I Am Reluctantly A Member Of The COVID-19 Fraternity
I’ve gotten vaccinated and double boosted and I was sure I had dodged the COVID-19 bullet.
But five days ago, I felt exhausted and congested, more so than normal, so I took a COVID-19 test, sticking the QTip up my nostrils, rotating the little tip ten times for each nostril and causing me to sneeze uncontrollably. And after 15 minutes, the little pink line on the test strip showed I was positive for the variant, something I was not expecting and something that seemed rather odd to me that this nasty virus was crawling around inside of me.
I called my doctor and he prescribed PAXLOVID, the anti-viral medicine of choice. I quarantined for five days and I have religiously taken the twice daily regimen of PAXLOVID and I feel much better, though the fatigue comes and goes. So I retested this morning and tested positive again, so I have no idea what is going on inside my body.
I don’t know if I have a variant or a breakthrough infection and I don’t really care; I just want to feel back to my old, generally run down, tired, sleeping poorly, self. Mostly I am mad that I can’t pick up my daughter from her group home and go out for dinner.
I am not going to whine because I am not seriously ill, I’m not in the hospital and I’m not going to die, at least not of COVID-19, probably. I feel like I have a lingering cold and I am fairly sure that I will recover. In a strange way, I am glad I got the virus because I was feeling left out before. I have joined the COVID-19 Club.
A vaccine breakthrough infection is what President Biden had. It is what they call it when you’ve been vaccinated and had a booster and then get infected with the virus any way. If you are vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection, you are much less likely to experience severe symptoms than someone who is not vaccinated. Or so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.
People with vaccine breakthrough infections can still spread COVID-19, although the chances of giving it to someone else are mitigated by a bunch of factors that make little sense to me. Still, I’m staying away from my daughter until I test positive or until the symptoms are gone. That’s important because I don’t want to make my daughter sick and because the more people who have COVID-19, the more chances that another, more powerful strain or variant will pop up. So I will wear my mask in stores and I will rethink going back to the gym where I could put a mask on and it would make breathing difficult while straining on the treadmill.
I’ve been seriously sick only a few times. First, when I was 4 and my stomach hurt and Dr. Babigian diagnosed me as having a stomach ache. It didn’t go away, and got worse and soon I was whisked away in an ambulance so doctors could save my little body from a ruptured appendix. They gave me a needle that was three feet long and stuck it in my ankle. I made it through.
My sister hit me on the head with a softball bat while I was catching and she was supposed to be hitting the softball. The blood poured out, my father rescued me and put his snotty handkerchief on the wound and soon I was at the doctor, where I got seven stitches. For quite a while, I had to wear a bathing cap to protect the stitches when I went swimming.
There were other broken bones, abrasions and bruises along the way like one time when I was playing a game where you punch a ball on a rope to make it wrap around a pole. I hit the ball and broke my wrist. Once I broke my hand in three places when I punched the wall in the school gym because I had been hit with a ball in bombardment and had to sit down. I put my thumb on the end of a car cigarette lighter because it was black and didn’t look hot but was very hot. I once wore my contacts too long down at the shore and it felt like someone had poured hot sauce in my eyes. Friends brought me to the ER where the doctors stopped the burning and told me to wear eye patches for a week.
The only serious time as an adult came when I was in the shower and began to bleed profusely from my winkie. It was very scary and fortunately my wife drove me to the ER where I was still bleeding profusely until they admitted me and the doctor inserted a catheter which drained out internal blood until it finally stopped bleeding. The catheter felt like someone had shoved a big plastic tube up me. Fortunately I had a morphine drip which the nurse activated every time I rang her, which was a lot. But I got better and haven’t had similar issues since.
I am relatively healthy for 72 years old but I need to lose weight and cut out the beer. I go to the gym regularly, when I’m not shut down by COVID-19. I generally eat healthy foods and I take vitamins. I also quite smoking 25 years ago after my son was born three months early with underdeveloped lungs and the doctor said I could kill him with second hand smoke if I kept smoking.
I keep procrastinating having another, regular colonoscopy, though colon cancer runs in my family. And I keep putting off going for a checkup at the urologist even though my last PSA was elevated.
It feels like my body is some alien vessel that mysteriously wears down or gets polluted from time to time. I don’t expect I will ever be able to look into my body any more than I can see my back, except with a mirror, and that would only be a reflection. So I have no idea what the COVID-19 virus is doing right now in my own body and I can only hope it goes away soon.