Covid-19 in the community

So, at first it was the fever, temperature and then the body started aching. So just tired, tired, tired. So waking up, waking up in the morning and sitting up just feeling tired and just wanna you know, just brush my teeth and wash my face. I just wanted to go back to bed again. So, it was that was the main thing that I just feeling really, really tired and sweaty, temperature, fever. That was my main, I didn’t have like coughs, I didn’t vomit, I did nothing, It wasn’t nothing serious like that. It was just for like a good seven, eight days I didn’t have no energy to move. Just feeling ill.

I didn’t have the typical symptoms so I had like diarrhoea first, I was feeling sick and then it moved onto having the high temperature a few days later and I had the horrible pains in my joints, in my legs. It was just awful. I seemed to have lost a tremendous amount of weight in like days and but the weight just feel off of me. I lost my appetite and whatever.

I started getting like flu-like symptoms, started to like get cough and sneezes and things like that, I didn’t think anything of it at first, and then I was like ‘Oh god it could be Covid.’ So I got a test done and it came back positive for Covid. But you don’t really know how to sort of say how you’re feeling when you get it because you don’t really think it’s going to happen to you, until you get it.

I normally get flu for maybe a couple of days every year and I’ll be sort of, lie in bed for a day or two and basically recover. But I would just have terrible fatigue, that I could barely sort of get up in the morning. I was waking up around, I’m normally an early riser. I was waking up around midday, I was just about managing to stay awake for a couple of hours and I was just completely exhausted. No energy, lethargic, not a huge appetite. I basically stayed in my room pretty much. I think I just, we’ve got a rocking chair, I just about made it to the rocking chair. But and I thought, I think someone said, “Maybe you’ve Covid.” But they weren’t really testing at the time, and they were just telling you to stay at home until you got over it.

I just felt I’d been doing a lot of night shift and the level of exhaustion, a bit of breathlessness, lethargic and that feeling that I’m coming down with something, that kind of feeling, that doesn’t sit well, you know. Then my friend say, “You know what, Lyn, you’re doing too many night shift that’s causing you and also the stress from home and this pandemic and worry, that could be part of it.” But I just felt, yeah, stress, yeah, but maybe they’re maybe they’re right as when I went home, and then I feel a bit like I’m having fever, coming down with fever and then I just feel like chest tightness. I just feel very weak.

By the beginning of Feb I didn’t, I didn’t have any fever, I didn’t have any cough I didn’t have any general symptoms of Covid, absolutely nothing but I was feeling really, really tired and you get this fluey feeling. You don’t have any fever or I don’t, I didn’t have any fever but I had a really bad fluey feeling but I thought because a year end is approaching and I had always working it’s being at home and he is so hard working and all that, I thought it was just a general and you know you don’t feel good anyway about you know sitting at home, you are not meeting anybody, my family is in India and it’s like so worrying anyway because you know numbers are going up there so I just put it down to the general I’m not feeling great because I’m not going out or whatever and then all of that for five days was that I was feeling really tired. Then by Thursday I felt, I felt that something was not right, and I told my husband something was not right, and he said that why don’t we do, you know, a Covid test because he was not feeling great. A couple of his colleagues had Covid.

Just as we were prepared to do this actually so that was the weekend and then the Monday after that, we all felt slightly unwell and initially, so that was mid-March I think or the week, just a week before lockdown was announced, the first lockdown and it felt really sort of strange because the symptoms were what you might describe for anxiety attacks so, you know, short of breath and a bit tired but I wasn’t very unwell, I had maybe a ti-, tiny fever but not, not very much. It was mostly this sort of short of breath and I was like, ‘But am I just really anxious?’ I’ve been anxious for three months now, is it just me being over the top and but my husband was more unwell, he had more like flu-type syndrome, symptoms and, and this sort of made it clear to us that it wasn’t just anxiety, it was something real.

On the Saturday morning it reminded me of the feeling I had when I was, I’d got chickenpox in my 40, in my 40s. And it was that slightly strange, what, what have I done, you know, something doesn't feel right. Excessive fatigue where the only option really was to curl up in a ball, in bed that sort of almost the same thing you get when you get extreme dehydration as well, that sort of thing. So, it just, I just thought I’d been unlucky and you know, yeah. I didn't think of Covid at all. It’s only that nothing improved.

I was the one who started coughing really badly one Sunday, Sunday the I think 13th of December 2020, just had a real dry cough and I thought, “Oh maybe my asthmas kicked back in” because I did have slight asthma years back but not really used my pump. So, I thought, “Oh maybe, maybe it’s just your asthma kicking in, change of season, you know, it’s gone damp,” so, you know, I used my pump, but that dry cough was, wasn’t going anywhere fast.

As I said, we weren’t getting tested at all so we weren’t 100% sure, like we, we had a good idea, right. My husband was actually absolutely 100% sure that this is what he had because he’s not often ill and he, he also had lost his sense of smell and taste so that was also a very sign of Covid so I think from these symptoms we assumed we were pretty sure that this is what we had.

I something from, I had some temperature, I lost my appetite and the taste as well. I felt weak. So, these two, three things I experienced. And when I, I didn’t realise that it is a symptoms of Covid, so I talked about that, I don’t feel the taste. I cannot eat. And at that I realised that I might have Covid. I had some temperature.

It was very violent and it just didn’t go away. That’s why, I didn’t know. I’m not an, I’m not very medical so I don’t know. Simply, on a personal level, because it was unlike, I just thought the chances of getting a cough unlike any cough I’ve ever had at the same time as the worldwide pandemic, there may well be a link there.

And it’s really funny because I woke up, you know, the morning after the funeral and said, “Oh my God, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck” [laughs]. And my partner, Lucy, just said, “Do a Covid test” because she had heard that phrase used before from people who’ve had Covid like exactly word for word. And so, yeah, it was just a real kind of body ache kind of, you know, in places I didn't know that I could ache you know [laughs].

By the time I was in my car driving to my test centre I knew that I had Covid already. My whole body was really sore. I started with headache [laughs]. I know, you know it was weird because I never felt in such a way you know. I am a person who suffers a lot from flu but that was totally different from flu.

And, at first, we just thought, do you know what, it’s, we’re just a bit under the weather, you know, bit under the weather and then my husband, he very rarely gets ill, touch wood, and he was like, “Well, I think it’s, my body is really hurting.” And then the kids had it and at first we thought it was a little bit of a sniffle, you know, January, as that happens but we had, I think three days when once I woke up in the morning and I was literally in more pain than I probably was in labour.