30 of 50

As I mentioned last week Covid finally caught up with me and despite feeling a little better and no longer testing positive I don’t feel like I’m completely back to normal yet.

Inevitably someone asked me if this was the worst illness I’d ever had. Too be honest no it wasn’t, although probably would have been a lot worse if we didn’t have the vaccines, but it ranks up there. The first few days were the worst with cough, temperature and a range of other symptoms, the tail of those symptoms lasted the better part of two weeks. The government is telling people (via it’s app) that after six days you can go back out into the world. After six days I was still testing positive, it took 11 days to get a negative result and even then I was feeling unwell.

As a kid I was always ill (or at least it felt that way). I was a martyr to just about every chest infection, cough or cold that was going. Being mildly asthmatic meant that I also ended up sounding like a congested steam train most of the time.

Doctors used to tell me and my Mum that I would “grow out of it” and largely they were right but that took years and required me to reach adulthood. I missed a lot of school, drank lots of hot Ribena (the modern stuff isn’t a patch on what they made 40+ years ago), dosed on Junior Disprin and occasionally nice pink antibiotic medicine. Read a lot and listened to Radio 2.

The sickest I think I’ve ever been was when I was in my late 20’s when I caught tonsillitis. This was a viral version (although we only worked that out when the antibiotics I was initially given didn’t work) and I can remember having had a sore throat for a week or so before waking up one morning unable to swallow and looking down my throat in the mirror and seeing two golf balls where the back of throat should have been. I had to tough it out, and ended up being off work for over 4 weeks, including missing our staff Christmas party. I was pretty miserable and my memory tells me that although I wasn’t any sicker than I’ve just been with Covid the duration of the illness made it feel like it was worse. It too had quite a long tail of post viral symptoms the same as Covid seems to at the moment.

I’ve had a few trips to hospital, a couple for out-patient appointments and three or four times via Accident and Emergency as a result of accidents, but never been admitted.

I have to say my experience with Covid wasn’t pleasant and I can very easily understand why it has taken so many lives. What I don’t understand is why many governments think it’s over. I certainly don’t want to catch it again, and as that is a possibility I will be continuing to take precautions and where a mask when in crowded places or indoors with others. Whilst this maybe didn’t protect me, I’m pretty sure I was asymptomatic for a couple of days before I realised I was infected so wearing a mask will help protect others if this happens to me again. The new bivalent vaccines sound promising, so there’s hope that we can truly make this endemic and not pretend we have as we are currently doing.

Overall I think I’ve been lucky with my health to date and try not to take it for granted, I’ve had no serious illness and although I still have the asthma, nothing that would be classed as chronic. All in all for 50 years I think I’ve done pretty well, and hope the next 50 go as smoothly.

Thanks for reading.