#this Mystery Cold that isn’t the flu or strep or Covid is making me feel worse than Covid did

[focsle]

FEELS BAD 👎

[exeggcute]

glad to know you are mostly recovered from covid! if i may ask, could you describe how where your symptoms or at what pace you got them? the information i've got from both medical / govermental sources in my country is contradictory at times. also, what would you recommend drinking if i found myself to be with covid?

first off: WATER!!! drink water!!! I mean you can probably drink whatever as long as it’s moderately healthy and you’re staying hydrated (my drink of choice while sick is red gatorade. it has to be red or it doesn’t work though) but water is always a safe bet

also I’m happy to share my experience, just know that (1) I am not a doctor, just a professional Sick Person and (2) I never officially got tested thanks to a shortage of coronavirus tests in my area, but I’m pretty damn sure my symptoms were aligned with covid-19, so take that as you will

the first thing I noticed was a sore throat... but I have sore throats allll the time because of my other health issues, so I didn’t think much of it. I did start to notice my sore throat was getting better (from a previous mystery illness that knocked me out for a few days, and which I initially thought was strep but was probably just a bad cold) before suddenly getting bad again. I also had a day where my sore throat was especially pronounced and I had that Really Tired Feeling you get when you’re sick. I guess we can call that day one, but at this point I definitely didn’t think I had corona

that night I noticed some chest tightness, which I initially wrote off as an anxiety attack (and considering my extremely anxious personality and the fact that we were battening down the hatches for a pandemic, that seemed like a fair assumption) but using my inhaler didn’t help--in fact, it made the pain worse! but it did pass eventually, more or less, and I forgot about it

(side note here that if you think you have corona, do NOT use your albuterol inhaler or any kind of steroid inhaler unless you’re having a legit asthma attack with wheezing and all the works. using your inhaler can make the corona symptoms worse, but obviously if you need to use it then it’s important to keep using it. consult your doctor. also another similar note: if you think you have it, stay away from most NSAIDs if you can, as those can also make things worse. tylenol is okay though as long as you’re careful about the dosage--not as a corona thing, you just always need to be careful with tylenol dosage. and it’ll help keep your fever down, which is important!)

then over the next day or two I noticed the chest pain flare-ups but wrote those off as well. they were short-lived and mainly seemed to happen at night, but the inhaler always made them worse. around this time I also started experiencing some general GI upset for a few days (not to get too into that...), but I have a very touchy digestive track and was taking antibiotics at the same for other unrelated reasons, so I was like “well it’s probably nothing” but was starting to get worried.

then about five days later, the chest tightness really made itself present. like, it lasted all day and was constant. I was concerned but not immediately freaking out, and it was really windy that day so I kind of chalked it up to allergies, but as a very allergic person I’ve never had chest tightness like that from allergies (and my other allergic symptoms have improved considerably since I started allergy shots, so it would be weird to have a new symptom crop up out of nowhere like that).

then the next day, and the next day, the tightness wasn’t going away. this was clearly not allergies. I started to seriously think about corona tests, and I even called my primary care doctor, but she was extremely dismissive (all she did was call in a prescription for an old allergy drug that never even worked for me in the first place) and it was downright impossible to get tested. I was freaked out, but not entirely sure.

it’s about day seven at this point, and the chest tightness is in full swing. when I first wake up, the pain isn’t really present, but after about an hour of wakefulness my chest starts to get tight, congested, and kind of has that rattle-y feeling when it’s full of mucus and crap from the postnasal drip. not much congestion otherwise, but I’m so hopped up on antihistamines at all times that I don’t really get congested in general. the best way I can describe the chest tightness is that it feels like when I exert myself and my asthma makes my chest seize up and it’s hard to catch my breath (aka every single PE class I was ever forced to take as a kid), but my inhaler doesn’t do shit. my throat is still hurting pretty bad too and I feel vaguely fevery, but I don’t have a working thermometer at home. overall I just feel shitty, like that feeling you have when you know you’re sick (and I get sick a lot so I’m pretty well-versed in that lol). for quarantine purposes, this is the day I’ve been counting as the “first day” of having obvious corona symptoms, but it was really predated by the things I described above.

several days pass like this, I keep trying to get tested and call all sorts of places but it’s all dead ends. I also develop a slight cough, which mostly comes in bursts or when I speak/eat. by day twelve I manage to get a primary care appointment, and they do an EKG to make sure it’s not cardiac pain (the EKG came back fine) and a throat swab to see if it’s something bacterial (it’s not). they do confirm I’m running a slight fever, although my body temperature is usually so low that even a fever of 99 is high for me. my primary care doc basically tells me to fuck off and stay home, which I was already planning on doing. she also didn’t even wear a mask or gloves to look into my throat, despite the fact that all the other nurses in the practice were wearing masks and gloves when they interacted with patients... so I’m not exactly full of confidence in her judgement here.

the night of day thirteen, the day after seeing my doctor, I have a night where I can’t sleep because my airway feels restricted (both in my chest and my actual throat being swollen from pain). I used my inhaler, like a fool, and when the inhaler didn’t help the first time I tried using it two more times. big mistake! I ended up lying awake gasping for air, taking huge gulps just to feel like I was getting the teeniest bit of oxygen, and feeling stabbing pain when I took these deep breaths. I was too afraid to sleep and almost made my girlfriend drive me to the ER but I hate going to the ER so instead I just tried to calm down until I got exhausted enough to fall asleep around dawn. I also kept alternating between sweating buckets and shivering to death, no matter how I kept adjusting the temperature and my blankets, so I assume I was having a crazy fever that night.

the next day, roughly day fourteen, I decided to suck it up and go to the ER to get a chest x-ray. they said my x-ray looked fine, which was encouraging (hopefully no permanent lung damage there), and they took a flu swab and a strep swab just to rule those out (both negative, of course). at least two other people were there with me in the ER complaining of similar symptoms, but they didn’t have any tests for us so the doctor just told me to go home, act as if I had it, and keep taking tylenol and drinking water. this doctor is also the one who told me to stop using my inhaler--and the fact that my inhaler kept making the pain worse is one of the things that really tips me off here that I probably had it.

things are pretty much uneventful for the next week: still having a tight chest, a fever that seems to come and go, sore throat, cough. no more crazy attacks like that one night.

by day nineteen (yesterday) I start to notice a bit of improvement in my chest pain. it’s not gone, but it’s not as bad and I’ll have slight reprieves from the tightness. today is day twenty (more or less, my numbers are a little rough here) and I actually felt okay most of the day. by the evening the tightness returned and I’m still coughing every now and then, but far less often. I think the fever is gone and my throat doesn’t hurt too bad, either! I’m well past the point of being contagious, so I actually went to the grocery store today and got a few things. I’m not totally out of the woods yet, but I think (knock on fucking wood) the worst has passed.

anyway, I hope my anecdote is helpful for you, and I hope you stay safe and healthy!