Nothing is more boring than someone else’s physical complaints. Mine don’t even interest me very much.
In normal times, when I felt like I did yesterday, I would have assumed my body was fighting whatever was going around and slept it off.
But, these are not normal times. Everything takes on an exaggerated significance.
The usual things may be in the air, but we don’t know. The time when Coronavirus was beginning to penetrate New Mexico was allergy season. I suspect people ignored symptoms because they always felt bad when juniper pollen was in the air.
We’ve lost that early innocence, and now suspect the worse.
Yesterday I took more precautions than usual. They say nothing helps, but I still took aspirin every four hours, rather than once a day.
Then I tried applying what little knowledge I had gleaned from the internet, that the virus lodged in the throat.
I started thinking about all the ways one could feed or destroy something located there. Should I drink more liquids, or would that give the organisms necessary moisture?
I remembered the medicinal mouth wash my dentist had given me. He seemed to think it was the best all-around antiseptic available. Once, when I had a cut on my finger, he asked if I had treated it with the mouthwash. It hadn’t occurred to me, but it’s what he would have done.
This time I looked more closely at the bottle. It clearly was marked for external use only. But it wasn’t like iodine. It had to be formulated so small amounts were safe, because klutzy people probably swallowed it.
I took a small amount and used it in the prescribed way, then swallowed a tiny bit. I don’t know if it did any good. All I know if the usual bad aftertaste extended to the base of my throat.
I woke again this morning sometime after 5 am sweating. It may have been hunger, it may have been heat building up in the room, it may have been anything except a sign of illness.
When I finally got up around 6:30, my throat was less sore. I used some of the expectorant I was hoarding to wash away whatever remained in the cavity.
During the day I had the symptoms of fatigue: sleepiness and weak knees. I was constantly hungry.
Then, by mid-morning my throat was OK, but I was stuffed up. Whatever was causing my problems had retreated to my head.
My stomach got more upset, but then why would it be happy with every odd thing I was sending it? It doesn’t much like aspirin, and taking more yesterday would have been enough to create turmoil.
Now I’m left with the final unknown. Was it simply a cold or something worse? I couldn’t have gotten tested: my symptoms weren’t severe enough to justify one.
Will it matter, if I’m OK now? No one knows. Those Germans I mentioned yesterday found evidence the virus remained in the body after people recovered, but their sample was too small to be useful.
Would it be like malaria or chicken pox, or malaria, or more benign? We may not know for a year if there are long-term consequences. Even then, we may not know because few would get the kinds of tests the German researchers were able to use on hospitalized patients.
Sources:
Roman Wölfel, Christian Drosten, et alia. "Virological Assessment of Hospitalized Patients with COVID-2019." Nature website. 1 April 2020.
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