Road to Recovery

I wrote at the beginning of March about a virus I picked up the previous September. Here we are nine months later and I’m almost recovered. Or as recovered as I’m likely to get. I recently hit 12 stone on the scales. I’d plummeted from about 13 stone to just over 11 stone. I’ve weighed in at between 12 and 13 stone for the best part of the last 25 years. To be honest, I’m probably a little bit heavy at 12.5 to 13 stone. I think I’m good at where I am now. 

Still, given that I lost the best part of two stone in just a few weeks, it sure took a long time to put anything back on. I bought scales at the time, because the weight loss was becoming a concern. I’d begun to look a little skeletal. I still have a post nasal drip and a bit of post viral fatigue to deal with. They’re a nuisance, sometimes uncomfortable. But not life changing.

If I’d picked up this virus in the last couple of months, I’d have called it Covid-19. No doubts about it. I’d have been 99.9% convinced of it, and with fairly good reason. It wasn’t Covid-19, of course. It didn’t exist back then. But the symptoms of viral respiratory infections can be similar. I had enough of the symptoms. The fever was an odd one. In that I had a temperature and woke every night for more than two weeks soaked in sweat. But it rarely went over 38 degrees, the temperature at which fever is diagnosed. Still, it was high and wouldn’t budge.

Then there was the difficulty breathing. You know, I never really associated that with the illness at the time. Not straightaway, anyhow. I put it down to the smoking and just being a bit weak. I became a bit concerned at the end of the first week, because I hadn’t really smoked for days, and normally my lungs recover quite quickly once I stop puffing. They weren’t recovering at all. They were getting worse.

There were times that breathing felt quite tough. That maybe I should mention it. But I was feeling so much more screwed over across other parts of my body, and I still mostly blamed smoking. Today, more than six months without a puff, my lungs are better. But not recovered like they’d normally be. There’s a bit of a cough that lingered. That’s perhaps a sign of scarring on my lungs, from stuff I’ve read. Perhaps. But it’s not life changing. Not so far. Hopefully it won’t be.

In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that the virus fucked my lungs over quite badly. Perhaps I’d even had mild pneumonia. But frankly, the trade off between the damage caused by the virus and the benefits of quitting smoking are – at the time of writing – balanced in my favour.

Aside from whining on about how ill I was, and how drawn out the recovery has been, there’s a point to the story. The other day a colleague at work told me that he wouldn’t mind catching the coronavirus. Get it over and done with. He’s looked at the stats for his age group and he’s good to take his chances. Most cases at worst are ‘mild’. Once it’s done and dusted, he’d be able to stop hiding away. I do understand the sentiment.

I told him the story of my mystery virus. What it’s like to be unable to eat for weeks. The weight loss. The pain. The sleep loss. The misery. The fatigue. The difficulty of breathing. Weeks and weeks of it. And who knows, at the end of it you might not even be immune to getting it again. And just to drive the point home, I mentioned that if my illness had been Covid-19, it would be medically defined as a ‘mild’ case.

Only a fool wants to get this virus. But there are fools a plenty out there.