Day 510 – Status update

It’s been seven days since I wrote this, so I thought I’d update it with all the latest news.

Things are definitely improving. A little more energy here, a little less breathlessness there. I can climb a flight of stairs (slowly) without stopping at the top to get my breath back, and I can stay up until 9pm without feeling like something has gone very wrong.

This is real progress.

I still can’t smell anything and while a bit of my taste has come back, sadly (and yes, weirdly, because this is a weird virus) it’s only the bitter taste. So everything tastes bitter. I’m guessing that a lot of things have a bitter taste to them, but it’s balanced or overwhelmed by other tastes (sweetness, saltiness etc.) or flavours. Those tastes and flavours aren’t working for me at the moment and so everything is really bitter. It’s not great, but I’m hoping that it might just be the gateway to other tastes opening up once again. Fingers crossed.

Despite this, I’m eating more. Probably (definitely) too much. I think there are some drug side-effects at play here as well as a desperate need to catch up on what I lost. But I need to eat all of the things at the moment, and all of the time. Rather that than an involuntary hunger strike, but I’m trying to keep it under control.

My brain…. comes and goes. Sometimes, things are almost “normal”, but concentration is still an issue and oddly (perhaps because this is a odd virus?), the more I try to think about something – like a word I want to use – the less I’m actually able to do it.

Otherwise, a few iffy side-effects and other symptoms that I don’t want to tell you about and you don’t want to hear about. But generally, I’m on the mend. Hoorah.

We’re not quite there yet though. I tried to have a normal day on Monday. I went to the supermarket and I dropped some stuff off that needed dropping off in Tokai and I did some washing and I cleaned the fireplace and… no. My body decided that enough was enough and let me know. Broken. And that meant that yesterday was crappy too. And so I’m back to taking things easy rather than pushing myself. A sensible regimen of doing the stuff I can do and not trying to do all of the rest of the stuff as well.

Second jab is just under two weeks away now and I just want it in me, so that I can – hopefully – not have to go through this sort of thing again.

Day 296 – Not 100%

Yesterday was a bit of a write-off. I’m still not sure what happened, but I came down with “something”. This was rather worrying because we’re in a situation at the moment where we’re trying very hard not to come down with one particular thing, and the spin-off from that is that we shouldn’t really be coming down with anything else either.

Incidentally, it has been working as well: I haven’t been “sick” for close on two years now. So yesterday was a bit of a downer.

Given the symptoms, I narrowed it down to four possible causes, one of which was obviously you-know-what (because that has to be considered in everything we do at the moment). The others involved having consumed a dodgy garage pie (which I hadn’t), a severe lack of sleep (which I had suffered with the previous night), or a delayed reaction to the excessive heat on Wednesday (it was still 52.5°C in the sun at 6pm), which I actually thought I had handled quite well at the time.

Thing is, it could have been any one of those four, any combination of those four or something completely different.

Medicine is hard, hey?

Anyway, having felt crappy for most of the day, we postponed, cancelled, delayed our braai plans, I loaded myself with drugs and had an early night. I’m happy to report that I seem to be mostly mended this morning, which at least seems to rule out the most concerning option on my makeshift list and proves that the human body – yes, even this one – is a wonderous thing.

Onward and upward. With plenty more handwashing.