My Current Persistent Delusion About How I Beat COVID-19
WARNING: CONTAINS MILDLY DISGUSTING DESCRIPTIONS OF ILLNESS
BACK IN LATE November and early December of 2019 (the Before Times), I came down with what I thought was a bad cold. I had a maddeningly parched and scratchy throat that kept me awake in bed, plus an intermittently uncontrollable dry, hacky, non-productive cough along with an odd heaviness in my lungs. It really knocked me down, made me the kind of sick where you just sit in a room and exist. No interests, no motivation to do or think anything; you’re just a stationary living thing with no interior life, no hopes, no future.
After nearly two weeks of this condition ebbing and flowing but not dissipating, I went to my Forty-Dollar Copay Primary Care Physician and he was like, “Yeah it’s a nasty virus that’s going around, I can give you something for the cough.” I was so profoundly ill I couldn’t even embrace the possible narcotic sport of a few days worth of prescription cough syrup. Sizzurp!
I stayed on my established DayQuil/NyQuil Möbius strip, and after three weeks I started to feel better, but then the illness mutated to bestow upon me a set of sludgy, congested lungs. I’ve had bronchitis enough to recognize it. I had a horrible, burning, productive cough, definitely approaching pneumonia. I’m not in favor of antibiotics unless I know that’s the only thing left to do, so I fought the new state of sick with lots of fluids, rest, acetaminophen, strategic doses of the respective Qs, and loud, revolting bouts of searingly painful racking coughs in a hot steamy shower every morning, resulting in the ejection of globs of yellow phlegm, sometimes on the cusp of dull green, with the odd streak of blood. Very satisfying to get that stuff out! Yuck!
Of course my wife ended up catching my initial illness and it did the same thing to her, scratchy throat, nonproductive cough, it wiped her out, she was in bed for two days, and it took her three weeks to get near normal. We went to New Orleans for a week in late December because we had longstanding plans for her 50th birthday. We took our state of health seriously, we were agreed that if one of us felt like it was too much, we would cancel the trip, we did not push it, were in much better shape and took it very easy, but at least once a day one of us would cough briefly but gruesomely. We had a great time and we recovered completely.
About a week ago, in my capacity as a not-doctor and not-scientist, I began to develop the hypothesis that we maybe we had experienced the COVID-19, and while we had it, we got sick with other stuff, opportunistically. I don’t have anything to back this idea up, and so I can’t say we did, and I’m no Celebrity, nobody’s gonna indulge me and test my wife and me behind this tale, but now I kinda think we did.
We didn’t!
But I kinda think we did.
My wife and I are symptom-free and in good health, practicing Government-mandated prophylaxis in our daily activities and will not research my theory (which my Bride has bought into a li’l bit) by tempting fate via exposure to possible infection (RE-infection?!?) but part of me thinks maybe we had it. But of course we did not.
But maybe.
UPDATE! DELUSION REINFORCED: Famous star Debi Mazar reported that her family got sick over a month ago and didn’t know what was going on, then they “recovered” after about three weeks, and then got sick again, this time def with the COVID-19. Celebrities: They’re just like us!
