That’s the question a lot of us are asking right now. when we get ill – is it ‘Covid-19’?, or once recovered, hoping that it was Covid-19. Immunity to Coronavirus being the thing we all hope for now.
I’m in that group. For about 4 days it felt like a small elephant was sitting on my chest. I thought it was stress and asthma combined. Molly is the GCSE year, so it’s been a stressful few months.
It didn’t feel like my ‘normal’ chest infection and chest infections aren’t anything unusual in our house. Just like Christmas they come once a year, in December. This year my GP’s opening statement was ‘our aim is to keep you out of A&E this winter’. So onto Seretide I went, which did seem to improve the control of my asthma. In December, at the first sign of the annual chest infection, the GP prescribed antibiotics, and Prednisone to take in case it all got worse. I recovered faster than ever before so by January I was feeling pretty smug.
So I did my best to downplay my symptoms in March, afterall it wasn’t a dry cough, and I didn’t have a fever. I used some ventolin to reduce the tightness but as I wasn’t coughing I wasn’t worried. Then, after four days I woke up with the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had. Again, I’ve had those in the past but only when I’ve taken a tumble waterskiing and water has shot up into my sinus’. The headache that accompanied it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I logged onto our doctors website and booked an appointment for two days times, thinking I could cancel it if the sinus infection went away with sprays and cleanses.
As a precaution I isolated in our bedroom, at the time I thought I was being silly. Within 24 hours my chest suddenly became very bad, lots of coughing and general unpleasantness. My GP’s surgery agreed for a doctor to call me that day, and that’s when Covid was first mentioned. The GP prescribed antibiotics, and told us to isolate as a family.
We’re lucky we live on a great street with helpful neighbours. A quick message on the neighbourhood Whatsapp and we had offers to pick up my antibiotics and any food we needed. Local companies were just starting their delivery systems to we were in a pretty good position to pull up our drawbridge and hunker down. I won’t go into details about the next two weeks, suffice to say that I’ve never been so knocked out before by a bug. Bed was the only place I wanted to be, and even after two weeks the most I was able to do was shuffle around the house.
I’m in week 5 now, and finally starting to feel like myself. A small percentage of people with Covid have no significant fever, so if it was Covid then I fall into that group. Clearly, I hope it was Covid, and that I’ve now some immunity. Normally, I only ever get sick in the dead of winter, so it’s odd to get my annual chest infection, plus a brand new one in March. In all probability I’ll never know, just as we won’t know if Molly’s illness the two weeks before I got ill was mild Covid. Molly suffered from exhaustion, a tight chest and had terrible headaches. But just like me, no high fever. In fact, both of us had temperatures that were lower than our ‘normal’, which is just plain odd.
What I do know is that I’m wearing a mask when I go shopping from now on. I don’t care what anyone says, anything that helps to stop the spread of this virus is a good idea. Additionally, even a small increase in avoiding getting the virus is also a good idea. I suspect there will be another government U turn on masks in public.
Normally being asthmatic doesn’t interfere with my daily life, but now it adds a new level of worry and stress. My daughter will be going back to school at some point, she takes the train – I expect to be waving her off wearing a mask in the coming year. And that, in short, sucks.
