I've been feeling better over the past few days. I woke this morning with only a 37.2C temperature. So I decided to try working from home today. I was fine until around 1230, when my lungs let me know it was a mistake.
I've pretty much reverted a week from just a few hours of work. Not sure how or why, but I certainly won't be fooled like that again.I don't know what about work hit me so hard – perhaps it's my authoritative voice? Perhaps it was listening and paying attention and making notes? I don't know, but it's not something my body can cope with.
I am not impressed with this virus
In other news, we've been doing more video calls lately. R, like most children always acts up on the calls. So we tried something different – turning off our side of the video. It worked as expected, at first. She didn't act up or make faces at all. Until after a while she burst into tears about not being able to see herself. That was a surprising side effect. but I will continue trying to just not show our side of the video and see if there's a way to make calls to family more enjoyable that way.
Day 8 and the whole country is on lockdown. On the other hand we finally got our food order delivered. So we are no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what we can eat. That said, there was no pasta, so I don't know how R is going to cope.
We had two grocery orders. One, from Tesco that we booked ten days ago. The other from the local veg shop that we called in yesterday. Given the reliability of the latter, I wish we could get everything from them. But it's good to know we won't run out of fresh food.
Today R had her first Zoom conference call with the other kids in her class. Good thing I use this at work all the time. It was easy to install and show her how to use it. Then I just let her be for 90 minutes. It seemed quite chaotic and I did not have the energy to even watch.
On that note, I'm still tired very easily. Talking a lot, especially on the phone, really does me in. I had a couple of long calls today after which I just had to nap. I say I'm easily exhausted, but not at night when I try to sleep. Then I'm just laying in bed for ages. (Last night wasn't helped by R setting an alarm for 7am, which only I heard. So I had to hunt down where her iPad was so I could kill it.
Talked to the GP yesterday about my symptoms and Covid-19. She said it does sounds like I've got it – which does bring some peace of mind. She also says that since it's been a week I should start to feel better soon. Most people are over it after a week, she says, except some take a turn for the worse around day 8 or 9. Which implies that if things are still ok Thursday, I should be past the worst of it. Apparently the lung/cough issues should linger for ages – but that doesn't really give me an idea of when I'm no longer contagious. Nor does it give me a sense of when I'd be ready to work again, but I should be able to work that out for myself.
Day 6 of what appears to be covid-19. It's hard to tell since most of the symptoms are so generic and there is nearly zero testing in the UK. All I know for sure is that I've got a fever, some mild chest and throat symptoms and am exhausted all the time. The girl has a higher fever and is bouncing off the walls trying to find something to do. L and the baby are both fever and symptom free.
I was coping with working form home for 2 weeks before coming down with anything. I decided to self-isolate when someone on the floor above me at work tested positive. Most of my coworkers decided the same thing. I have to say that our conference calls became much more chatty once they became nearly the sole human interaction we could experience.
I'm still not sure how I caught this. Could be anywhere. Looking back at the 5-14 days before I felt anything, I'd not gone out much, but since I've been on pills that make me immunocompromised, it appears it doesn't take much. And when it hit, it came on pretty fast. I started feeling a sore throat at around 5-6am. By 11am I was completely wiped out and dropped off the conference call, saying I'd be out for a while. Hung up and and went to sleep.
The next day R came down with a fever, so I've been sleeping on an inflatable mattress in her room. Which is much better than the tiny sofa in the office I had been using. Since then, everything has shut, including schools. We're slowing running out of food, so I hope out grocery delivery does not get cancelled (like our last one was). Beyond that we're catching up on a lot of old Deep Space Nine Unfortunately I don't have an extra energy to do useful things like clean the place, or file away the mess of papers which have accrued. The one night I stayed up late dealing with bills completely wiped me out, and I won't be doing that again.
To keep R in the right mood, on Friday I read her The Masque of the Red Death as a bedtime story. She absolutely loved the description of the Black Room – It sounds so beautiful. And she said that maybe this could happen to the Tories, which means she understood what the story was about.
Annoyingly the pleasure of when I get better will be diminished by the fact I've no idea if I've actually got covid-19 or am just sick. So when we all feel fine again we'll still be stuck here uselessly quarantined until 2021, at this rate. I've already written my MP get universal testing, I suggest you write yours too.
