(I published this post originally on June 22. Little did I know at that time that my coronavirus story was not over, in fact it lasted 28 days. I am healthy now.)
June 22, 2020
I am a new man. Today is Day 14 since I first felt symptoms of coronavirus. I finally feel the disease leaving.
My body has folded enough proteins that antibodies exist that are effective at flushing my body of the virus. Along with it the symptoms are fading.
The symptoms are no joke. I consider beating coronavirus to be one of the biggest feats of strength I have ever experienced in 40 years of life. Not exaggerating. Only other thing that comes close was my knee surgery.
You don’t go through something that intense and not change somehow deeply. I am not sure what changed. I just know that this was a really intense life experience. The kind I’ll remember the rest of my life as a big moment.
Fourteen days of nothing but my own head. No one else around. Very little TV (I had to force myself to watch), no music, no books (too dizzy to read). Just me and myself, thinking about each other.
I played a ton of UNO and Clash Royale on my phone. Mind numbing activity to pass the time. I got tennis elbow from holding my phone playing those games. Some nights I might have been otherwise able to sleep, but the tennis elbow kept me up.
I improved at disease management as time went on. I didn’t know anything the first few days. Day 1, I had chills (no fever actually which I thought was strange, in fact I never once registered a fever) and muscle aches; that was it. I purposely tried to sweat it out in bed. To get the chills to break. The chills never broke.
I’d have the thermostat set to 80 degrees and tons of blankets and I still would be unable to straighten my body in bed because I had the chills so badly. I curled into a ball to try to warm up, and I sweat and sweat and sweat and was still cold.
Finally around day 3 or 4 I realized I was cooking myself. My body needed normal temperature despite having chills. And whew that immensely helped.
But everyday I had to sweat at least a good 30min to an hour (some days twice) or I would not feel well at all. Sweating definitely helped, but the sweat never broke. I had to break it myself with temperature control. My days started to revolve around moving my body to positions in the house (upstairs bed versus downstairs couch) at the right time for the temperature, sleep, and food.
I tried to go outdoors to my back deck or front porch, as often as my body could. Some days I didn’t make it.
I had very little appetite. I would nibble as often as I could on disease fighting things. Once per day I would make myself eat something that resembled a meal. I had to plan a lot to make sure that I kept my body nourished. There was no way I could anticipate in advance what sort of foods my body would want. Somedays soups. Somedays pasta. I ate an apple every day.
I tried to eat bananas every day but I fought a house mice issue during the first week that led to banana loss. I killed at least 4 mice during my experience, the only other animal companions in my home. I got 2 of them at the same time as they were nibbling on peanut butter next to each other and thwack!
As you can see, I had a lot of time in my head.
I remember when quarantine first began that I saw a youtube video by some Italian man saying to Americans, “coronavirus is real!” I remember thinking to myself, “That man seems legit.” That man was legit.
I feel the bones and sinews of my body have somehow changed. That’s how real this was.
You’re on day 11 of this. Day 11 was really bad btw. And all you see online is information that coronavirus takes 2 weeks. You don’t hear of anyone with symptoms taking less than 14 days. But you also see sentences on the same websites indicating “it may take up to six weeks for more severe cases.” It’s Day 11 and you feel the worst day you have felt in 11 days. That feels severe. Maybe not 6 weeks severe. Maybe just 4 weeks. But STILL!!! You have no idea where you will land in the spectrum of cases. You never know. There is the lurking, you could be that 1% mortality statistic. The psychology of the uncertainty about when the pain will end is wild.
And 1% is an interesting psychological number. If it were 0.1%, that’s just not enough to fret. If it were 10%, that would have been debilitating fear. But 1%, wow that percentage is tough to grapple with.
It was too difficult to talk to people on the phone for much of the time. I would ignore phone calls often. I finally just started telling people that I could text but not talk.
The shortness of breath didn’t really appear until the second week. But when it appeared, it took over. The second week was worse than the first, if you subtract my errors of baking myself with the thermostat the first few days.
After about a week, I could start to feel the gunk in my lungs. The cough that developed was from deep in the lung. And my capacity to breathe was reduced. A major indicator of my lung capacity was how winded I became going up the stairs of my house. That became a barometer. Days 7 to 12 were especially horrific for breathing.
I sweated profusely at least once per night. Showering became the absolute toughest part of the day. I’d wake up after a night of battling the disease covered in dry sweat and my first instinct was that nothing could happen until I showered the night away. So I’d wake up and want to shower. But that cough was deep. And moving my body made me short of breath which tickled the cough, which made me cough more, which almost sent me into a panic attack while showering a few times. Those were the closest moments when I started to wonder if I needed professional care.
Energy management was critical. I didn’t have a lot to expend each day: showering by far took the most energy. I spent a lot of my expendable energy changing bedsheets due to the sweat. And eating related activities.
Outside of those 3 endeavors, I did nothing but go to and from the toilet. Diarrhea was killer throughout. I never once had solid stool. Yesterday my stool solidified for the first time in 13 days. It was a huge sign to me. The liquid coming out of my butt was really oily. Like a paint primer or something. That shit looked protective. I became grateful for whatever it had done for me while inside my body.
I didn’t clean any dishes, Dayo cleaned my kitchen several times throughout the disease. Dayo was my hero. Around day 5, he also brought me some Nigerian potion his mom had made. That coincided with my chills breaking and temperature control understanding coming online around the same time. It helped a lot. I am grateful for Dayo. I could take a warm glass of the potion and feel better. Who knows why.
My son David was the most helpful. He visited every other day or so. He made sure I had groceries and looked me over to make sure I stayed alive. He’d come over after going to the gym, be healthy and normal looking, and just sorta shake his head and make little quips like, “yup you’re going through it.” It was comforting to have someone tell me to man up, though he could have done without the arm folding and slow head ‘no’-shake.
All appetites for normally pleasurable things, e.g. food/alcohol, sex, were gone. Gone, gone, gone. So I spent 14 days me and myself thinking about each other, with no appetite for pleasure to color my thoughts. I think that had a real impact in framing my head.
Craig was spot on in his predictions about what I would face. At the beginning, I didn’t want to listen. But he was right. He got the thing twice before quarantine even began. I can’t imagine going through coronavirus and not knowing what it is.
When that deep seated cough appeared, I was speaking with my family. My sister-in-law Quincey is a nurse and my brother Bill is an anesthesiologist resident. Between the two of them we determined that I needed some tummy time to try to jostle the cough around and make it less impactful. That was a good idea. But there was one night (might have been night 11) where I was doing tummy time and the cough was still in full gear and I couldn’t breathe. The only thing that got me through was the thought that at least I didn’t have another man on the back of my neck. The connection between the two around breathing had me thinking.
I chose to use a lot of my time to think about systemic racism. I am shocked at myself for not understanding that more crisply. My heart has never been racist. I have never been racist. But I certainly was not perceiving and comprehending systemic racism accurately. Those thoughts are for another article. Black lives matter and incredibly deep reforms must be made, starting with our policing and prison systems.
Dave Chappelle became a big hero of mine during the ordeal. I really didn’t know much about him until his recent Sticks and Stones special which my girlfriend, Kaylynn, and I attended in Atlanta. I loved that. Then while sick, I listened to more of Dave’s words. I believe Dave is one of the smartest men alive. He’s incredible. His was really the only content that was so interesting that I could muster the energy to pay attention. When I ran out of Dave stuff to watch, it was sad.
Rick and Morty is the only other TV I watched. Mainly because it’s so mind numbing that you can watch it, but it’s still sorta smart. Like you don’t really have to pay attention but if you happen to it is okay and sorta worthwhile.
I’m rambling. I’m rambling. I’m rambling. That might be a side effect of this whole thing. Remains to be seen how this has changed my life.
Me has learned to love Myself. We get along.
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It’s interesting to note that none of the top 10 people I had closest to me got sick: none of my 6 kids got sick, Kaylynn didn’t get sick, the boys I spent the most time with Chad and Dayo didn’t get sick and Craig and Arshad already had antibodies from before quarantine even began. So think about that. This was such a big experience for me. But yet the 10 ppl I was in closest proximity to sharing all sorts of germs, none of them got it. What does that mean about the contagion factor? It flies in the face of the stats we hear.
When quarantine began, it seemed as though the virus was so contagious that everyone was going to get this thing. Given the contagion stats that were being reported and the fact that vaccines take over 18 months probably much longer to develop, I assumed there was no stopping this virus from infecting everyone eventually. So why kill the economy in the meantime, assuming of course that the curve stays flat enough that hospitals don’t become overwhelmed? That was how I thought. I just planned on getting it one day, stayed quarantined as much as the state of Georgia guidelines recommended, and went about my life. Around Memorial Day Weekend, I started going to venues again. When I wasn’t getting sick, I started to wonder if I had developed an immunity like Craig and Arshad. I was super excited that I probably had already developed immunity too and didn’t even know it. Day 1 was two weeks after MDW.
Yet none of the 10 people closest to me got sick from me.
We really do not understand this disease at all. Uncertainty is the biggest single word I think the virus evokes.
My big uncertainty now will be: “how powerful are my antibodies?” Is this a forever immunity? Will it prevent all strains and derivations of the virus? The uncertainty is the killer.
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My June 29th follow-on post is on Facebook and will be reposted on this blog tomorrow.
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