Since my post a few weeks ago about my family contracting COVID (and the disturbing revelation that negative Covid PCR tests are wrong at least 20% of the time), a lot of people have asked me what it was like to have COVID as a doubly vaccinated 50-year-old. Here's my best attempt at putting it into words:

My Covid symptoms began with a slightly stuffy head and a few sniffles. This went on for about 2 days, during which I got a Covid test (which came back positive a couple days later). After I got the Covid test, my stuffy head turned into one of those in-the-background headaches that just wouldn't go away. (I didn't take any medication, because I've had some allergy issues (itchy hives) when I've taken ibuprofen and other pain medications in recent years.) After a day or so, just when the background headache seemed to be subsiding, I got an ice-pick headache, which made it hard to sleep, for about a day. The ice-pick headache eventually dissolved into another background headache that finally went away after another half day or so.

At the same time, for at least a week, I was just really unmotivated and physically tired. Not sure I’d say my body was ‘aching’, but I had little to no appetite and just wanted to watch tv or listen to radio/podcast and sleep. I slept a lot. A couple hours during the day and 10-13 hours at night (one day I was in and out of sleep for 15 hours!).

I wasn’t having a particularly hard time breathing, though I did get winded more easily and I got clammy or downright sweaty whenever I did anything physical.

For the most part, I felt like I had a bad case of Mononucleosis (which I experienced when I was a teenager), though I never got a fever. It was just surprising how long my Covid symptoms were lasting, particularly since I’d been vaccinated (twice). But things got surreal when I lost my taste and smell, which happened about a day after I got my Covid test results (during the ice-pick headache stage). While making myself eat half a Breugger’s bagel (the 'everything' kind) for breakfast, I suddenly felt like I was eating paste. Then I realized the paste was completely tasteless.

When I first suspected I had Covid, my husband told me that a golfing friend who had Covid said he couldn’t even smell his dog's poop when he bagged it, and it usually made his stomach turn. So I opened the lid to the (halfway-full) used cat litter container we keep by the litter box and took a big whiff. I smelled absolutely nothing. It was so weird, it was actually a little exciting. As I was contemplating the situation, my throat began to burn from the urea I had breathed in, reinforcing how badly it would have smelled if I could smell it..

I laughed at how gross I am, then went on the Internet and discovered that some people don’t get their sense of taste and smell back for months, if ever. Of all my Covid symptoms, this was my biggest worry, particularly as the days went on. Carbohydrates tasted like paste, and vegetables tasted only like their textures, unless I put certain spices on them. I could feel the sensation of salt, sour, spicy... but I couldn't really taste them. I marveled at how much more sensitive I had become to the texture of what I was eating, now that I could no longer taste it; and I was intrigued by how I still preferred certain foods based solely on how they felt in my mouth, making me wonder just how much information food texture, alone, relays to the brain.

Thankfully, my taste and smell began to return about 10 days after I was tested and were nearly back to normal sensitivity by the time my 2-week quarantine was over.

In the end, I felt like crap for a full seven days and abnormally tired for another 3 days after that. I did not have a fever or a lot of difficulty breathing, but I lost my sense of smell and taste for about a week. My husband seemed to have an easier time of it than I did, except that he had a fever and he also lost his sense of taste and smell. My 11 YO son's symptoms (headache, sneezing/sniffles, coughing, and fatigue) lasted only 2-3 days, though he lost his taste and smell for 5-7 days as well. All of us experienced similar physical symptoms- they just varied in severity and duration. Likewise, all of us have fully recovered, including our taste and smell.

We feel fortunate that we have recovered from what, for many, has been a deadly virus. My husband and I figure that this counts as our booster shots (though we will likely still get them when the time comes), and that our 11YO received a mega-dose of Nature's vaccine as well (he isn't quite old enough for man-made vaccines yet). Now we just hope that the symptoms of our friends and loved ones - everyone out there- will be equally innocuous when they carry the virus (and they will).

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P.S. I love this picture of an eagle in an enclosure with a cage close behind. (He is a rescue.) Seems the perfect metaphor for the United States right now.

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