Virus Diary #5

 Day 5

As expected, the results came back positive for both SO and LO. We had to have that difficult conversation all over again, only that SO's list was much shorter. He is a stay at home dad. I had to list everybody at work as well. It felt like we were talking to investigators trying to solve a mystery. In a way, we were. They thought that the virus had most likely come from a customer at work. We suspected the nursery. After all, media keeps reporting that the virus is spreading wildly among school children now. Going there was the only unusual thing we had done lately. LO had only gone there for a week when we got sick.

I still can't smell or taste anything apart from the most basic sensations of bitter, sweet, and spicy. I feared that salt didn't taste like anything either, but plain salt still tastes salty. Spicy is weird. I seem to be a lot more sensitive to spicy now than before. The thai chili tuna, which usually is one of my favourite foods, burns my mouth now. I still ate it.

My stomach is upset. I keep running to the bathroom, and it feels like I had eaten fire noodles the day before. It burns. The cramps were so bad that they woke me up in the middle of the night. I had dreams where I was curled up in pain on the floor, crying and breathless. I woke up feeling almost like that. This reminds me of the pain from ovarian cysts, or labour, or the worst periods when I was full of polyps and myomas. To be fair I have an appointment scheduled in early September to check for cysts and myomas, but this came out of nothing.

We are now confined to this apartment until 3.September. I called my father yesterday. He thought that sounded like something I wouldn't like at all. He is probably right, but going out is still not too tempting.

Virus Diary #4

 Day 4

My test coming back positive for COVID meant that the little one also had to get tested. His result would determine if all the other children in the nursery also needed a test. My SO, not having received his result yet, was technically not in isolation (even if he fell into the "Suspected COVID" category at this time), so he was allowed to come with him to the test station. Little one and I had woken up at 6. SO at 9. Their appointment was today at 17.

SO had the foresight to fill our freezer and fridge with easy food that night of day 2. I did some housework while they were at the test station, and wanted to have some lasagne ready for them when they came back. My sense of smell was now completely gone. It had started with the smell of "pus" or "crusts" that usually comes at the end of a common cold, when the nose has started to dry up a bit and the sense of smell is returning. Now this smell came before a total loss. I couldn't smell anything. Not even frying onions smelled of anything. Everything smelled as neutral as air coming out of an air purifier. I could still somewhat perceive if the air was hot or cold, humid or dry, but the sense of smell was just completely deleted from my nose.

The lasagne was hot, and I could taste some acidity from the tomatoes and some saltiness from the cheese. We had some ice tea with it. I could taste sweetness and some astringency from the tea, but apart from that, nothing had a smell or taste.

I still had a fever. For me, it never moved away from the 38-38,5C area. This isn't a high fever, and it felt strange that it could affect my sleep, dreams, and senses so much. I was dizzy, and it was hard to tell directions and temperatures apart. The only touch that didn't get translated into WRONG was the little guy's hugs and kisses. Even my husband's touches came through as WRONG, which i found very disturbing.

Testing positive means that I'm not allowed to leave the house for at least 10 days. That thought wasn't welcome, but I was still too sick to enjoy going out at this point. I tried to distract myself with some games, mostly Ingress and Pokemon go, but those games require walking in order to be played properly and I just couldn't concentrate. 

Virus Diary #3

 Day 3

I got up at 8. I hadn't slept well and my dreams had been weird. My test result wasn't in yet. My head started spinning as soon as I got up, so my boss got another call. She made it clear that I can't come to work in this state. 

My entire body felt weird. Now I understood what my SO had been complaining about a couple of days ago, that his nerves was oversensitive and even wearing clothes was uncomfortable. Almost all sensation of touch was translated into "WRONG" by my brain. It was hard to feel the difference between hot and cold. My head was spinning, in the same way as it does if the ear canals are blocked by water, ear wax or a sinus infection. It wasn't hard to breathe or anything, there was just sort of a disconnect between my senses and my consciousness.  Worst of all was sticking my hands into water of any kind. It gave almost a fight or flight reaction. This was inconvenient, because housework still needed to be done, and it is important to wash our hands often when we are sick!

Making and eating dinner was exhausting. I was sweating, shivering, and constantly feeling like all my hairs were standing up. I couldn't decide if the feeling was pleasant or uncomfortable. My feet felt like they weren't fully in contact with gravity. This can be compared to the first sign of a THC high. I decided that I just wasn't used to having a fever.

The little guy seemed a lot better, his fever was gone, and they had gone out for a short trip to a park while I was busy with housework. After eating, I wanted to lie down for a short while to gather energy for the little boy's night routine. Exactly when I put my phone away to drift off, I got a message. My test came back positive.

This wasn't the message I wanted to give to my boss. She took it well. The nursery manager had just left for the day, so I sent a message through their app. After this I got a phone call from the city's health authorities, asking me to list every person I had been in contact with this week. With my head swimming from fever and lack of sleep, this wasn't an easy task. There was no nap. The rest of the evening was spent on phone calls and emails.

Virus Diary #2

Day 2

I woke up at 5.30. The agreement with my boss was that I would check my temp, and if it was back to normal and I was feeling better, it would be OK to come in. Unfortunately, it was still high. Not bad, just slightly high at 38,5C. I booked a COVID test because the workplace requires it, and went back to sleep.

A couple of hours later, I woke up from a smell. It was difficult to make out just what it was I was smelling. Was it coffee? A fart? Mature cheese? Feet? The smell was musty and brown, and could fit any of those things. If my brain would have been fully awake, I would have made the logical conclusion that it was cheese. My SO was eating breakfast next to me. He doesn't like coffee. A headache and cough had woken him up. 

I sat up, and my head started spinning. "Wow. It has been a long time since I felt like this!", I exclaimed to my SO. I had indeed not felt this bad since the flu in 2008. A tiny alarm in the back of my head was saying something about my sense of smell being off. My phone showed that my test was scheduled in a few hours.

"Have you taken this test before?", the nurse asked me, fully covered in gloves, plastic clothes, and a face shield. "Yes", I replied, and tried to think of something distracting and peaceful while I first opened my mouth, then tilted my head backwards so she could reach my nose. It was over quickly. My stamina was so bad that I decided to rent a scooter for the way back home. Walking is usually one of my favourite things.

We didn't get the test results this day. We all still had a fever. The little one had also developed a nasty diarrhoea, which my SO got the unfortunate task of dealing with while I was at the testing station. He took a walk late at night to get some groceries and fresh air. I put the little one to bed in the mean time, which took a while, since he was restless. His nose appeared to be stuffed.

Virus Diary #1

Media (at least in my country Norway) has been full of stories about the pandemic. The focus has been on the serious cases, the horror stories from hospital units where unlucky patients fight for their lives with severely damaged lungs.

I got a mild case of COVID. Maybe reading one of these blog posts will make someone recognise the signs of the infection, and decide to get tested. If only one person does that, then these posts will have served their purpose. I know that the infection is different from person to person; as a Reddit user put it, "Breakthrough COVID is a disease with random symptoms".

I'm vaccinated. My country has had a good supply of vaccines, and I'm in the age group that didn't come completely last in the queue. Unfortunately, the virus caught up with me before the second shot did.

Day 1

I picked our son up from the nursery at 3 in the afternoon. He was tired after playing outside, and he had completely refused to take his thick jacket off in the warm late summer day. When I arrived, he was sitting in the kitchen eating a snack. This must have been the first time he would rather be inside than outside. I asked the employee if she thought he was getting sick. She assured me that it was completely normal for the newcomers to get tired easily, their senses can be overloaded from the new situation with other kids everywhere.

I was also feeling tired and cold. My SO had been feeling unwell for a couple of days and didn't want to go to the nursery in case he had an infectious cold or something. When the little one just wanted to spend the rest of the day curled up on my lap, we decided to measure his temperature. We all had a low fever.

Now I had to contact the nursery and tell them that the little one wasn't coming in tomorrow, as well as my boss. She told me to stay away from work for as long as I have a fever. I asked if I could still come in and do something that didn't directly involve customers, but that was also not allowed.

Still hoping that I'd get up for work at 5.30 the next morning to go to work, I went to sleep on the sofa, to not disturb the others that early in the morning...

Playing dress up with dream costumes

This image is hosted here just so I can post it on LD4all. I used Azalea's Game of Thrones scene creator to illustrate two costumes from my dream last night. These character creators can be a nice and quick way to make dream illustrations without spending too much time and effort on it.

When the mind wanders, it sees faces...

A few days ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being stuck for a while in a room that was in need of renovation. There was nothing to read, nothing to do, and I couldn't move. My eyes had nothing else to look at than the stains and holes in the floor. Before long, the shapes started to take on meaning. There was a baboon, there was Mickey Mouse, and right before me was a fire-breathing dragon!

Mickey Mouse

It is interesting how we all see patterns in random things like clouds and stains. Who has never looked at clouds drifting across the sky, and seen people and animals? I often see maps of familiar countries and fictional worlds in the clouds. Trees and mountains can have faces and bodies, so clear that I can clearly understand where the myths of Trolls come from. 

This is called pareidolia. It is what happens when the brain interprets a random image as a familiar pattern. The single most common pattern generated in this way is a human face. Pareidolia is the phenomenon behind the "face of the moon", the inkblot test, and some say it is the reason why we can see a smiley icon as a smiling face. 

Naked woman throwing a hammer

There are many communities and blogs out there dedicated to pareidolia. All of them, at least the ones I have found, are filled with images of things that look like faces. All it can take is a pair of dots, and the human brain will interpret it as "looking at you". Even the word "look" contains a pair of eyes when we look closely at it! 

When I was a child, my bedroom had curtains with large brown flowers on it. That pattern gave me nightmares, because my young eyes saw a witch in the flowers. She was wearing cat eye glasses and a scarf. I couldn't understand why my parents' couldn't see the witch, when she was clearly staring at me from every flower on those curtains. In fact, I couldn't even see the flowers back then. I could only see the witch and some random swirls. 

Dragon breathing fire on the ground

A couple of years ago, my parents were cleaning in their basement and found those old curtains from the 70s. They took them up and draped them over a chair in the living room, because they thought I might be interested in taking them with me. There was the witch, staring at me! 

I don't have a picture of the curtains; they are in my parents' house. I do have pictures of the stained floor and its strange inhabitants. 

Pareidolia wikipedia article

Photo collection on Google+