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

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.

hang in there bg.

Sorry I stopped my little narrative. It was starting to get repetitive. My sorry now is that for myself and my kids I think it’s firmly in the rear view mirror. Unfortunately the Lovely Emma B still has a fever, which is not ideal. Day 12 for her.

Emma Brexit?

best to you all obv :)

right there with you mh. issues with breathing for the past few days have me super hypochondriacal but the thermometer comes back normal so chalking it up to allergies and the increasing vice of stress both human and financial.

love to emma b and glad to hear most of you are in better skies!

Best wishes to you and yours bg

And to your Emma b, TH

All best wishes to the bgs, and to everyone else who is currently wrestling with the bug.

thanks everyone

mrs g still has a bit of a temp and is knackered today, started a bit of a cough tonight - a bit short of breath when going up stairs and stuff

i’m knackered but also been up since 6:30 looking after our wee girl and been tense all day worrying about mrs g

just wish there was a way to get tested and then we’d at least know wtf was going on

just wish there was a way to get tested and then we’d at least know wtf was going on

this. the strain of not knowing if one's symptoms are from 'rona or just part of a familiar disease or allergy is emotionally exhausting. good luck to you and yours, bg.

Best of luck to ye both, and to Tracer’s Emma.

Thanks for the wishes everyone, I don't know how I missed this.

It's been a rough and horrible couple of weeks (now on day 20), and I guess I count as a "moderate" case. Lots of similarity with what TH describes -- except I thankfully didn't get fever, which is apparently the case in anywhere between 10 and 30% of cases depending who you ask.

What I have had: incredible fatigue, like can't-leave-bed, can't-even-text fatigue. Two horrible new kinds of chest pain: one a burning all down my windpipe like it has been burned by peppers gone down the wrong way, the other a tight band all around. Lots of heart burn. A weird, dirty, metallic taste in my mouth that made me continually brush my teeth. The tinnitus thing, yep.

I didn't ever get a pneumonia, or even a very bad cough, but my breathing was definitely affected and I got short of air – knocked about 200 off my usual peak flow reading. Blowing up balloons helped.

It also did weird stuff to my heart: my resting heart rate dropped to 55bpm one night, which is about 20-25bpm lower than usual. Another night it cranked to 100bpm.

It's just a really ... weird and new thing, this – it's not like any illness I've had before. I wasn't in much doubt that it was CV, just because the symptoms were so different to flus or colds I've had before.

I think it will be a lot less scary when there's more cultural awareness of it, and we know what to be worried about and what can safely be ignored. Right now, it's as if you're the first person to ever get chicken pox, and so with every new thing you're like "OH MY GOD THE SPOTS ARE WEEPING NOW IS THIS TIME TO CALL 999?"

Also, it's true about the recovery/relapse thing. 4 times I've thought "ah, finally better" and the next day it has socked me again. And it can change really quickly: one hour you're OK, the next you're very Not OK. Which is exceptionally cruel in the more serious cases, I've read, because you think the patient's recovering and then they suddenly get worse. I'm not sure I'm fully out of it yet, but each recovery has been better than the last.

jesus

glad to get a check in, fingers crossed the worst of its over for you

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.