Covid Diary Part 1 (of Probably 3)

I’m writing three posts regarding my COVID journey. My three posts will be “I have COVID” and how I found out (which I haven’t even written yet), “My living and quarantine situations,” and “Entertainment,” which will include what I’m doing/going to do with this laptop.

Now, how did I find that I have COVID? As I may have mentioned before, I have asthma. My two biggest triggers are allergies and illness, and one of the biggest allergic triggers I have is “mountain cedar,” which is technically Ashe juniper. Mountain cedar levels have been pretty high lately, but I’ve also been pretty good about my Flonase, which usually helps a lot. I was coughing on Thursday and mostly wrote it off as a little bit of mountain cedar, but it was in the back of my head that it might be COVID, since that happened about five years ago. I had a cough in January that year that I was sure was mountain cedar and it turned out I was actually sick.

Then late on Friday, my knees started to really hurt, and when I sat down to check it out, I realized that it was actually the lower part of my thighs, like, my biceps femoris, maybe? At any rate, it was muscular pain, and even when it’s an illness that doesn’t cause muscle pain, my legs will hurt when I’m sick. And COVID does cause muscle pain.

I knew I should have tested Friday night, but I cheated and did it Saturday afternoon. Pikmin Bloom Community Day was Saturday and I knew I could get my 10,000 steps in in my neighborhood without having close contact with anyone, so that’s what I did. I knocked that out between 11 and 12:30, then I did the at-home test. Five minutes into the 15-minute wait, I could see the line indicating infection forming.

So I ordered some food, bottled water, and rubber gloves from Walmart for curbside pickup and began to gather my food and entertainment options and filled out the registration form for the urgent care we go to for testing. By 2:30 pm, I had an official diagnosis.

Normally, I’d’ve sent Alex on the errand to pick up the food and my prescriptions, but Alex also has COVID. He moved out over a year ago, so neither of us could have caught it from the other, but boy what lousy timing!

I took some things to him on Friday night and told him that there was a good chance I had it, too, and if I was sure I’d’ve given him a hug, but didn’t want to take the chance just in case. And now I know that I could’ve given him a hug and I’m chagrined, to say the least.

So after I returned from picking up my food and my medications, I grabbed another couple of things (maybe this is where I found the laptop that I wrote this on?) and was sequestered by 6:30 pm. I had a bunch of jackets piled on my bed and one of those stairstepper thingies on my floor, but after I’d locked all of that in my closet, the room was much less claustrophobic.

And now I’m living in a world that’s mostly without time. My only form of time is my Medrol dosepak. I have to eat four times daily, to ensure that I have food in my stomach when I take the pills, so that I don’t feel nauseated. Well, that was for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, at least. Wednesday I go down to three times daily.

Hopefully I’ll develop a sense of time by then.

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