Back in late May, The Pip had a brief bout with Covid, which looked like it was going to derail various end-of-school-year activities that he was very fired up for. In the end, the weather bailed us out, and he didn’t miss any of the things, so it just ended up as five days where he barely left his bedroom and I called him “Covid Boy.” (I remain a little puzzled as to how none of the rest of us got it then, since our house doesn’t really allow for true isolation (none of the bedrooms have an en suite bathroom) and The Pip generally couldn’t be bothered to wear a mask when making a run to the bathroom, or to close his bedroom door afterwards...)
At the end of his isolation period, my parents got him the shirt you see in the photo above, which was taken on his first morning heading back to school. I joked with him this week that I needed to get a shirt just like it, coming off my own bout with the virus, because I definitely agree with the one-star review.
I’ve been doing antigen tests at home every other day since the end of my official isolation period, and yesterday was the first to show a clear negative (day 12, for those keeping score). The symptoms had dropped down into the noise several days earlier— I still have a bit of cough and congestion, but it’s not distinguishable from the cough and congestion I get at random intervals from what I’ve always assumed are allergies. Given that, I think it’s probably safe to talk about my bout with Covid in the past tense without worrying that I’m jinxing myself.
Because I listen to way too many podcasts from The Ringer, when people ask how it was, I’ve been defaulting to a power ranking: “I’m not sure it’s in the Top Five of the sickest I’ve ever been, but probably Top Ten.” This did lead to a bit of a rabbit hole of trying to seriously enumerate severe illnesses (I had pneumonia as a kid, I had my appendix out in 2019, there was that time I was taking 1200mg of Advil at a time to keep from shivering uncontrollably…) but that’s really more of a statement about vibes than anything else. And on a vibe level, it’s accurate— I was definitely very sick, but wouldn’t say it was the worst I’ve ever been sick.
The vibes aspect also makes it difficult to sort out in any kind of objective sense. Some part of my perception of how sick I was undoubtedly traces to the knowledge that it was Covid, specifically. Even coming at this late post-vaccine stage of the pandemic, it’s not nothing to know that the reason you feel crappy is a particular virus that’s killed a mind-boggling number of people. That knowledge tends to elevate even relatively mild symptoms.
So, you know, I had a bit of a cough, but it was far from the worst cough I’ve ever dealt with, and actually was about its worst on the day before I tested positive. (That, or about five days in, but that was the thing where all the accumulated gunk starts draining out and there’s just a constant tickle in the back of your throat, so you cough a lot but it’s really mild). I never had serious trouble breathing or swallowing, as I have at times in the past. But I was also a lot more cautious about it than I would’ve been had I had the same level of cough in 2018.
The worst symptom by far was the fever, which had me doing the shiver-under-a-pile-of-blankets thing followed by the wake-up-absolutely-sopping-wet-with-sweat thing for a few nights running. That’s the part that had me most worried, enough to call my GP just to check whether it was really okay to keep taking ibuprofen indefinitely, but I’ve had comparably bad fever a few times in the past. (Including one occasion when I took a bunch of pills and then drove from New Haven to Boston to do wedding prep stuff…)
If I hadn’t had the official diagnosis, I wouldn’t’ve isolated at the level I did. When I’ve been that level of sick in the past, I’ve tended to minimize time out of the house but not completely shut things down. I would come to campus a half-hour before my class, and leave immediately afterwards, but not cancel a lecture, that kind of thing. Which, you know, you can read as commentary on societal attitudes toward illness, or late capitalism, or whatever. I’ll just stick with “I was definitely sick, but not that sick.”
The worst part of the whole business was probably when Kate tested positive on the Saturday after my Wednesday test, and had to begin her own isolation period. Which was technically a day before I could officially leave the house. This came the day before SteelyKid’s birthday, which upended some plans there, but we got past that. Happily, my mom was able to come get the kids that afternoon and bring them back on Monday, and then SteelyKid’s camp group left for a four-day excursion so we only had The Pip to wrangle. That was plenty, though, since it hampered any attempt to ease back into ordinary activity—if anything, it was a bit worse than normal, since I not only had to do all the food prep I normally do, but also was the only one who could do dishes afterwards. I would definitely recommend, given the choice, being the second adult to go into isolation…
On an institutional level, the response to this was not terribly impressive. When I tested positive on Wednesday, I reported it both to the county health department and Union’s Human Resources office (per college policy), and also called my GP’s office and left a message (it didn’t seem urgent enough to choose the emergency talk-to-a-human option). The only one of those that got back to me in a timely manner was HR. I called the doctor back on Friday and talked to a receptionist who seemed faintly annoyed to need to run through the Covid symptom checklist with me; my GP called back an hour or so later to confirm that I didn’t need Paxlovid if the cough was improving and could just take Advil until the fever went away. The county sent a text and an email the following Wednesday, after I was already three days clear of the isolation period; Kate got one the same day (four days into her isolation), so maybe they just do them as a once-a-week batch process.
Of course, it’s very important to note that I’ve been both lucky and good, here. Good, in that I’ve got the full complement of shots— both vaccine doses, and two booster shots— which undoubtedly played a role in keeping my illness mild. (When I spoke to my GP, he said “At that level of vaccination, you’re unlikely to get any sicker than you are right now.”) And I’ve been lucky in that I didn’t get any of the scarier symptoms— trouble breathing, loss of taste or smell, “brain fog”—that seem to hit some people and not others. And nothing seems to be lingering to an unreasonable degree— I’ve been tired, sure, but I also dropped five pounds over the week I was isolating because I just didn’t eat much, so it’s probably not surprising that my conditioning is not what it used to be.
This also happened at a time that works out fairly well in terms of family and professional life— I got sick a few days after our big outing to Yankee Stadium, and there’s another week-and-a-half before our next planned event, a trip to a Broadway show. And of course, classes don’t start until just after Labor Day, so this didn’t put too much of a crimp in my planning for the upcoming academic year. There are so very many ways this could’ve been worse.
If you’d like to find out whether I actually have managed to jinx myself with this, here’s a button:
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