new variants are more contagious but (with vaccines) are showing lower rates of developing long covid. They’re down to 30%, but that still sounds incredibly high to me, and that goes up with successive infections. I need that under 1% coupled with treatments before I’m “okay” with this, but we’ve been taught by the media to downplay getting sick and often just blame it on something else; a “summer flu” or a “mysterious illness.” Meanwhile I get older and more susceptible.

I took Clariten D again this morning to alleviate the symptoms.

7/30/24

Took nyquil last night and slept a lot. Rowed in the morning. Still have some sniffling and coughing, but not as much as yesterday. Fatigue feels less as well. Got a bit excited and took a test… which showed the same faint positive line as last Wednesday. So here I am looking into the suggestion that it may be picking up “dead” (viruses aren’t really alive in the first place) particles. And I’m finding bad news. First, apparently the proteins that have been intercepted by the immune system aren’t just laying around, they’re “obliterated” according to virologists. Scientists actually have strict protocols they have to engage in to even keep “dead” viral particles alive in the lab, which would be near impossible to replicate in a living human body even if you tried, and I’m not trying. Thus, the rapid tests are almost certainly picking up “live” covid proteins. Which means if I breathed out those particles and they hit another person’s throat they could be infected.

So I have to keep isolating. But how long is this going to go on? I keep reading “people with weak immune systems may test positive for much longer.” Usually this is cited as 10-20 days, but I’ve seen articles that say “up to 90 days.” Are you kidding? I’m supposed to isolate myself until Halloween?

The terrible thing is that I have no way to know. I could test negative tomorrow…or not until October. But there’s a lot of stuff I’ll have to cancel along the way if the results don’t change.

It should be noted that I don’t feel “normal” yet, so it’s not a complete surprise that I might still have active particles in there. But does that mean when you have a lingering cough after a cold or flu you’re still spreading that too? Everybody knows someone (if not themself) that’s had a lingering cough before Covid. Is Covid different or were we all making each other sick the whole time by going back to work with a cough two weeks after the flu?

And the numbers are absent. If I unmask around my wife today am I putting out 10% of the particles I was a week ago? 50%? 0.05%? One article said that even a single covid protein molecule could trigger that positive test line. If I’m breathing out a single particle with each breath it’s unlikely I’m getting anyone sick. This is where the faintness of the line provides a clue; clearly I’m not as contagious as two weeks ago, but how much less? How much risk am I introducing to other people? The official CDC guidance is you can stop isolating five days after a positive test even if you still have symptoms but no longer have a fever and are “improving.” Well, that’s me, but then scientific articles urge folks to avoid everyone if they still test positive at all. Which absolutely nobody is following because almost nobody tests anymore. People aren’t testing up front (“It’s the summer flue” “it’s allergies” “it’s something else”) so they’re certainly not testing on the back end.

No wonder we got here. At least when we had mask mandates if people were going back to work too soon their masks would catch most of the particles.

We’ve created a system where conscientious people are punished. I guess that’s nothing new. It’s up to the beer drinker not to drink and drive. But we’re basically encouraging people to drive with a buzz on right now. And then the TV says “covid is surging in Los Angeles” but doesn’t give any remedies for that. No mention of masking. “So just be aware that everybody else on the freeway has had a couple beers too, but hospitalizations are down so it’s all OKAY!”

All of this just for money. Commercial real estate contracts need to get renewed so rich guys can buy more supercars to sit in their garage 364 days a year….and I can’t see my wife for 10 days…20 days… maybe 90 days…so Manny Khoshbin can buy another Pagani?

Prior to this we hadn’t asked our friends to take a covid test before coming to our outdoor roof or hiking or anything like that. Some of them did so anyway. Now I appreciate that more since if they hadn’t tested negative it could mean they’re still passing on the virus up to three months after their infection. I knew about asymptomatic cases before, but not a three month window of infectiousness.

So do I keep blogging about this every day? If I have to keep updating every day for 3 months this is gonna be a long post…and boring…and not super meaningful. Perhaps I’ll not post again until symptoms significantly improve, or I test negative, or both.

One more thought to close out: How does this window of positive testing overlap with “long-covid?” Long Covid in some folks is just symptoms that continue for months, in others it’s potentially permanent. Is it only considered long covid if you’re testing negative? But almost everyone isn’t testing at all at this stage, so are there a lot of folks claiming to have long-covid a month out from infection that are actually just still trying to fight off an active infection? And if so, (again…) why are we all just accepting this as normal and fine and not worth talking about? Instead people keep talking about they are “getting sick a lot more” or “always sick.” Are you just still contagious with your original infection? Are people just transitioning from one Covid variant to the next and just being a constant host for the virus? It sounds like a science fiction script, but here we are. AND consider that “brain fog” is a symptom. So we have people walking around coughing out active viral particles that make them and other people dumber, and dumber each time they get it, and they’re constantly re-infecting themselves. (but we don’t say the C-word!!!)

This is the zombie apocalypse. Were living in it, it’s already here.

8/2/2024

The clearing of this virus does not seem to be top priority for my body anymore. The T-cells are off drinking a beer somewhere after winning enough of the battles that the outcome of the war is clear. The reserves in there finishing it, but they’re not as well trained or efficient. Repair operations are incremental at this point and that’s a terrible thing because, as of yesterday, I’m still testing positive. So we’re heading into week 3 of isolation. Moving (not urgent) doctor’s appointments again. Wondering if we should cancel an upcoming beach trip or otherwise do what exactly to make our friends feel safe.

If I followed the CDC and most people I know’s behavior the answer would be…do nothing. The more people I ask the more I find that they only tested to confirm they had Covid so they could get treatment. Testing was never a strategy to end isolating or protect anybody. “COVID is a household disease” one friend said. “I went back to work (at the hospital) when they told me to, but my cough lasted for a month” another said. At this point it’s safe to say my cough is directly correlated with a positive test result and therefore (based on studies) contagiousness.

The last thing I want to do is give up and let my wife catch this. Not only because it would be selfish and callous of me, but also because the paxlovid supply issues are even worse than they were 2 weeks ago when most of my KP pharmacies were out of stock. Supply is so bad now there are news articles about how California is running out. This accompanies news of a massive summer surge of the latest variant in several states, with the highest wastewater readings since common sense lost and masking was thrown out with the bath water.

Based on more anecdotal evidence from conversations I’ve gathered my experience was better than many others because of that paxlovid prescription. Most folks that didn’t take it had multiple days of “can’t get out of bed” style suffering. Paxlovid put a stop to my aches and chills and fever within 24 hours and I never missed a day of work (although I definitely would have if I had to work in the office).

So there’s a good chance if I stop isolating and masking at home now, I could pass this to Sam and she’d suffer in ways I didn’t.

But isolation creates its own strains, mental and otherwise. And not just for me. Multiple home improvement projects (my purview in our household) have been pushed out. Our anniversary is coming up and it’s going to be a bitter pill to spend that alone in the same house.

I can stop wondering why anyone would put up with this, the symptoms and the isolation, because for most they’re only enduring one, not the other. Burying your pain and putting up cognitive barriers from thinking about your role in everyone else’s health is an American trait. “No pain, no gain,” after all. And that pain was never just yours. Anyone that fought up the corporate ladder left folks in their wake. Both at work and at home. Even latchkey kids know, it’s better that mom and dad made that money (college is expensive) than work less or closer to home. The wealthy class in America has convinced the labor (white and blue) class to celebrate pain. “Kids don’t want to work these days.” Who the hell ever wanted to work? Nobody wins the lottery, gives all the money away, and keeps working at that office or that factory.

Deep in their hearts, nobody wants covid. But Manny Khoshbin needs you back at the corporate office complex your company is leasing from him so he can buy a yacht, so “end isolation after 5 days without a fever and don’t bother to test.” It’s the best thing for everyone. Everyone named Khoshbin, or Trump, or Biden, or Zell, or Bren, or Roski, or Caruso, or Sterling… You know, people that don’t “Work” anyway.

8/7/2024

On Saturday (8/3) I tested positive again. I tested in the morning, hoping I could rip off my mask and throw it in the trash (“doing a Biden” let’s call it!) and enjoy eating our traditional Pizza and coffee (without the beer today, though, still in recovery). But, no. This time it was a solid covid line!

We decided to not even bother testing until next week. I called the doctor and was advised (they were just pulling from CDC guidance) that I could mask around family and keep testing. So we did. Unlike all the other days we watched movies on the couch with masks on.

The doctor also said they had zero guidance on how long anyone can test positive and when or if testing positive for a long time would mean you may need healthcare of any kind. While “doing my own research” I discovered studies that show most folks have negative tests within 10-15 days, but there’s a “long tail” that lingers for about 5% of patients. Those patients trend older, but do include younger folks too. There’s currently debate about whether those long tail infections are evidence of weaker immune systems, the beginning of long covid, or any number of other things.

Because our approach now is to “let er rip” there just isn’t a lot of focus on outliers like this. Although the weird thing is that long covid studies show that over time the number of edge cases increases with infection quantity per person since every subsequent infection seems to do more damage than the last.

There is hope, though. Just today University of Houston published their work on a sterilizing nasal vaccine that apparently works on future covid variants because it shows strong resistance to all respiratory viruses in general. It basically stops them from getting in by creating a super-activated immune response within the respiratory tract. Okay, great – let’s do it! Of course the studies have only been in hamsters so far, it’s not even moved to human trials. We need to bring back project light-speed again to get THIS solution out to the public. Imagine if there was a vaccine that not just stopped covid, but stopped you from getting the cold and flu….forever. No masks (at least for common respiratory viruses) again… ever. Imagine how that would change the dynamic for parents. “My kids are always sick.” Imagine if they were never sick, at least with colds.

As I write this I’m basically killing the time to confirm my latest test. Which has 4 minutes to go and so far shows no covid line. I still have slight congestion and a diminishing cough, so there’s a chance it could show a faint line….

and….

I’m free! No line.

(yes, I know they say to test again in 48 hours to rule out a false positive, but that’s more for folks who test negative QUICKLY and have only dropped the fever, it’s been 21 days now since my first symptoms so it’s highly unlikely it’s false)

(also, Sam tested again yesterday and was also negative. I was so jealous)