Coronavirus

This blog post is about my personal experience with coronavirus, which I was first diagnosed with a little over a month ago.

Diagnosis & Day One

I received my positive test result for the virus on November 6th. I mean so literally that I was shocked. On Friday, at work, I had a slight headache, which I attributed to the stress of being a teacher during a pandemic at the end of a grading period…you know, and shook it off. A coworker mentioned that her daughter had to go home sick from school, and was going to get tested. When I got home, I mentioned to Charles about the coworker’s kid, and he said we should go get a test just in case.

I had no. idea. that it would be positive. No. Clue. Like I said, a little headache and nothing else. I did all the things I was supposed to do…I called my workplace, made a list of everywhere I had been the last two weeks, and cleared as many obligations as I could for the week in case things were worse for me. It didn’t help that my test results arrived ten minutes before I was supposed to start work. Thankfully, or not, depending on how you look at it, my school is entirely online right now due to a surge of Covid all across Wisconsin.

I can’t stress this enough…I would have gone to work feeling the way I was. I would not have had any idea that I was contagious to others.

My first thoughts? I’m furious. I was absolutely livid. I took all the precautions. We have been SO cautious. We’ve canceled and turned down so much over the past few months, even as I’ve seen friends and coworkers living their lives as nothing has changed. Did they get Covid? No. Caitlin with the mask and the hand sanitizer did. Seriously, I do not go near unmasked people. Period. Based on the timeframe I must have gotten sick, and the fact that my husband tested negative when I tested positive, the chances are very high that I got it at work.

So, I get positive. I’m freaking out, but I push through. I teach from home. Work says I can take the time off if I need to, but I enjoyed going to work that first day. It helped calm me down a lot just talking about space and joking around about things that are totally unrelated. Staying at home and worrying the whole time wouldn’t have helped me a bit. Symptoms on day one were very mild. I had a headache that wouldn’t go away but was manageable, and general fatigue. If I were to lay down, I could fall asleep in seconds and sleep for 2-4 hours at a time. That was it!

The Rest

Things…never got bad. Not really bad, anyway. The scariest day was when I couldn’t get out of bed. I had worked half the day and was sinking really hard that afternoon. I went ahead and decided to take a nap and just could not wake up. I was so sleepy. I wasn’t low on oxygen or running a fever. I was just tired. I slept for five hours and then slept another 11 at night. That’s the story I mostly can tell. I was exhausted. There was no such thing as enough sleep at any time. My muscles ached like the day after an extremely hard gym day every day. Every muscle. And the fatigue was so hard to overcome. I managed to work from home through my quarantine but it was difficult and deeply unpleasant. I regret not taking the time off. At this point, I’m a full month out from my diagnosis, and I can still easily sleep 14+ hours a day if I let myself. I’m still very tired all the time and I have to fight it.

Keeping Secrets

Also the embarrassment. Telling people you have covid immediately opens the can of “what did you do wrong”. Was it the takeout we got last week? But it was contactless! How about the drinks on the patio we got a few weeks ago? No, that was too long ago. The guy who got too close to us at the dog park? We were outside and wearing masks!

The long and the short of it was that I most likely got sick at work. It probably came from a student or a coworker. But that doesn’t stop the questions. The thing I want to convey is that you can be as careful as possible, and still catch this. It’s intensely contagious and it only takes one completely unnoticeable slip up. So, we kept it need to know. Need to know didn’t include most of our family, or any of our friends and coworkers until after the quarantine ended and we were certain we were on the other side.

We got off lucky, but that did not make me feel relieved. We had such a mild case and it still was fairly debilitating for huge chunks of my day. If it was even 5% worse, I would have been incapacitated for at least three weeks and unable to leave my bed or go to work, even via zoom. We’re young and healthy and it was still incredibly difficult to overcome. I can’t imagine if I had accidentally given it to my parents or another older person. It would have been awful. We canceled any kind of Thanksgiving we were going to have (it was going to be small anyway…just us and my two parents). Just not worth the risk. We’re reassessing Christmas, but it’s overall been a series of hard and no-win decisions.

Take it seriously. Wear your masks. Stay away from each other. Don’t get sick. It’s misery.

Also, I don’t really care about your comments on this one. If you want to pretend that Covid isn’t real, move along somewhere else.