Covid-19 in the community

I will say unequivocally, without yeah, shadow of a doubt, it’s been the worst I’ve been sick ever in my life and the longest I’ve been sick, and I didn’t appreciate just how difficult it would be to just how nasty the symptoms are and so many of them as well.

So my husband’s positive, my son’s positive too, yeah. But they, but what is really strange, what we had, I lost taste for about ten days. I couldn’t taste anything, couldn’t, didn’t eat very much. My husband was more achy, and tired. Maybe he swims everyday so maybe it’s like affected him, on his body. My son had sore throat, and very tired but maybe just a few days. So they both didn’t really, you know, had a funny taste, as it lost maybe one day or two, but otherwise, different from me. My daughter was fine, her housemates was fine. But two weeks later she’s positive.

The consensus or the consensus between the three of us was I had the worst symptoms because I, you know, wasn’t able to get out of bed for the three, you know. For three days, I was just shivering on my sofa or sweating and didn’t sleep very well. Whereas from my friends, they were saying, oh quite tired. They were, one of them was just tired. The other one kept on saying how every day they felt better and it only kinda lasted a few days for them.

And I had the awful tiredness, awful, awful, awful tiredness. I would sit down and then fall asleep, burnt dinner, all kinds of stuff. I was a liability really and that.

All three of us are literally in our rooms all day, couldn’t even get out the bed, I was just drained, it was the weakest I’ve ever felt. That, that was the one thing I can say it drained every life out of me, I just felt completely weakened.

You couldn’t even get up, let’s put it that way. Once a cough comes, it was a continuous cough, it would not stop. Once I continued to cough for a good half an hour nonstop, you know. And I think my wife and my daughter they could hear me at night time when I was coughing just to go to the toilet and back, you know. I could hardly walk from the bed to the toilet, you know. Just about to collapse, put it that way, you know. And sometimes yes, you have to drag yourself in drag yourself back, you know.

I think at my worst point, I was, not just did I feel the sort of chest ribcage area really, really sort of, being ripped every time I coughed. It felt like, the only way to describe it is knives being stabbed, between the ribcages. So, it affected me really, really bad from a physical point of view. From a mental point of view it just completely knocked me out.

Because we live in a second floor and I see that my breath got faster, when I climbed up the stairs. Sometime or other someone dropped the food downstairs and they call me, “I left the food down so can you come and pick up please?” Then I go to pick up the things from the down and I come back up to the second floor, within the second floor like maybe thirty, thirty five stairs, after that I become breathless. I, it’s taken a minute to stop my breathlessness like heart rate gone faster and then cough coming so I think it was because of weakness and the breathlessness, it’s hard work, make me more tired.

And of course, once I started to do things, I realised that even going upstairs, I was a bit short of breath. Standing for a couple of minutes anywhere, I had to sit down because my legs were just giving way, you know, you could just feel the energy draining away from them quickly. 

Yeah, I had the hot and cold sweats. I mean I’d be sitting on the bed, and I’d be absolutely roasting, take my clothes off and then five minutes later be freezing so had to bring it all back on so it was, temperature was up and down.

Yeah so sometimes I was just hot. I felt like I was, we would use, it felt like I was burning up. Really hot, really hot so you could, everything off windows open, really really hot like my whole body would say like, your whole body feel like it on fire, that’s what we would say. Really, really hot.

I was freezing, absolutely freezing with three duvets on you know, and woolly socks and flannel pyjamas. I could not, get warm I was so cold, but my temperature was 40 degrees, it was really, really high I was thirsty all the time. I know at one point I brought a 500ml water bottle in to the room with me. and at one point, I counted the number of times that I filled that water bottle, and I filled it 12 times in 24 hours, so that’s six litres of water that I needed. I was so thirsty, my skin cracked I was just totally dehydrated.

The fact of the bed being so wet at night, having to have all these sweat, these showers and then I said to my wife, ‘you know, I’m experiencing also this, these hot flashes,’ you know, and she said to me, ‘Well I think you’re having a menopause.’ [laughs]. And it would go from cold to hot, hot to cold and that’s, I know my body was going through some changes I was not aware of.

And during this two weeks time I feel like there is a sound coming out from my heart like a small hollow in my heart, something like a hole in a heart. And I feel like something is passing from the heart, something like that and after two weeks it’s like it stopped around three weeks time, then I never feel like there is a hole in the heart because you’re feeling like there’s some cold coming out from the, your heart. So I think I’m feeling like this.

I was my biggest symptoms was the temperature and the pains in my head. I have never experienced anything like it in my life. I felt like my head was gonna explode. And I said to him, the only relief I got was a hot water bottle and I’d have a hot water bottle on my head ‘cos the heat of it and then I’d go and stand under a boiling hot shower and then the water went on my head. I needed heat on my head, something to try and help it.

I lost the smell like a half of it and the taste also half, for fifty percent gone because when you eat something, we can’t get that much like a flavour from the curries and taste also bit like, you know, they fade out and that time for just for eating we are doing dinner, eat other food and we just emphasise on the hot tea with ginger, lemon, something like that, you know.

So my taste changed so much where upon the only thing I could, my body or my brains rather could realise that my palate, could realise that I had something salty, sweet and spicy but I could not get no flavours of anything. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was a piece of potato or a piece of chicken you know it just all tasted the same.

I lost my smell and taste maybe for a day or so, really not like, my partner lost her sense of taste and smell a lot, lot worse than I did. But I just I, I just my body just couldn't handle it. So, for a few days, I was throwing everything up and then I would say for a good four to five weeks post having a positive Covid test result, just had really, really awful diarrhoea. And so, at one point, it was kind of a mixture of both and it was just not great not great [laughs]. And yeah, and so eating was just not appealing. Just didn't have an appetite at all, really.

There’s not too much coughing, some coughing but very, very tired, you know, sleeping and no energy even to go downstairs to make a drink. I, yeah, no energy and lost appetite, didn’t eat very much. It’s, I probably, for many, many days, I probably had a slice of toast a day.

I lost any kind of appetite for food and the smell of certain foods made me vomit. So, I was vomiting and vomiting even though I had not eaten and the vomit would seem to have my, my internal organs, just seems to be tight and, and, and it was hard to breathe. I had to sort of try to gasp for breath at times and the experience became worse and worse.

Yeah so, I had like a cough. But it wasn’t like, it wasn’t constant, it was like a cough and but it kept coming and going. And then I had like a headache, a sore throat. My eyes were probably one of the weirdest ones I had, the weirdest symptom I had was I was getting like really gunky eyes. Yeah so, I didn’t really, I felt poorly but I didn’t feel as poorly as like other people were there.

So there were, there were a couple of days, I think about two days where we were both like absolute zombies [laughs]. We were both like unable to do anything. It would literally be like you make the tea [laughs]. No, you make the tea. No, you make the tea because we were both just so wiped out and had like no energy. It was really, really comical. And thank goodness, she recovered really quickly. So, she had about two days of feeling really, really rough and then, you know, a couple of days and then a few days after that of feeling a bit rough, but not being, not having a fever. Not being in bed, basically. And yeah, I just think thank goodness for that, otherwise who knows what we would have done, really. And, and so, yeah, it was just really a couple of days of kind of having to struggle all through both of our, you know, of being forced to exert energy that we both didn't have, really to feed ourselves, wash ourselves and do all of that stuff.

Our condition for four days was very bad. Like, for two days we had only cough and then it turned out to be Covid positive, so for the initial two to three days we had lot of weakness. 
 
Like, going to the bathroom, brushing teeth. We did not even have the strength for that. How many minutes does it take to brush? Two or three? But even through that we needed to sit down after returning we used to feel shortness of breath. 
 
So, the, having the strength to preparing our food was beyond possible. But even if somebody has given us ready cooked food, I did not have the strength to just warm the food in the kitchen to just be able to stand for two minutes. 
 
That’s how it was.
 
My daughter was mostly fine, maybe because she is quite young, children feel less impact anyway and we are in middle age now so that is why we it is because of that. 
 
It took me, took me, 10 days, to get back to normal, for instance, I went in kitchen, just made some tea in a pot, then I used to feel like, quick let me sit down on the sofa, after turning off the gas.
Back to a little rest and then back, I mean, it took 15-20 minutes to do everything.

It was sort of standard tale of isolation I think for about ten days pretty, in bed or you know, not venturing much further than the kettle or the television. And we were pretty ropey for about ten days after that as well and that pretty much takes us to about ten days ago, I think at which point, since when blissfully felt pretty buoyant, healthy and recovered and were grateful, really as we are for the vaccines.