I Got COVID for the First Time

by Adam

After three years of successfully ducking and dodging the dreaded coronavirus that’s plagued the world, claiming many victims in its wake, I contracted it for the first time during Thanksgiving. Now, I don’t mean to speak light of it in any way, knowing very well just how much it can do to the human body and the gargantuan number of lives lost to it. This blog is simply meant to log my personal experience with it having managed to avoid it for so long.

At this moment, I’d like to acknowledge the progress that healthcare has made since the global pandemic hit. In 2020, we lived under a blanket of fear of the unknown. We didn’t yet know how to combat this new danger as it began to ravage our bodies, while we sat there helplessly deteriorating. Nowadays, we are equipped with tests to detect it, vaccines to help prevent it or at least lessen its impact, and medication that help reduce symptoms. I’m thankful that when I finally contracted it, I had all the tools I needed to get through it relatively unscathed.

After having Thanksgiving dinner with my partner, I returned home feeling a little exhausted, nursing a mild headache. The next morning, I felt worse. I woke up in a bit of a daze, realizing that my headache had not loosened its grip on me. Knowing that my partner had been suffering through COVID over the last few days, I quickly obtained a test and found a positive result.

As the day progressed, my condition worsened. As the cranial hammer strikes began to strengthen considerably, the rest of my body began to ache, and my temperature was rising rapidly. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too dissimilar from my dalliances with being incredibly drunk and/or incredibly high. Just an intensely unpleasant experience. My partner quickly suggested I reach out to my doctor, as she had heard that there was a prescription medication that could help with the symptoms.

Thankfully, my doctor was available to take a phone visit. After a few minutes on the phone, a prescription for Paxlovid was sent to my pharmacy. Rather than being dispensed as loose pills in a bottle, I was handed a very well-packaged box full of five blister packs, each containing six pills. Each pack coincided with each day you were to take it, divided in half for morning and evening doses. Taking 3 relatively large pills at once is no easy task. I took my first dose in the afternoon and proceeded to sleep the rest of the day away.

The following day, I felt infinitely better. The headache had dulled quite a bit, my body aches were gone, and my fever was decreasing steadily. It’s a little deceptive because, although I felt better, my body was still very sick because I couldn’t do very much physically without exhausting myself and I had to take frequent naps. As the days passed, I was progressively getting better and better. By the third day on the medication, most of my symptoms had disappeared except for a slight headache once in a while, intense sinusitis, and a persistent taste of metal. This continued onto the fifth day, where I felt free of all the symptoms except for the metallic taste.

The next day, I woke up and the metallic taste had disappeared. I immediately went to test myself, desperately hoping for a negative result and I was rewarded. The timing was perfect, because I wasn’t totally sure that I could handle another day of working from home. I know it sounds weird, but trust me, with what I have to do for a living, it’s fucking hell.

Overall, I’d say that my experience was that of a very bad case of the flu at the onset, resulting in actual pain and soreness radiating throughout the body before it peaks and eventually dies down over the course of five days. Obviously, experiences may vary and I’m probably lucky to have been taking medication for it.

As I said before, modern medicine is truly a marvel. In just three years, we now have ways to identify it and make the suffering more bearable. I’m personally very grateful because, and my partner can attest to it, I’m a big fucking baby when I’m sick.

Decided to break the norm of this blog and focus on physical health instead of mental health. I guess this is my way of reminding myself that both are important.

Keep on.

Adam