My Covid-19 Experience

I had always had these romantic notions that when I got Covid, I would live-blog it. I did some Facebook posts, but the reality was I didn't have the energy during or immediately after. It's no joke. Covid was the second-sickest I have ever been, and the sickest I ever have been without going to the hospital.

The sickest I have ever been was when I was three, when an infected abrasion escalated into a systemic infection that landed me in the hospital for a month. My mom couldn't visit me because my baby brother had been born mere weeks prior, and they couldn't risk any exposure to him. They moved a recliner into my room and my dad left my mom and infant brother to quarantine with me so I wouldn't be completely alone in the hospital for the last couple of weeks. I think maybe there was a window where they could wave at each other but direct contact was a no-go until I was completely recovered. I don't remember much about it.

The third sickest I have ever been was when I was in my mid 20's and got norovirus. For 24 hours my digestive system slammed into reverse so hard, stuff was coming out my mouth that looked like it should have been coming out another end. Sorry, is that too gross? It was so gross. I had no appetite for two weeks, but mercifully the worst of it only lasted a day.

I would take that norovirus again over Covid any day.

At the skilled nursing facility where I work, we had a Covid outbreak in May, if my memory serves. For a good portion of the summer we had a cordoned-off Covid wing. I spent hours sweating in personal protective equipment (PPE) working in close-contact with patients who had the virus. No eye-roll was ever hard enough as my friends and family on Facebook whinged how they could breathe in cloth masks, while I had an N95 donned for ten-hour days and my sweat made the plastic gowns adhere to my skin. In all that time, I never got it. As summer waned, our facility was able to clear out our cases, and I thought I was safe. 

Then, in December, a case snuck in. I found out over a weekend a patient I had been seeing tested positive. I wasn't super worried; we still wore full PPE with patients in our observation unit, where new admissions were quarantined. I am not sure how it snuck past my PPE; I am guessing I reached up to absentmindedly adjust my glasses at just the wrong time and it got in through my eyes, but that's only a guess. Through my anecdotal experience, it seems like prevention is 50% proper PPE and 50% sheer luck.

On my weekday off, about three days after I had last seen that patient, I woke up with a cough. That wasn't a big deal on its own; since moving to Eastern Washington I have always gotten bronchitis every winter. I checked my temp to be safe: 98.1 degrees. Well within normal limits. I went out to an appointment, and then headed to the laundromat to do my weekly laundry.

It was at the laundromat when I first realized something was wrong. First, the always enticing taco truck wasn't appealing to me. The laundromat was fairly busy, so I was waiting outside in my car and staring at the truck. It was lunchtime, but it wasn't appealing. Second, as I went in to switch machines, I just felt...off. There wasn't a specific symptom, but it was that sort of generic rundown feeling. By the time my dryer was done, I could feel my chest congestion worsening, and I felt like an absolute trainwreck. The exhaustion was real. My boyfriend had come up to meet me at the laundromat, and I just looked at him and said "I think I need to go home, like right now. I think something's really wrong." He was disappointed that I refused to kiss him.

My laundry takes about an hour to wash and dry. That's how quickly I went from feeling fine to knowing something was definitely wrong.

I went home and I slept. And I slept. And I slept. And when I finally woke up, I felt freezing.

I turned to my boyfriend. "Is it cold in here?"

"Not to me."

"Fuck!"

"What is it?"

"I got a fever. The medicine cabinet behind the mirror has a thermometer...can you grab it please?"

I had a fever of 99.9. Not high, but definitely higher than what I took in the morning.

That was 5pm. At 6pm, that temperature climbed to 101. At 7pm, it was 102. My boyfriend started to panic. I told him I wanted to wait and if it hit 103, I would take a Tylenol (I was trying to let my immune system do its thing without intervening) and if it hit 104 we would go to the ER. Around 8pm, my fever peaked at 102.8 degrees. It came with a headache every time I coughed that felt like a hatchet was splitting my skull in half.

I texted my boss and my workplace's director of nursing to find out how quickly our weekly Covid swab results would come back. We got tested every week, but typically didn't hear about the results. No news was good news. I had been swabbed on Sunday, and today was Tuesday. I was told to come into work the next day for a rapid test.

The next morning my temperature was down to 96.9 degrees, and I looked up what the actual hypothermic limit was (below 95, if you were wondering).  Just sitting upright felt absolutely exhausting, and standing was dizzying. My boyfriend drove me to work; despite my attempts to send him home he had stayed with me. One of the staff met me outside with the rapid test. We hadn't even made it home when I got the call confirming my fears; I had tested positive for Covid-19. 

The next couple days my temperature danced between 97 and 102. The fatigue was the most crippling. If I wanted to brush my teeth, use the bathroom, and take a shower, I couldn't do it all in one go. I would have to lay down between each task and rest for five minutes or so. The coughing also progressively worsened; it was a deep chest cough that came with that splitting headache each time. My back also hurt like hell.

The boyfriend and I debated on how best to handle his exposure. Should he stay with me and ride it out, or go home and isolate but potentially expose his family in the process? After three days he went home, which I didn't agree with. He ended up testing negative a few days after, so it worked out for him. Remember how I said it's 40% luck? I can't say I'm not a bit envious of him.

On Friday, I started coughing up frothy blood in the shower. I called the ER, but they said I would just have to go in since they couldn't give advice over the phone. I knew our local hospital was close to capacity and I didn't think I could sit upright long enough to drive there anyway, so I downloaded some apps to figure out how to the our telehealth benefit I had. A couple hours later, a doctor on the phone said as long as I wasn't feeling short of breath, it was probably a small tear from coughing hard and wasn't a major concern. I sat and thought real hard about if I was actually short of breath or just anxious and decided to stay home.

"Have you lost your sense of smell yet?" The doctor asked.

"No, thankfully not yet."

"You're lucky."

I was not lucky. That doctor jinxed me, I swear!

That night, I had the weirdest dreams. I have not done hard drugs, but that night is what I imagine a bad trip would be like. If at any point I went hypoxic, that was the night. (I am disappointed my pulse oximeter was at work, because it would have been interesting to find out.) The best way I can describe it was that it felt like my brain was folding in on itself. At one point I considered I might have been stroking out and thought about calling for help, but I couldn't find my body to tell it to reach for my phone. It was bizarre. I don't know if it was Covid or not, but it was odd enough I figured it deserved a mention.

The next morning I couldn't smell my blankets. You probably don't think of blankets as having a smell. It's not something I noticed until I suddenly couldn't notice it. Rushing to the bathroom, I grabbed perfumes and essential oils. The small few I could smell seemed like the smell was very distant and far away.

That's when I cried. I had friends who had Covid who couldn't smell for weeks or months, and it was such a disheartening thought. I remember going to let my dog out and when I got outside taking off the mask I wore to protect my roommates, and feeling absolutely despondent that I couldn't smell the fresh air. This wasn't a clogged sinus and stuffy nose blocking my sense of smell; this was an entire sense missing. With my smell gone, all food tasted like cardboard.

Fortunately, despite my fears, it only lasted a couple days.

Monday, six days after my symptoms started, my sense of smell returned about 60%, as I noticed I could smell my body wash again. I was still coughing like no one's business, but my fever had been gone for a whole day and I finally felt just a little bit stronger. I sat up in a chair and lasted about five minutes before dizziness sent me back to bed. Then I tried six minutes of sitting. Slowly, I built up to two hours sitting in the chair, smelling all the essential oils I could and trying to will my strength and senses back.

Working in physical therapy in a skilled nursing facility, I tell my patients all the time to get out of bed and just sit in order to build up their endurance. After Covid, I have a whole new appreciation as to how challenging just sitting can be!

Over the rest of the week my cough persisted but the fatigue slowly lessened and the sense of smell slowly strengthened. Friday I was officially free, per CDC guidelines, and I went for a very short, flat hike that winded me. I was able to return to work the day after.

The cough lingered for a couple weeks, but lessened each day, and I managed with cough syrup and cough drops. (My doctor suggested Robitussin over Dayquil, as the former is an expectorant.) Oh, and remember that swab I got the Sunday before my symptoms started? Yeah, the county health department called me to let me know I was positive two weeks later, after my quarantine period had ended and I was already back at work. (Per CDC guidelines, you are clear 10 days after your symptoms began, assuming you are fever-free for at least 24 hours on the tenth day.) No wonder our healthcare capacity was so impacted with the labs running that far behind on notifying cases! I was so thankful I had access to the rapid testing through my work to verify my diagnosis instead of waiting on the county labs.

Today, when hiking or doing any exercise, I still get short of breath quicker than I should. According to my Fitbit, my resting HR increased while I was sick and then quickly went back to normal, but after a week of recovery gradually crept up into the upper 70's when it should be in the low 60's. Three months later, and it seems like this week it has started to decrease a little bit, but we'll have to wait and see if that trend continues to return it to normal. It makes me wonder what the underlying damage is.

Bonus: My Covid Vaccine Experience

A few weeks after I recovered and returned to work, we were offered the vaccine as frontline healthcare workers. I asked if I should get it since it was so soon after recovery; my director of nursing shrugged and said the CDC didn't say anything against it, so I figured I better stay with my "phase" and get it since it might be logistically more difficult later. We got the Pfizer shot.

I have never had an arm so sore after a shot. The ache lasted about five days, though the day after was the worst. The first shot I got in my non-dominant arm and the second shot in my dominant arm; I hoped that since I moved that arm.more the second shot might hurt less. They both hurt the same.

Both shots gave me a slightly elevated temp, and both made me exhausted the day after. I slept most of the day after (fortunately my normal day off) and felt back to normal by evening.

Despite having side effects from both shots, the vaccine reaction was not nearly as bad as the actual Covid. As much as people seem to be afraid of those reactions, getting the actual disease can be so much worse. 

I stayed out of the hospital, but I was still pretty damn sick. I have had friends end up in the ICU with scarier symptoms than I had. I had friends who stayed out of the ICU but became "long haulers" who didn't really recover from fatigue and pain and shortness of breath, who have resorted to literally crawling around their homes because they lack the capacity to walk. One of those felt so debilitated and despondent that she took her own life over it. 

The disease is so much scarier than the vaccine reactions. If I were you and had to choose between one of the two, I'd choose the vaccine in (an elevated) heartbeat.

On Communication

2020 has been a wild year and I haven't written much about it, thanks to burnout and depression. There are a lot of things I have wanted to talk about. Things like my experience with Covid, and then the vaccine. Things I have been learning in therapy. Later when I summon the energy I can talk about those. But right now, I want to share how I am dating a guy and I think he might be the One, and all because I told him I was mad at my insurance company.

My company switched health insurances. After a bunch of "don't worry you can keep your doctor" talk, it turns out like 80% of the providers in this town won't work with this insurance so I suddenly need to find all new providers. And because this is "network-free" insurance they don't have a list of providers for me to pick from...I have to basically find someone who is taking new patients and then go through a bunch of hoops to find out if they take this weird insurance. It's frustrating as hell. 

Anyways, I was making phone calls and getting trapped in robo-phone-trees while doing my laundry when my boyfriend called me. He could tell by my tone of voice that I was upset, so he asked "is something wrong?"

In the past, I would have stuffed it. In the past, I would have said "It's nothing; I just don't want to talk about it." Even now, my knee-jerk reaction was to push away and isolate. It wasn't his business, and it wasn't anything he could do anything about.

But I decided to try this new thing called talking to people. So instead I said, "Actually I'm really frustrated because I'm dealing with stupid insurance stuff and the insurance is stupid and the doctors are stupid and the pharmacies are stupid and everyone in this town is stupid and it's pissing me off, so now I'm in a real shitty mood."

In the past, I would have been told how I was overreacting, how it wasn't that bad, how I just needed to "suck it up and deal with it." I would have been told this by parents, supposed friends, and romantic partners. At some point, I just stopped opening up. Opening up always lead to invalidation, so why bother?

This time was different though. Because, as I regularly seem to need to remind myself, my boyfriend is not those other people.

This time, I was met with, "That sucks. I don't know if I can help, but let me know if I can."

Maybe that seems like such a small thing, but when you spend decades of your life being told your experiences are invalid and you're overreacting, that small gesture of acceptance and tolerance becomes a really big thing.

I am relearning how to open up and be vulnerable, because I was met with so much antagonism in the past. Slowly, bit by bit, conversation by conversation, I have been getting there.

Don't invalidate your loved ones. Because when you do, you make them shut down, and opening back up becomes a long and hard process, even if it doesn't seem that way from the surface.

The Haunted Library

We don’t tell our guests about the library.

Here at Chateau de Livres, we have a wide array of amenities. An Olympic-size lap pool, a world-class spa, a Michellin star restaurant, and of course luxurious guest rooms. Despite our name, though, the library in the basement is strictly off-limits to all but a few select staff.

Unfortunately, the breaker boxes are in the basement, and the spirits there like to play tricks so sometimes we have to go down there.

The breaker boxes are along the wall. Sometimes it’s a one-minute walk to them, sometimes twenty. It depends on how the library is feeling that day. Whatever you do, stick to the wall. No matter how long your walk, as long as you stay on the perimeter you will eventually make it out. If you venture off into the stacks, it’s a death sentence. You’ll be lost forever.

The apparitions are best ignored. If you ignore them, they’ll ignore you. They wander about, but as long as you don’t interact with them you’ll be okay. Don’t give them more than a smile and nod. If you try to talk to them, stare at them, or run from them, they’ll drag you off into the stacks. 

Don’t follow any sounds you hear in the library. The sounds will try to lure you off into the stacks. Whatever sounds you hear, ignore them.

Just last week, I took a trainee down there. Joe. He did a fair job ignoring the apparitions. It took us five minutes to reach the breaker box. Once we reset everything, we started our walk back. About twelve minutes into our return trip, we heard a loud thud, and then a girl crying. Joe started to look for the sound. I tried to pull him back, but he shooed me away. “I’m just going to peek around the corner,” he whispered. He stepped maybe five feet into the stacks, around the corner, and was gone.

I felt bad for Joe. I almost followed him to try and call him back, but the stares of the apparitions told me what didn’t need to be said. Don’t go into the stacks. I smiled, nodded, and continued on my long walk back to the stairs. The apparitions returned to their usual business of walking about and ignoring me. I dreaded having to tell my boss that we lost yet another employee to the library.

We don’t tell people about our library.

Anxious Reflections

I know I have been very, very absent on the blogging front lately. I have been burned out for about a year which has resulted in one of the longest bouts of writer's block I've had. But something else has also come up.

I feel like the first few months of this pandemic, I was doing okay. I was actually losing weight and walking around the neighborhood a lot. But as time wore on, my energy and focus suddenly dropped. It was hard to stay focused at work, and things that once gave me joy like hiking (and writing) became dreadful, energy-sucking chores. I've also started experiencing what my doctor thinks are panic attacks, and I've had them in the most benign and random settings like when I'm folding laundry.

Talking to colleagues, I am not alone. Everyone's anxiety has been sky-high. Several of my colleagues have been seeking out either counselling or medication to help cope, which I believe is a good thing because it means they're taking the steps they need to take to care for themselves.

My first meeting with my new therapist when we were talking about my anxiety and where it began, I explained how it's been worse over the past year, but to be honest it's something I have struggled with for a long time. I told her how my normal outlets have been cut-off with the pandemic.

"I think what's happened with you is that you've been able to run away from what's bothering you and have been able to sort of stay ahead of it for a long time," she told me. "You've been staying busy and have been able to push it aside and cope with it that way. But now that you're basically stuck in one spot, you're being forced to actually confront it."

Damn. That struck me. I feel like she hit the nail on the head.

With subsequent sessions, she also seems to think I probably have PTSD, though we're still figuring out from what. People who know me immediately assume my ex-husband, who was abusive, but my anxiety runs back to before I ever met him, so we got a whole lot of digging to do.

So here we go. I wanted to share the start of my therapy journey because in these trying times, I think it's fine to ask for a little help on the mental health front. We shouldn't stigmatize it. Hopefully when I come out the other side, I'll be a bit happier and a bit more focused. Maybe I'll return to updating this regularly, who knows?

Hang in there, be healthy, and take care!

Pandemic Thoughts

I haven't been writing much. I have been very, very burned out and have been neglecting a lot of hobbies. I feel like I should say something about the coronavirus pandemic. Most of what I have to say has already been said so I won't lecture you too much.

I work in skilled nursing and we had a wave of it go through out building. Fortunately, most of our staff and residents had mild cases. We did have a small number of fatalities among residents and a few hospitalizations and one staff member in the ICU, but for the most part we got through it with minimal complications. Not every facility was that lucky, so I consider ourselves lucky. We cleared the cases in our building and were Covid-free, testing our staff and residents on a weekly basis, and we were finally accepting new admissions. 

Then, the spouse of a staff member tested positive. They were an essential worker in another industry; I'm not sure if it was retail or agriculture or what, but they were exposed. Our staff member stayed home as soon as this was realized, however it was too late. Last I heard we had three new confirmed positive residents and one suspected case who had symptoms.

I've heard some say "just isolate the vulnerable and reopen for everyone else." What that fails to take into consideration is that the vulnerable population can't be totally isolated. Our residents have been locked down in their rooms since March. But their caregivers still need to to get food, get medications, go to the doctor, and be out in the community. They may live with others who are essential workers who face the public.

We get tested weekly at my workplace. Which means in less than a week, this staff member who had been negative was exposed and spreading it before we could catch it. It's no fault of the staff member or their spouse. It just demonstrates how incredibly contagious this disease is and also how quickly after exposure you can start spreading it without knowing it.

So for the love of your community and your vulnerable neighbors, the absolute BEST things you can do are wear a mask and follow social distancing. Because this thing is so contagious, even when not showing symptoms, there's no simply "isolating the vulnerable". It takes everyone to pitch in to control the spread of this thing. You could be sharing it and not even know. Please, I am pleading with you, mask up!

Most Annoying Recipe: Easy Peanut Noodles

So I'm going pretty much straight between work and home during the pandemic these days, and figured I'd try my hand at writing a recipe. You know those annoying blog recipes where they tell their entire life's story before you get to the recipe? Don't worry, I'm not going to do that to you!

Instead, I'm going to make this so, so much worse...

Ingredients

• 1 package of whatever noodles are still available on grocery store shelves (I usually use rice noodles, but during the pandemic work with what you can find)
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• Sriracha to taste
• A couple cups of cut up veggies; I usually use broccoli and carrots but go nuts with whatever you want
• Some protein for this sucker: either a couple chicken breasts cooked and diced; a cube of tofu cooked, diced, and faux-fried; or a cup of edamame are good options
• About a pound of existential dread

Start by boiling water for your noodles in a large pot and cutting up your veggies (and if your protein needs to cook, now's a good time to do that). Some people salt their water for pasta. Growing up, we never did this (that's right, I'm throwing this shit right in the middle of the recipe. You were warned by the title) because we were on a low-sodium diet, so Mom NEVER added salt to anything. It was a sad and tasteless existence. When I finally moved out on my own and discovered salt, it was a godsend! See, sodium ions can help block bitter tastes from our taste buds, enhancing the more pleasant tastes in a dish. I missed out on all that goodness growing up. So I say go ahead and salt the water. You only live once.

Once you get your water to a rolling boil, go ahead and reduce heat and add your noodles. Rice noodles will cook quickly whereas spaghetti and linguine noodles will take longer. I don't know how long noodles take to cook; you cook them until they're tender. Did you really reach adulthood without knowing how to cook noodles? Just take a noodle out every once in a while and nosh down on it...if the texture seems right then they're done. There's also a trick where you're supposed to be able to throw a noodle on your cabinet doors and if they stick it's done or something...that always seemed like too much of a mess for me. I'm trusting you to figure out how to cook your noodles. 

While your noodles are cooking it's time to make your peanut sauce. In a medium bowl, combine your peanut butter, soy sauce, and about 1 tbsp of your sriracha sauce (more is fine...in fact I usually use more, but sometimes I cook for pansy-asses who require less). Now you gotta mix them together. This part sucks because you're going to quickly discover that peanut butter and soy sauce don't like each other. In science class, we learned about different types of mixtures as solutions, suspensions, and colloids. Solutions are clear with homogeneous particle distribution. Suspensions are cloudy with particles that will settle and separate out when still. Colloids are sort of in-between; cloudy but stable and homogeneous.

We're making an emulsion here, which is a subclass of colloid. Milk is an example of an emulsion. In our case, we have oily peanut butter and watery soy sauce. It's going to take more mixing than you think to make them mix together. It's going to look like some sort of horror at first as you have this lump of peanut butter just sort of rolling around in a pool of soy sauce. You're going to think I'm full of shit, telling you to mix these together. But then suddenly it's as if the ingredients just sort of surrender, and they magically start to mix. You have to keep it up though. Don't let them win. 

In the last few minutes of your noodles cooking, add your veggies and let them cook with the noodles. I usually use broccoli and carrots, but you can substitute out virtually whatever vegetables you like. I like the broccoli and my dog likes the carrots. He'll beg for them and sit there and gnaw at them while I finish cooking. Sometimes he'll eat the broccoli too, but he doesn't like it as much. He eats it more out of stubbornness than actual enjoyment of the vegetable.

When the veggies and noodles are done, all that's left is to strain them, mix in your sauce and protein, and then top with more sriracha as desired!

I hope that recipe was thoroughly annoying. Stay home and have a safe quarantine y'all!

Reflections on a decade

All over Facebook people were like "where were you a decade ago?" and posting their pictures from 2009/2010 in comparison to now. I thought it would be fun so I looked up my photos from 2009. There weren't many, and I was dismayed at what I found, as they were all pictures from my wedding. I was making the mistake of a lifetime, and suddenly all the memories came rushing back.

The last decade for me has been a transformative one. It's also been a gut-wrenchingly painful one. I entered 2010 freshly married and for the first six years of the decade continued existing in a progressively deteriorating abusive relationship. Then came what I dub the "year of hell" when the marriage finally imploded and I suddenly had to juggle two jobs, school, internships, divorce, therapy, graduation, board exams, and ultimately moving across the state to a strange city all alone to start everything over. It was an essential shift and I definitely needed out of that relationship, but it hurt like hell going through it. Ever since then, I've been slowly rebuilding. There have been ups and downs along the way. I lost my Grandpa. I rescued a lovely little furbaby guinea pig who saw me through most of the decade before she passed. Overall, however, I'm definitely coming out of the decade in a better place than I was going in.

So no, I won't be sharing pictures from a decade ago on social media. I wish I could reach through the photo albums to slap myself of a decade ago across the face. I wish I had never gone through with that marriage. I wish I had the strength to leave it when I felt I needed to instead of waiting it out for so long. I wish I had done a lot of things differently this last decade.

Of course, if I hadn't gone through all that, I would have never felt the drive to improve my situation, to go back to school, to stumble into a career that I love. So it's a bit of a catch-22. I regret a lot of things, but I also wouldn't be where I am without it those things. Go figure.

Here's hoping the next decade doesn't hurt as bad. *knocks on wood*