rona moved in: ilx0rs with the bug report on their progress

Wednesday 1 April
Best night yet. I didn’t need my emergency paracetemol.

Two massive naps today. Worryingly, Paul comes down with a 103F fever and sleeps for hours as well.

Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation on the teevee with the kids. Goodness me what a movie. The opera scene. The ‘water torus’ scene. The car chase in Morocco. Kidnaping the Prime Minister. The final cat-and-mouse shootout / knife fight among the foggy alleyways of Tower Hill. The delicious conclusion. Best MI hands down imo.

Appetite still good (though still no sense of smell) and breathing still fine.

Thursday 2 April
Rocky night. However Paul has woken up in a great mood, and no fever.

Went for a longish walk today with the lovaly Emma B. Made avologmeno for lunch and was then attacked by a headache the ferocity of which I have probably never felt before in my life. It wasn’t all-encompassing like a migraine but it somehow felt worse - it was sudden, implacable, vice-like, a heavy boot holding me down. Utterly defenseless. Slept three hours in the afternoon and the boot was still there when I woke up.

Managed to rouse myself for dinner, read to the kids before bed.

In some ways this is maybe the worst day so far. Just flattened. Currently watching Pitch Perfect, which is exactly my speed. Head still throbbing. I’ve heard that people can really take a nose-dive in the second week and I hope this isn’t the beginning of that.

fingers crosse tracer, i hadnt seen migraine as a common symptom but i have where possible just been avoiding too much of that reporting tbh

heartened that yr MI taste is back, that is indeed the best of them

Sorry you’re going through this!

Thanks for keeping everyone informed, I'm sure it's a struggle.

best wishes to you both

Best wishes to you both.

<3 <3 <3 <3

<<<<3333

Damn Tracer, hang in there.

,

fuck, tracer. get well soon. and thanks for keeping us updated here - this sort of thing really helpful (and dare i say it interesting)

Get well soon. Hope it does mean you can't get it again at least.

<3 Tracer all the best to you and family. thanks for posting your updates. what fizzles just said.

Hold tight Tracer. Honestly this sounds like a real motherfucker, something especially cruel about the way it seems to trick everyone into thinking they're improving for a bit before finding new and more horrific ways to brutalise them.

following, and wishing both of you the best

Thanks all. Feeling much better today. 8-y-o’s fever came back in the middle of the night. When I went down for my pee he was calling out that he couldn’t go back to sleep. So I calpol’ed him up and today he’s.... fine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sending love; fight through.

Friday 3 April
Last night decided to watch 'View From The Top' (Paltrow, Ruffalo, 2003). A more hallucinatorily bad movie I may have never seen. Everything is so airless and off about it, it's just bananas.

The Lovely Emma B's sleep anxiety has decided to return, which is unhelpful. Paul's fever came back in the night. Some Calpol took care of it.

For the first time in a long time none of us went outside at all. It just felt like too much.

Something I haven't noted yet, but which has ben a feature of the last week, is a ringing in my ears. It's not overwhelming but it's pretty much always there. I notice it particularly in the mornings. Which throws another log on the fire of the feeling that every day I'm somehow paying for Hunter S Thompson's sins. Head pains, metallic taste, burnt out lungs, just a general charred aspect to life. And ringing ears like I've been to a thrash metal show.

Felt pretty okay today. Didn't take any naps. Like an idiot checked work email and found out I'd been taken off a project "indefinitely" that I'd been looking forward to for a long time, and which is one of the main things motivating me to get back in the saddle. Started boiling inside. Instantly fired off about 4 pissed off texts and was reassured pretty much straight away that no, it's a misunderstanding - I'm still on the project. Sometimes you have to throw a strategic stink. I've been watching Larry Sanders. I know how this shit goes. The second your back is turned the fucking jackals come out.

My sister keeps texting me ancient newspaper clippings of distant ancestors who died of the the Spanish flu. i.e. 'This was your great-uncle Carl'. Thanks?

Another texting buddy warns of a 'spike on day 10' so i guess I've got that to look forward to.

Ordered pizza and watched Major League. Kids and wife all now asleep. The latter will surely wake at some point soon, at which point I am armed with what have become the most precious objects in my household bar none: 2x 500mg paracetemol tablets.

<3

My sister keeps texting me ancient newspaper clippings of distant ancestors who died of the the Spanish flu. i.e. 'This was your great-uncle Carl'. Thanks?

LOL

thank u ulysses

hugs tracer and thx for writing this up :)

thinking of u tracer & the whole hand family
i have avoided reading most firsthand accounts of this scourge aside from this one

Maybe the ringing ears is just coincidental arrival of tinnitus? There's a thread on that. Great choice with Larry Sanders. A show filled mostly with venal characters seems perfect.

I have mild tinnitus which I mostly don't notice unless I think about it, but sometimes when I have a cold it gets a lot worse/harder to ignore, and stays that way for a week or two after all the other symptoms have gone

obv the 'rona is not just a cold, but maybe something similar going on physiologically? not that I know what that is, exactly

thanks for your updates - glad you felt a bit better today and fought for your place on the project! hope you get better soon, and your kid too; it's good that he's mostly not been too bothered by symptoms so I hope it stays that way

this sounds proper shit, tracer. hope you and your family are on the mend soon

thanks for your reports tracer

you're welcome! thank you all for the good wishes. i hope this doesn't feel indulgent. obviously many have it worse than me so far.

It's not indulgent at all. We all really want to read this. Thank you for doing it.

^^ agreed, this is really helpful and (so far) relatively reassuring info.

hoping we hear from stet soon as well.

I take it you're in Australia Tracer Hand, so you wouldn't know CNN's Chris Cuomo. (If you're in, like, Hoboken, New Jersey, just pretend I didn't say that.) Similar to your posts, he's still going on and doing his show every night from his basement. First-hand accounts are enormously helpful to people like me who are living in perpetual fear of this.

tracer is an American who lives in London

according to my xls

The grand ILX tapestry is a mystery to me. I piece it together as best I can.

Trayce is in Australia.

my wife’s had an elevated temp since Friday and generally been feeling duff - felt a little worse today, called 111 and the doc said ‘yeah, probably a touch of the ‘rona, what are you gonna do 🤷‍♂️, call back if your symptoms get more severe’

if only there was some type of, like, test or something that could tell you if you had it

fingers x-ed for the best bg :(

oh shit, good luck to you both

Good luck Mr and Mrs Gazzara.

best to you BG.

Has Tracer posted anywhere recently?

good luck to your wife and of course yourself and the whole family! not fun to have when you have a young'un to attend to :(

(er, unless my .xlsx is faulty)

tracer posted here earlier today (phones and kids) and on one of my whatsapps

Good luck bg

yeah, we’ve got a 21-month-old - challenging enough keeping her entertained without the possibility of a visit from the ‘rona

my eyes have been super-itchy today and i’m knackered but that could just as easily be the start of hay fever season and being run down from being cooped up for three weeks

time will tell i guess - if my wife has been ill with it since the end of last week it’s been pretty mild so far, thankfully

This is a good thread. am wishing all the rona-touched a recovery and some solace thru what sounds like a lot of frightening misery.

Best to youse BG <3

Sorry to hear that bg, hope it fucks off asap!

i maledict...the virus

hay fever season is wretchedly bad here. I opened up the house yesterday during beautiful weather and I feel fatigued today

99% sure it's allergies and the quick bike ride I took yesterday around the block

Best to you all bg. And best to everyone fighting this right now.

She's really lucky to have you in her life Neando, that's for sure.

A lot of people underestimate how long it takes lung stuff to heal. Coughs, even regular coughs, can linger for weeks. If antibiotics don't take it out, might be worth checking for pneumonia.

I don't know why, but I've heard lots of stories (or at least, more than one) of doctors not prescribing Paxlovid even when the patient is right in the bullseye: covid, older, more at risk, etc. Granted, the medicine supposedly works best very early on in the diagnosis, and also interferes with a few medications that many older people often take (blood pressure?), but other than that, I'm not sure there are any real downsides. When I had covid in July, my primary doc didn't prescribe it, so I just immediately contacted a Teledoc right after and she prescribed it with no hesitation.

dreading the metallic aftertaste.

This I don't get. Yeah, it wasn't the best taste, but it wasn't terrible, no medicine tastes good, and it's only temporary. I can see dreading a colonoscopy or dreading getting a filling, but medicine that tastes weird for a couple of days? That's not worthy of dread, imo. You can tell your mom I said so.

Here's more fun long covid stuff

https://wapo.st/3UDglOd

Gift link

xpost yeah and it's easy enough to get at Walgreens so I might just tell her 'come on, what's one more pill'

tbf, it's a lot of pills!

oh she has like 12-15 already lol

mom improving. me, still nothing, no symptoms, no positive test.

and now i've been isolating, whereas before we knew we had basically been sharing a lot of the same air.

may get lucky.

isolating from mom that is in my own room. and a KN95

Good thoughts, that's a lot. Hope improvement continues.

the big improvement is in her cough, thankfully. suggests that the bronchitis might indeed be separate bacterial infection and that antibiotics are working.

mom has essentially beaten the bronchitis and sinus infection and just has residual gunk from the bronchitis.

still testing positive, but line has gotten fainter finally.

I continue to test negative and feel absolutely fine, and if mom is negative soon, I might completely luck out again. especially since we're basically in separate rooms and masking when in the same room.

https://scontent-hou1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/435678587_10163219403263709_6542223938633004152_n.jpg?stp=cp6_dst-jpg_p526x296&_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=AuNwQ2OVFZcAb7E-ic6&_nc_ht=scontent-hou1-1.xx&oh=00_AfCocMRCAEi-acf4yXqKjmso_CA7Z6wfkht4QGAokz3Stg&oe=66204022

this lollipop sucks, who comes up with these flavors

Get well! How do you feel?

Not too bad, actually. A little achy, sinuses swole but not runny, feels like I have a slight fever but my thermometer says no. I caught it from my wife, who got it from her cousin last Sunday on an eclipse-watching trip. She had one very uncomfortable day but is on the upswing.