Covid

Departing from the usual content I post here, I'm going to record my experience with covid so far as I sit isolated in one room of my apartment in Athens.

Amazingly, I have never had covid until now - at least I never knowingly had covid (and I've always tested if I felt sick or was knowingly exposed). Since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 I've always been very careful. I wore masks longer than most people around me. I was among the first to get vaccinated (my state, Maryland, eventually included university professors in the group given priority access to the vaccine before the general public) and have gotten all the boosters that have been available. I've actually lost count of how many covid shots I've gotten: five or six, all Moderna, including most recently the updated booster in September 2023, seven months ago. My son did get covid once, but amazingly my wife (who also has never had covid) and I did not get it from him even though we made no attempt to isolate him from us at home. I actually had started wondering recently whether I'm one of those inexplicably immune people you sometimes read about, since almost every other non-elderly person I know has gotten covid at least once, usually repeatedly. But no, now I know that all along I've had masks and Moderna to thank.

I started feeling symptoms three days ago on the evening of Monday, April 15. I had just returned to Athens earlier that same day from running the Rotterdam Marathon (see my previous post). It's not uncommon for me to get a cold after running a marathon, which is well known to suppress your immune system temporarily. So feeling mild cold symptoms the day after the marathon didn't strike me as anything out of the ordinary. The next morning, Tuesday, April 16, I still felt like I had a head cold, but it was so similar to how I ordinarily feel after marathons that I didn't get around to taking a covid test for several hours after waking up (but I never left my apartment that day). That was when I got the positive test: Tuesday at midday. The line indicating a positive result was super thick and dark, and it showed up immediately. Clearly I was shedding a lot of virus at that point. So I told everybody I'd had recent contact with, and whom I knew how to get in touch with, about my positive test (all of whom are testing negative) and started isolating in one room. It's a very nice room, I must say, and I'm very lucky to have covid here of all places, given that I must have covid at all. I have a balcony with views of the Acropolis and access to fresh air without putting anyone else at risk. I usually wear an N95 mask when I occasionally go elsewhere in the apartment, including to the one of our two bathrooms that only I use while I'm isolating. When my wife leaves and our son is at school, I do open windows and walk around the apartment, mainly to the kitchen, without a mask (and after washing my hands). But she's here most of the time. I'm obviously very fortunate for that too, for her most of all, and that I don't need to take time off work since I'm on sabbatical.

So I flew to Rotterdam on Saturday, April 12, the day before the marathon. Then I ran the marathon on Sunday and obviously felt fine. But I started feeling symptoms the day after that, Monday, after returning to Athens. What I've read suggests that the incubation period for recent strains of covid (this is presumably JN.1) is longer than 2 days. The shortest time I've seen mentioned is 3 days, but usually 4-5 or even longer is mentioned. So my timeline suggests that I did not pick up the virus while traveling to Rotterdam, but rather picked it up in Athens in the days before I left for Rotterdam. If so, then my wife and son were probably exposed then as well, but perhaps only I succumbed to it because only I ran a marathon on Saturday that suppressed my immune system. That seems like the most plausible reconstruction anyway. Another possible explanation (maybe?) is that I did pick it up on the way to Rotterdam and succumbed to it earlier than people normally do because of the marathon. Anyway, I hate to think that I may have exposed others to the virus while traveling back on Monday - apparently you are contagious before developing symptoms. But I'm somewhat reassured by the fact that my wife and son are asymptomatic and testing negative, even though I was in closer contact with them, and for longer, on Monday (as well as Tuesday morning in my wife's case) than I was to any anonymous fellow travelers. 

Here is how my symptoms have progressed so far, and what I've been doing to mollify them. For the first 24 hours my only symptoms were head and nasal congestion, and a mild headache. As I mentioned, this is typical for me in the day or two after marathons. For whatever reason, my body tends to produce a fair amount of mucus (sorry), and an uptick in mucus for me does not necessarily mean that I'm getting sick. The head congestion progressed slightly over those initial 24 hours but remained mild. Then, roughly 24 hours after I first noticed any symptoms, on Tuesday in the late afternoon I started getting chills and feeling cold. Now, I had just run a marathon, so of course my muscles were sore. But I'm pretty sure that I also started feeling body aches not related to the marathon around that same time. Every time I had gotten a shot of the vaccine in the past, I experienced a mild fever and body aches (not only at the injection site) the following day. On Tuesday evening I felt almost exactly the same as I always had after getting a dose of the vaccine, except that the nasal congestion was also still there. When I took my temperature and found that I had a fever of 101F, I instituted the old method I learned as a kid to keep fevers down: I took a fever reducer every 3 hours and 45 minutes, so that a higher fever never had a chance to break out - alternating between aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen so that no one part of my body was affected too much. That night (Tuesday to Wednesday) sucked. I barely slept because I felt alternately cold and hot, plus the head congestion had continued to progress and felt very uncomfortable when I was anything close to horizontal. In other words, it felt like I had the flu that night. So far there weren't really any symptoms or permutations of symptoms to distinguish my case of covid from cases of the flu that we've all experienced before (although for me it's been half a dozen years).

The next morning, Wednesday (roughly 36 hours since the onset of symptoms), I stopped the regimen of fever reducers that I had employed overnight and was happy to discover that my fever did not immediately return. I thought maybe that was it and now I was on the road to recovery. I continued isolating but told my wife that I'd take another covid test on Thursday morning if I remained fever free until then, hoping of course that I'd get a negative result and could stop isolating at that point. But over the course of Wednesday it gradually became clear that my symptoms were simply changing, not abating. Mild chills and body aches did return that afternoon, and temperature regulation was still a problem for me over the following night (Wednesday to Thursday). But I don't think the fever came back, at least nothing more than a very low grade fever. The main change moving into Wednesday evening and night was the onset of a cough. The congestion was moving down, again as it does with the flu. But what was different from any case of the flu or other illness that I've experienced is how thick and viscous the mucus was that was causing the cough (again, sorry, but you did choose to read this far). It felt like glue was clogging up my head and coating the back of my throat. Perhaps that is the explanation for the infamously dry "covid cough." Your cough reflex is constantly triggered because this glue-like phlegm is all over the place, but coughing succeeds at moving absolutely none of it even a millimeter. The usual result of a cough also ensued over the course of that night, which sucked even more than the previous night: a very sore throat. I did take ibuprofen once in the middle of that night in order to try to get some of that inflammation in my throat down, but otherwise I didn't take any more medicine.

On Wednesday I drank a pot of herbal tea and as much water as I could stomach over the course of the day in order to move things along and compensate for all the mucus I was losing (it was still thinner at that point). But when I woke up this morning, Thursday, my body felt ravenous for liquid. I drank a pot of tea first thing along with my coffee, in part to sooth my sore throat. I'm on my second pot of tea now as I write this in the early afternoon, and expect to have a third pot later. Very little of this liquid that I've been pouring into my body today is coming back out again. So copious amounts of herbal tea seems to be the best medicine I've hit upon for at least this stage of my case of covid. I'm also about to take a hot shower to sooth my head and throat with steam. I never thought I'd complain about the wonderfully dry air in Greece, but at this unique moment I for once wouldn't mind a bit more humidity. I've read that for many people covid does not progress linearly, but sometimes symptoms (both particular symptoms and any symptoms at all) may disappear only to return days later. And in rare cases where people experience moderate or severe symptoms (mine are obviously "mild" even though they really suck), often these appear only days after symptoms have remained mild for a while. Of course that's statistically extremely unlikely to happen to me, and presumably my immune system (which is evidently quite strong in normal circumstances) is now back at full strength after being suppressed briefly due to the marathon. But at this point I'm bracing for anything and taking it hour by hour. Nighttime sucks but I feel ok during the day and look forward to being able to go outside and walk around again (with a mask) at some point, when my symptoms have abated and I'm testing negative. Until then my main priority is to avoid giving this thing to my wife or son.

If I don't post about covid again, then it's because there weren't any more weird changes in my symptoms and they improved enough that I either was able to leave this room soon or regained enough brain power to do other things besides write posts like this while in isolation. I hope to be back running, and maybe even posting here about running, relatively soon.