I had been feeling good after my bout with Cornavirus and was more than ready to go back to work. Mt husband went back at the end of 10 days but I waited because I knew some of my employees were anxious. In fact three of them waited until 6PM the Friday before I was to return to share with my practice manager that they were not comfortable with me returning and needed to do some “research.” None had reached out to me with questions as I had offered for them to multiple times or expressed this concern until the last minute. My younger daughter and I both experienced the feeling of people being afraid to be around us after a known diagnosis.
On July 10, 2020 I once again found myself up during the night and vomiting. I have several GI issues and am actually trying to schedule an upper GI scan so this wasn’t any big concern. It was a nuisance but seemed on par with my body to make me nauseous right before I was to return to work. During the night Sunday, July 12 I awoke to the most horrendous night sweats. I had no idea that night sweats could be like this. I was completely drenched from head to toe and you could easily have wrung water from the sheets. I was not running fever in the morning so my first assumption was that my body truly hated me and that menopause had decided to rear its ugly head. I was exhausted but headed off to work concerned that this was to be my lot in life for a while.
By late afternoon I had a cough. I didn’t think too much about it as I knew a cough could be a lingering issue. As well with Texas allergies a cough is always possible. This cough was bad enough I stopped and picked up different cough medication. My husband again was concerned. The cough lasted about 4 hours and then it went away.
The next day I worked and things seemed good. Then around 5 PM the cough came back again, worse than before. I rushed out the door. When I got home I took cough medicine. It was not helping. I made a hot toddy. After about four hours the cough was gone again. That night I once again had night sweats.
Back to work I went with a normal temperature the next morning. Around 4PM I became extremely fatigued. Then I started shivering. I was shivering so hard I could not keep my legs still and my teeth were chattering. I headed home. Now I had a fever. I was determined to learn what was going on with me so I found an Urgent Care that could see me. I was congested and wondered if I just had a sinus infection starting. The doctor wanted to test me for COVID again. He said everything I told him sounded like I had to have had COVID two weeks prior. He couldn’t explain if I had gotten it a second time – though we couldn’t figure out from where since I had been at home and only back to work three days or if I was just having a relapse. I was again terribly worried about if I had exposed my staff. The doctor was very reassuring and even sat next to me on the table and said as long as we were wearing masks at work the risk was low. He recommended that I take ibuprofen for the fever and said it was safe. He also told me that menopause would not come on that suddenly and he did not feel the night sweats were from that.
When I received my results I was in fact positive. This doctor actually spent a lot of time speaking with me. She told me supplements to take – 2000IU Vitamin D, 1000mg Vitamin C, 75mg Zinc, and 10mg Melatonin. She wondered if going back to work just stressed me and caused the relapse. She said in reality no one knows when you stop being contagious. She couldn’t tell me if I was still contagious or how long I might be. She also assured me that as long as everyone at my work was wearing masks the risk to my staff from me was low. She shared stories about other patients that I did not necessarily find encouraging. She told me of one man who had been very sick and they came close to sending him to the hospital. He came in a couple of weeks later and said he was feeling great. A few days later he returned and had to be hospitalized. She said that because I was immunocompromised that the virus might stick around longer and do some strange things and that it is still too soon and too new of a virus for anyone to have a lot of answers.
I was in bed most of that day with fever. I now found myself having night sweats every night. If 60% of my body is water 55% was in our bed. My hair was disgusting and wet each morning as well. I offered to move to the other bedroom so my husband could sleep but he said he wanted me near him so he could keep an eye on me. I bought bamboo sheets to try to help. This seemed to be my life now. Fever during the day and night sweats at night. I drank and drank and drank water to try to keep up with the loss I was experiencing.
I would try to get up around 9AM and slowly make it from the bed to our kitchen table. I would try to eat something and have a drink. By this time my sinuses were full of mucus and my teeth hurt. I also lost my sense of smell and taste. It wasn’t the normal I have sinus congestion loss of smell where you can still kind of smell something. I could not smell. I put Vicks Vapo Rub directly on my nose and couldn’t smell a thing. This made it difficult to care about food. I would try to stay up for 45 minutes to an hour but by 10AM I would be back in bed. A couple of hours later I would get up again and maybe take a shower or make it to the sofa to lay there. This went on for days.
On Saturday, July 18 my mucus turned green so I called the doctor and asked what I should do. I told the nurse that normally I would take a steroid pack and maybe an antibiotic and would quickly be well. They called in an antibiotic in case a secondary sinus infection was keeping me sicker. By Sunday I was still having night sweats and fever and started having heart palpitations. My blood pressure was low and had detected an abnormal heart beat. I was so weak and I couldn’t beat the fever. I had my husband call to see if the doctor could see me because I was just so weak and worried about my heart. Throughout all of this we had kept an eye on my oxygenation with a pulse oximeter and it had been good. The doctor called me when she got my husband’s message. She told me I needed to consider heading straight to the hospital. Honestly, I was terrified of the hospital. I asked her if she could just do the initial evaluation and check my heart and she agreed to do so.
My husband looked at me and said, “You need to pack a bag. If they send us to the hospital you know they won’t let me inside.” I had already thought about packing a bag. In the back of our minds we both thought if we went prepared maybe we could keep the worst from happening.
When we arrived the office got me in quickly. I asked the doctor if she thought my electrolytes might be low just from all the fluids I was losing at night. She ordered an EKG, chest xrays, and blood work. Fortunately everything came back good on the tests. She questioned if I was just a little dehydrated and recommended another electrolyte product to help me. She told me a story of a woman who didn’t qualify for testing early in the pandemic. She ran fever for 18 days before they were able to test her and learn she was positive. She told me just to keep trying to hydrate and rest and hopefully the fever would leave soon. She also told me if I worsened that I would have to go straight to the hospital.
Eventually my daytime fever stopped for the most part. I was still having night sweats and now it seemed that at the same time every night I would start to shiver. I would go outside in our lovely 100 degree Texas heat and continue to shiver and have goose bumps. I would come back inside and go to bed. My temperature would be normal and then suddenly shoot up to 103. It didn’t take long to learn that when the shivers started it was time to take ibuprofen. Most of the time my fever would be around 101.4 but it definitely did have episodes when it jumped up higher.
The first night I didn’t have night sweats my husband and I tried not to celebrate too much but it was encouraging. Then when I finally made it a night without shivering or a fever we let out a breath of relief. But it wasn’t until this happened three nights in a row that we finally felt it might be real.
I went back to work far more slowly. The fatigue is still a large part of my life. The first day back I was exhausted by 10AM. I made it until 1:30 and came home and went to bed. The next day I stayed a little longer but was in worse shape. My husband came home and found me in bed. Each day I have felt a little stronger but the fatigue is always there and I am having to fight my nature of going full blast.
It has taken a while for my brain to come back to functioning as well. During the worst I felt like I had issues remembering things or when certain things happened. I was putting things in strange places. I had to take it slower at work to think through things. COVID brain is real.
I still have issues taking a deep breath at times. I still have some sinus congestion that hasn’t cleared yet. I seem far less tolerant to the heat than ever. It seems to hurt my chest to be out in it for any time. Yesterday I went into the grocery store for the first time since that day in March and it wiped me out energy wise. My smell is back. It seems a little muted but it is back so that is nice.
I don’t know what the lingering effects or long-term issues from having this virus may be. I am glad I did not end up in the hospital or sicker than I was but it has been hard. I was one of those people when it first arrived in the U.S. that said it is just another flu. I will tell you it is more than the flu. I pray I don’t have another relapse. I hope I get some decent immunity from it but it doesn’t sound like that is guaranteed either. I am in relatively good shape, not overweight, type O blood, so many things that should have been a mild case. My husband has many things that should have predisposed him to a worse case but he had very minor symptoms. Even though he was mostly asymptomatic he has lingering effects. He finds himself out of breath when doing things like climbing stairs much more quickly now.
My older daughter is on hydroxychloroquine and I think it helped her have a very mild case.
I am still afraid of the lingering effects because at this time we honestly don’t know if there will be any and if so what they might be. I hope I have immunity from it. I feel a little emboldened right now that I probably have some immunity so I should be able to go into a grocery store safely. Studies seem to show I may get 3 to 5 months of immunity. But of course then I see studies that say people who have had coronavirus are more likely to be sicker if they get it again. So I’m not going to be making any major changes to my life anytime soon.
For those of you who say masks don’t work I am here to say they do. In my line of work it is impossible to social distance the whole time. While I try to limit my time at less than six feet to less than 15 minutes that is not always possible either. Was I contagious at work? Who knows. But I know another employee was. No one got sick from us. If you have the misfortune to need to be tested pay attention to the health care workers who are tested you. They are on the front lines and most of them are wearing only a mask and gloves even when they are working with symptomatic patients.
I realize this is a polarizing topic. I am not trying to convince you of anything. I am just sharing my experience. It was hard for me to decide to make my story public. I don’t want people to look at me differently or to be afraid of me because I have had COVID. I found encouragement from reading other people’s stories. I also found some things to make me fearful. I now know so many people who have been impacted by this virus – some have lost loved ones.
I am praying that my body has said goodbye to COVID and that I will not have any more relapses. In the meantime I will abide by the signs – NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO MASK, NO SERVICE.
