My Personal Experience of #Covid19 (thus far)
Five days ago I tested positive for Covid. Here’s a bit of what the story has been like so far
Tuesday was spent moving on of the offspring out of their rental property in country Vic and back down to Melbourne’s suburbs. A hot day of heavy lifting and a fair bit of driving.
By latish Tuesday I was feeling a bit under the weather. Initially I put that down to likely dehydration having played cricket on the Saturday (which was also probably why my throat was a bit sore) and a bit of activity on the Sunday and the cricket training session just had, starting to catch up with me. I’d been drinking plenty and just added more volume. The headache progressively got worse not helped by a really hot night making for a less than ideal sleep.
Wednesday took the dog for a walk early to beat the anticipated heat. Only a short one, half an hour or so of tossing a ball to her but me not covering much ground. Sore throat persisting. Tried to log in for work at about 8am or so and couldn’t get access for some reason (more on that later). Felt pretty tired, put my head back down for a bit and woke up just before 11am! 3 hours vanished. Headache really ponding now and body starting to get the flu like shivers. ‘oh what?! noooo’ I thought to myself. Tried to log in again – still couldn’t get access to work. Feeling ridiculously tired, still drinking plenty I was aware enough to think that might be a need for a test. Started making calls to see if I could secure a RAT from anywhere. None available and now at about 12 I was really tired again. Put the head back down at woke up around two.
As someone who wakes up without an alarm clock pretty much 6.15am every morning, having had about five hours of sleep extra during the day is unheard of. The teens helped me secure a RAT and about 3pm it took less than 45 seconds of the stated ’15 minutes’ for it to tell me I was positive for Covid. Teens not happy as now they’re in lockdown and I’m worried about infecting them too. log on to DHHS website to self report and got a ping back from Alfred HealthImmediately call the cricket club to let them know so they can advise team mates and our opposition from Saturday, and the club where I help coach as we’d had a training session on the Tuesday. Start thinking backwards about how and where given I’d had just two people contact events in the past 10 days anad everyone reportedly healthy, and that I’d masked up for all the very short stints at getting groceries.
A thought – all of the product handling that checkout staff do at the grocery aisle – is that a way to spread covid through contact?
Overnight on the Wednesday any time I got up (about every hour or so) going outside to cool down was interesting. My skin was hyper sensitive and the slight change of temperature booted up the shivers and shakes. Nurofen was I think helping the headache and the sore throat persisted.
Thursday. Feeling a little better in the morning but noticed a rather odd phenomena during the day. Despite the heat outside and despite how physically hot I felt, I was not sweating. Fluid intake was high, urine output as expected but not a single bead of perspiration. Made it rather difficult to cool down. Ridiclously tired.Had more stints of multi hour sleep breaks. First signs of a cough begin just prior to bed,
Friday. Muscle soreness has eased and headache mostly gone but now a cough has emerged and I’m feeling a little breathy. Contact work to find out what’s ging on with access. My password is corrent.But in between knowing it and typing it I couldn’t get it right on the keyboard! Mental fog. Still tired but today just one middle of the day sleep – three hours from a little after 10am. Both teens have had a pcr and get their results back – negative but I’m not convinced that will hold up. Son is feeing poorly and we’d spent a day together on that Tuesday driving around. He’s gonna have it for sure.
Saturday. am in the middle of packing up the house for a pending move. Have lost the previous days so thought I’d do some simple boxing up work. Little movement, nothing too heavy and yet needing to stop every few minutes to catch my breath. I’m packing up the shed in the backyard and shuffling each box towards the front of the house. I do that for about two hours all up with a number of sit down stints. The cough comes and goes, more irritating than annoying. Inside I’m in a separate room of the house and have set up a shower under the hose in the front yard. Daughter has taken over the outside office pod as is staying well away. Can’t blame her – she’s off the Gold Coast in a fortnight if eveything goes well!
Sunday (today). Cough coming and going, headache has come back and muscle soreness now replaced with everything just feeling tired. Definitiely finding it harder to breathe. Sitting on the couch watching TV is hard. I’m tired and there have been times where I’ve dozed off. Worryingly a shot of adrenalin is waking me up consistently – I’ve developed apnea, something that used to affect me when sleeping. This might be a tough night
Notes:
I’m double vaccinated (AZ) with 2nd dose in early September 2020.
Relatively fit, mid 50s fairly active, non smoker
Was planning on having my booster after moving the teen out of the country residence. Covid beat me
Alfred Health have been monitoring progress by both survey app and follow up calls
I’m in a better position than many with food available and some space to move.
This is not fun. It’s hitting harder and longer than ‘man-flu’
The teen son tested positive this mornin
With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…
Read More >In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…
Read More >Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…
Read More >I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…
Read More >On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…
Read More >With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…
Read More >For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…
Read More >I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…
Read More >One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…
Read More >As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…
Read More >