I was terribly sick for two weeks in the last half of February with a severe respiratory ailment, coughing my lungs out the first four or five days. I started coughing with a scratchy throat on Valentine's Day while I was watching the movie Parasite in a theatre and by bedtime I was coughing continuously and could barely sleep.
I woke up, more or less, on Saturday and got on the phone to Kaiser, my health-care provider, about what I was going to do about this sudden, dreadful cough I had developed in a matter of hours. My GP wouldn't be back until Tuesday (Monday was a holiday) and the advise nurse suggested two courses of action: to go to the Kaiser Urgent Care Center ten miles away for double my normal co-pay or go to a pharmacy and buy an over-the-counter decongestant Mucinex expectorant, which I did and started to tough it out.
A day or two later I was coughing so long and hard during the day that I feared the oncoming night and thought that I was dying. A few nights I woke up coughing so hard that I had to sit up in bed to catch my breath, several times.
But after two weeks I got over it, sort of. I coughed occasionally, not too hard, I was occasionally short of breath, especially at night, my lungs ached, I was generally fatigued and I won't tell you the details about my all-day every day GI issues. Now six months later I am still sometimes short of breath, I "go" several times a day and my lungs still feel inflamed so I haven't run a single mile since February because I don't want to further aggravate them and invite further inflammation.
I wonder what I had. Everyone tells me I certainly didn't have Covid19 because it was too early (apparently the coronavirus first started roaming the land in March) and I didn't come from China. Besides, there are no reliable tests in America even half a year later because, well, this is Trump's America and we have become a piteous country with no exceptionalism anymore, mocked or walked all over by the rest of the world.
I tried to get an antigen test in July so I could participate in blood plasma therapy if I had had Covid19 in February, but a Kaiser doctor called me and said: Naw, we don't do antigen tests, why should we; and if you think you are sick with the virus, call Kaiser and follow its long dance correctly and we'll get you a Covid test. She assured me that what I described had in February was merely the flu. I wondered aloud to her why the hell I got a flu shot in the fall if I still got so sick from the flu. She assured me my ordinary flu sickness would have been even more severe if I hadn't gotten that shot. Whatever.
Kaiser, which won't even let me in the door without going through the nth degree at the door ("Do you have shortness of breath? Nope, not me. Diarrhea? Nope.") and then taking my temperature, sent me a postcard to get a "driveby" flu shot this year. I called for an appointment and got to complaining about Kaiser not doing any antigen tests and my, how things have changed. I was referred to a nurse who got me an appointment this very day for a blood draw to be used for an antigen test. I like operating on real information. I'll keep you informed.
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