My (Our) Corona
Covid-19 made it into the Hovater house this month for real. Lot’s of folks have asked, and I know there’s a good bit of curiosity and confusion about the coronavirus for folks who haven’t had much personal experience with friends or family that have had it yet, so I want to give an account of what it looked like for us. Hopefully that can personalize, clarify, and maybe destigmatize the disease just a smidge.
Q: How did we get it?
A: We don’t really know. We know we had some exposure from the kids at school (we get email notifications if our kids have been in classes with students or teachers who test positive. That seems like the most likely case, as one of our daughters in retrospect was probably the first to develop symptoms, even though at the time we (and the pediatrician) thought it was a case of Strep throat. (We had another daughter with similar symptoms who DID test positive for strep, and that threw us all off until Kelly tested positive for COVID.
Q: What was testing like?
A: Honestly, I was pretty impressed with the testing our local health department is doing. If you need a test, the site in Manchester at the Southern markets grocery building will get you in and out quickly. I got a result back from a nasal swab in less than 24 hours.
Q: What has it been like? What symptoms did you have?
A: Our symptoms have been relatively very mild, gratefully. What’s been fascinating has been the way the virus progresses, though. It sort of comes on in layers, so you have different symptoms at different times. We started out with mild fevers and then some fatigue and muscle aches. We were on Tylenol/ibuprofen to damper the fever, and that controlled it for me pretty well, except for one night I woke up just absolutely drenched with sweat. The muscle aches were weird…not really the whole body achy-ness you get with the flu, but super specific aches, almost like deep bruises. the fatigue was a couple of days, and just made us crash. We also had a slight brushes with the taste issues, but those haven’t lasted a long time (although here at the end my nose seems to be acting up and making things smell sparkly. I know that sounds weird, but it’s the best I’ve got.)
We were getting those symptoms in something like two-days stretches, and then one set of symptoms would fade and something new would start. About 6 days in I got my first hint of the lung/breathing issues, which was the most concerning symptom—that’s one of the things where this stuff can get nasty and cause longer term problems. My doc got me on a steroid quickly, though, and I’ve worked to stay as active as I can, and the breathing issues have all but subsided after 5 days.
The weirdest thing we had was I’ve had crazy hiccups. Like—four days worth of hiccups. It’s mostly just been a nuisance, but when the breathing issues were present, it was pretty uncomfortable, since they make you sort of gulp for air. But by and large we’re grateful for a pretty mild set of symptoms.
Q: What kind of quarantine did you have to do?
A: If you develop symptoms, you have to go 10 days from the start of the symptoms, as long as you end up fever free for the last few days of that. It get’s a little complicated if you have people in your house who don’t get the virus, but we’re pretty sure we all did, even though a couple of the kids cases just looked like very mild colds. That means we pretty much had to pull out of life for a bit, with the kids being given distance learning work for two weeks from the school (that’s the school policy for a household exposure.)
