COVID has screwed me up

 I caught COVID just after Christmas, and tested positive on the first of January. Great way to start out the year, right? I felt decent on that first day, even drove home from urgent care singing along to pop punk in my car. Nothing unusual. 

And then I woke up on the 11th and realized classes started on the 10th. 

Obviously, a lot happened during those ten days, but I don't actually remember a lot of it. I remember being miserable. I remember changing my mom's bedsheets for her and complaining that she was going to get me even sicker (she also had COVID). I remember that I survived on NyQuil and cough drops. I remember being so emotionally unstable that I thought my grandmother was mad at me and cried for a half an hour (she wasn't mad at me). 

I was so delirious I forgot to order my textbooks for this semester, ordered them late, and had to email my teachers to let them know I couldn't actually do my homework for the first week of classes...or like...come to class... I actually fell asleep in my favorite teacher's class (World Civ, which is unlike me, because hi I'm a history major) because I took NyQuil and That Was A Mistake.

You know Puffs Plus tissues? They're the really soft tissues infused with lotion. They're supposed to be good for your nose, so you don't just rub it raw when you have a cold. Well, when I woke up, I found three empty boxes of those tissues, a half empty one next to my bed, and a terrible rash under my nose where I've been blowing and blowing and rubbing and rubbing. So now I'm slathering my face in petroleum jelly and cocoa butter to try and alleviate that pain, because apparently even the gentlest of lotions make friction burns sting like crazy.

Also, I've been blowing my nose so much that I just have a constant nosebleed. Not my usual recurring nosebleed, no. It's just constantly bleeding. 

My sense of taste hasn't come back yet, either, not completely. 

COVID swept through more than half of my family of 10, and none of us had the same symptoms.

• My cousin Johnny has muscle and nerve problems, and that's mainly the type of symptoms he suffered, aside from the tell-tale cough and fever. 
• My mom has all of the health problems, and she experienced all of the symptoms listed on the sheets you fill out at the doctor's offices. 
• Johnny says his mother, who has vision problems, experienced double vision for a solid week when she caught it. 
• My uncle, who is diabetic, ended up in the hospital with his blood sugar so high they put him in the ICU. 
• I have had sinus issues my entire life. All of my symptoms were from the shoulders up. And I had every last one, right down to the "trouble assessing". I even had an ear infection so bad that my ears still hurt, even though I finished the antibiotic weeks ago.
• My grandmother had cancer. She recently went through a rough round of chemotherapy before her surgery to actually remove the cancer. She caught COVID, too...but she doesn't have any base health issues, so she coughed for like four days and then she was fine.
• My great-great aunt, 84 years old, who hardly ever gets sick and is healthier than anyone else in my family, was around all of us when we were infected-but-not-yet-showing-symptoms, and around my grandmother as she was sick...and she just didn't get sick at all. Nothing. She's fine.
• Johnny's little sister, Chloe, didn't come out of her room for almost three weeks after he got sick unless everyone else was already locked in their rooms for the night. Smart girl, because my aunt and uncle followed along on the Sick Train. She's a master of evasion. Didn't get sick at all.

This disease is so weird and terrifying. It attaches itself to your base health problems and cranks them up to 10. If it's a dangerous health problem, like diabetes, it's really easy to wind up in the hospital (especially if you don't get your vaccine, you paranoid maniac). If you don't know you have a health problem that COVID can drag up to the surface, you're in for a nasty surprise. It might even trigger some chronic health issues you weren't experiencing before and leave you to deal with it for the rest of your life. 

I'm still coughing. You know how it goes - when you get sick and you have a bad cough, it never wants to go away. I've held onto coughs for months after getting well again. It mostly is bad when it's cold outside...and unfortunately it's been frigid. I inhale and it feels like someone's stabbed me through the lungs with an icicle. It's a mess.

I still have this morbid curiosity about COVID and the ways it affects different people. I'm not even a scientist or a doctor, nor do I want to go into those fields...but I can kind of see why someone would. 

It's late. 2 am. My sleep schedule has been destroyed and I really need to fix it. I blame that on COVID, too...because for a while after getting my mind back, I was just sleeping all day. So now I go to take a sleeping pill, listen to Epona's song so that I can get it Out Of My Head, and try to sleep.