It was a feeling. A flush fell over my body. I was just finishing up a basketball game and I felt… weird. Listen, over the past year, I’ve felt weird probably four or five times a day. Working from home has taken a toll on everyone. Working from home during the coldest stretch of the year with the house buttoned up and blankets covering the windows was not adding to the normalcy. Yet, I still felt… weird.
My wife keeps a thermometer in our bathroom. She takes her temperature once in the morning and once before she goes to bed. I told her, jokingly, that the happiest day of her life will be when it finally reads something other than 96.5. The weird feeling prompted me to grab for the thermometer and it read 99.6. Probably nothing. I took some Advil and went to bed.
The next morning I still felt weird. There was still a low fever. And I knew I had a bunch of basketball games to work that week so just to rule it out, I went and got a COVID test at the CVS.
It’s ironic that the word “Positive” means a negative. It means that you are going to be living in a small room for two weeks where you need to impose on the people around you to pop you popcorn or grab you some water. It means that when you walk to the bathroom, your son takes two steps back away from you. There is nothing positive about it.
But “Positive” it read. I tested positive for COVID-19. I felt fine. Just… weird. But there it was in black and white. (Actually, the CVS website was kind enough to put the word POSITIVE in all caps and in red. So there’s that.)
The next 24 hours were about shutting down your life. Canceling appointments. Moving meetings. Reading a government website written in four point type about symptoms and protocols and quarantines. I still felt fine, though. And then I didn’t.
When you get a cold, you get a stuff nose, maybe a sore throat, and maybe a fever. If you eat something bad, you have the poops for a few days. If you have allergies, you take some Day-Quil, maybe a cough drop. If you are dehydrated, maybe you chug a couple Gatorades.
The thing about COVID is that it’s 19 symptoms – all randomly placed at random times. For a while I had some stomach issues. For a while, I had a fever. For a while, I had fatigue. For a while, I had a cough. I’m on day eight and none of my symptoms have lasted for more than two days, but I keep getting new ones. I’m writing this at 4 a.m. after simply not falling asleep last night. This quite literally is a super bug.
All in all, my symptoms are still quite mild. The only time I was remotely scared was when I took a shower and got winded after washing my hair. Hell, that might not even be COVID. It might just be that I’m fat, lazy, and out of shape. So here’s hoping!
The blessing and the curse of having COVID is that it’s the most documented virus in human history. The obvious downside is that they tell you that symptoms can last for days, weeks, or months. I’m no hypochondriac, but something like that is bound to stick in your head. Is the worst yet to come? Am I done after I take a nice long nap? I’m so lucky to only be feeling mild symptoms. I cannot imagine what it’s like to have any one of these go up to 10.
All I can say is that I will be fine. Eventually. Maybe after a nap. On that, I am absolutely positive.
(We’re absolutely positive you can find Chris Kamler on Twitter where he is known as @TheFakeNed)