Covid still sucks

So. I finally got Covid for the first time a few weeks ago.

I went to a gig with a friend the night before I started having obvious symptoms. Thankfully David Geffen Hall was still requiring masks, otherwise I might not have been wearing one. I didn’t know I had it, and realistically I was probably positive already.

One thing I did notice though, was fatigue. I just chalked it up to not sleeping well and being out of shape. But walking up even one staircase up to our seats, my legs felt like absolute lead. “Good lord… I really need to start running again.” True, but turns out that probably wasn’t the main culprit behind feeling like an empty battery.

I woke up the next morning feeling rough and like I was coming down with something. Morning after I was clearly ill, tested positive. I had gotten my second booster exactly 14 days before. Frustratingly, this means I probably got the virus some time before the 2-week period before the booster becomes fully effective. Just going to assume it helped anyway though, could have been sicker without it.

I ended up being properly ill for a full week, and tested positive (rapid tests) for 13 days.

Immediately after that, things got busier with SuperHi as we moved towards the beta version of Bounties. I was feeling pretty scatter-brained and a bit unwell, a constant tiny headache and the feeling that I was having a harder time context-switching than usual. But I assumed that was just things getting busier and a little less organized as we prioritized the deadline over keeping every single little thing tracked and sorted.

We launched Bounties about a week after my major symptoms had subsided (🎉), but the scatter-brained feeling didn’t go away. I assumed it was just left over from the launch, we were still pretty busy with post-launch fixes and stuff, so I tried to put it out of my mind and just focus on getting to the weekend.

Then this Monday, a few days ago, I woke up with a weird headache and a feeling like I was getting sick again, the sort of dull ache in the back of your soft palate as if you’re about to get a killer sore throat. I drank a bunch of water and hoped that it would improve. But as the day went on it got worse, as did the brain fog.

I went to pick B up around 5pm as always. When I was walking back with him, I started humming “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind to myself. I got to “good-BYEEEEE” (best part besides the doot doot doots), and the interval was wrong. Tried it again and it was too flat, or was it sharp? It was the first time ever in my memory that I have known a melody but not been able to sing it.

(This whole thing probably sounds like not a big deal… But I don’t know how to describe how scary it was. It’s not even a brain-memory thing, it’s a muscle thing, intrinsic. Maybe the best comparison I could give is if you picked up a pen to write but it felt wrong in your hand, like you couldn’t hold it normally and couldn’t figure out why.)

I started pushing him along again and eventually got the interval. We walked a few blocks further when someone stopped me in the street to ask where the local subway stop is. I realized I couldn’t tell him. I have been there a bunch, but I couldn’t tell him if it was to my left or behind me. We quickly walked home.

I’ve felt a bit better since then but am still having low-level headaches and some trouble concentrating. Though now that I know what is going on, I’m trying to be more intentional with Do Not Disturb and writing absolutely everything down as I am working on it.

I don’t know if it was just me coming down with something else, or a post-viral thing, or what. All I know is that this cold/flu/Covid season is no joke.