Covid Finally Came For Me...

So this pandemic has been ongoing now in the USA for almost 3 years (though granted, nowhere near as bad as it used to be) and this past week, my luck finally ran out.

Maybe it was due to the table of coughing Trumpie boomers we were seated near at the 50s Grill last Friday, maybe it was the packed crowd at the Mall of America the day after, but regardless, I'm now among the number of total Covid cases.

As for my personal experience with the pandemic first-hand, like I said, I figured I caught it last weekend, but I didn't KNOW it was Covid until I tested myself Wednesday morning... the scratchy throat came first (Sun), then the coughing (Mon), then the chills and runny nose (Tue). At that point, I realized that, aside from the coughing/sore throat and runny nose, the rest of my symptoms were similar to my reactions to the vaccines. The more I thought about it, the more realization set in that it could be Covid. The test simply proved that it was.

But in a way, I guess I had the luck of Nagito, because I seem to be recovering rather quickly. Thanks to 5 jabs (the most recent one being the new formula that tackles Omicron), my symptoms got no worse than those I get with the common colds. I didn't have to cancel a stream nor take any sick days from work (my job became mostly work-from-home in the Spring of 2020, and stayed that way ever since, so it's not like I took Covid to "the office").

As I type this, I'm already feeling about 95% recovered. The runny nose is gone, the cough is down to maybe 1 cough every couple hours (or even less). I never had any of the major symptoms-- never had shortness of breath, never had chest pains, never lost sense of taste or smell.

And frankly, it's good that this happened *now*. I should be fine for my upcoming 11-day weekend, and with Covid transmission being low overall compared to last year, it hasn't been mutating much. There hasn't been a new full variant in over a year, just subvariants of Omicron that aren't different enough to fully evade the updated vaccine.

And of course, since my partner and I live together, she got it too, and it's hitting her harder than it did me, but not too much harder. Hard enough to need Paxlovid, but not hard enough to even threaten to hospitalize her, and she's also slowly on the mend. Just her cough is a bit more persistent.

Main takeaway from this is: We'll both be fine. I don't see any reason for either of us to worry about Long Covid, and by having had the current strain, that's all the more our antibodies are fortified for a future fight, assuming a new main variant doesn't appear.

So that's been my first-person experience with Covid. Overall, I'm weathering it a lot better than I thought I would, but still, I'd rather not see the like of it again. 🤣