when i'm like this, you're the one i trust

[erika]

Unlike many others, I remain aware of exactly what day it is because I've repeatedly given timelines of my symptoms to medical professionals. Keerist.

So! Tuesday is when I went back to urgent care and started the antibiotics. Wednesday felt substantially better. Thursday felt worse in the morning than I did on Wednesday, BUT by night time that had improved. Friday felt the same in the morning as I did Thursday at night and improved by night-time again.

Thanks to Jenett's helpful entry on life with cranky lungs, I realized today (Saturday) that I may be feeling worse from mucus build-up overnight. I got some nice, warm, humid air in my lungs in the morning from a hot shower and had Trav do some percussive maintenance. I also stole back the heating pad and that's been helping too.

Weird symptom I didn't really notice until it started waning: MY SENSE OF SMELL WAS GONE and now it's coming back! Reliably! So excited! I could smell things off and on, or very strong things (last Friday I could smell the homemade chicken stock Trav was simmering for me) but now I can smell Teyla's ears (hm, she may need them cleaned) and Trav's hair—unusually flowery for his scent profile as he's using my conditioner.

---

Good things:

Trav has been taking such good care of me! He's cooked quite a few things: he made stock (from my frozen chicken carcass/vegetable etc), he made stuffing (from a mix, sauteeing onions!), he made potato soup, he made stirfry with lots of diffferent vegetables!

Trav got our new portable washer and dryer running! I'm so proud of him for persevering.

The three of my siblings and I actually got on a group call tonight. We had a good conversation and it lasted HOURS; no one had a fight or was mean or rude to anyone else. We were actually supportive and happy for each other. I'm so impressed with all of our growth.

Teyla, my sweet beagle, continues to be PHENOMENAL. She turns 14 on Wednesday and you'd never know! As I was preparing to go outside for the first time in weeks that wasn't related to a doctor's appointment, she bayed to cheer me on while I was putting my shoes on.

Today is the first day I haven't needed my rescue inhaler! I continue to mend! Thankful to Alexander Fleming right now. Yay penicillin derivatives!

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Weird symptom I didn't really notice until it started waning: MY SENSE OF SMELL WAS GONE and now it's coming back!

Yeah, that REALLY makes it sound like you had/have coronavirus and got a false negative on the test -- there seems to be a strong association emerging between coronavirus and loss of sense of smell/taste.

[erika]

Yeah, it's interesting because I have a very strong sense of smell normally, but I think I'd actually 99% lost it by March 9th or so. In my original symptom timeline, I mention that by then I'm not hungry at all and I had to really push myself to drink water and eat. I don't think it was well known even by mid-March that anosmia was such a defining feature of coronavirus or I might have been more aware.

I'm glad it's coming back. It'd be very odd for me to go from "extremely strong sense of smell" to nothing at all.

[worlds_of_smoke]

yeah, this was my thought. Pretty sure you got a false negative, since things seem to be showing that a loss of smell or taste is an early symptom of COVID-19.

[rydra_wong]

Yeah -- Google tells me it can sometimes occur as a symptom of other respiratory viral infections, so it's not conclusive, but it does look like there's a particular association with COVID-19. And the current tests have a high rate of false negatives. So ...

[worlds_of_smoke]

And the current tests have a high rate of false negatives.

which is really fucking reassuring. >.

[erika]

Occam's Razor-esque, it just seems REAL UNLIKELY that I'd get something else that: made me lose my sense of smell, had a slow lingering onset of vaguely flu-ish, vaguely respiratory symptoms with SUDDEN LUNG DRAMA that developed into bacterial pneumonia— in the middle of a pandemic with a virus that is defined by all of the above symptoms— when I live 50 miles from a major port city on the West Coast of the United States in the rural outskirts of a mega-polis— and not have the illness.

But then again, negative test. My sister's hypothesis is that it was too late in my disease progression for me to have a high viral load in the upper respiratory tract; she thinks if I had gotten tested ten days before that, I would have been positive.