I got it about three months ago. At first it was just like having a cold and I didn’t really care, also it was impossible to tell if it was COVID-19 or not. That was the first week, but in the second week I felt more seriously sick, and one night I woke all shaky and short of breath. We went to the hospital, where they suspected COVID-19 and prescribed medication for pneumonia and to to help with breathing. My oxygen level was 91 which is below what’s considered healthy. Had to come in the next day for a chest X-ray, which showed lung infection, but were told it’s not dangerous as long as I feel I’m improving. That day oxygen was 93, and by the following week tested normal.

After going to the hospital I started feeling better relatively quickly, but then it did something weird where it seemed to move from my lungs to my nose, where it came on strong. I nearly completely lost my sense of taste and smell (I could only tell if something was salty or sweet), which returned in a few days. The congestion was probably the worst I’ve had, and then it returned to my lungs again but worse than before.

One of the bad things about it was that it was difficult to sleep; I was generally uncomfortable and kept waking up during the night. I was physically sick with COVID-19, but it was also seemingly complicated by anxiety. A doctor prescribed medication for that but it didn’t seem to help much. I tried an anti-depressant later, but the benefits were slight and the side effects were horrible.

My antibiotic course was 10 days and I stopped taking the breathing medication after that because I felt I didn’t need them anymore. Three or four weeks in it was as if I had mostly recovered, but suddenly I was struck with nausea, threw up one morning for no reason it seems. There was also a bout of diarrhea, maybe a week’s worth?

Fatigue, anxiety, nausea / loss of appetite, aches and pains around the chest, upper back, and neck. Some mild headaches. Just feeling shitty, and I thought it would never end because it all lasted two months total. Individual symptoms would last a few days, get better, and then something else would bother me. Around the end of the two months I either caught something else like a cold or had a brief relapse of cold-like symptoms with coughing, trouble swallowing, and then that was it.

I’m thankful that I seem to have made a full recovery. Eventually I regained my appetite, the pains are gone, I can sleep normally, I feel that I breath well, anxiety has subsided, and so on. The thing that I still have is mild neck pain, but I don’t know the exact cause. I read as much as I could about the disease, and it seems that long-term symptoms can be fallout due to damage the virus has done to your body, which can take several months to a year to heal. Knock on wood, I don’t appear to have developed any bad complication.

The worst part is that it lasted so long and I didn’t know if I was going to get better or worse. The whole thing was scary and frustrating. People think staying in home quarantine, wearing masks, and social distancing is a drag, but those things are fun and games compared to the disease. Any way to avoid it is totally justified in my opinion.

This turned into an essay:

My wife’s coworker’s wife works in a hospital, and that was enough for us to get it as soon as everything began shutting down here in mid-March. I’ve never really had eye issues so at the time I was convinced I had pink eye, and no one had ever suggested to me that eye infections could be symptoms, so I went to urgent care for antibiotic drops. (For what it’s worth, the doctors didn’t tell me it could be related on that visit either.) I was told it doesn’t quite look like pink eye, but I was prescribed drops anyway as a precaution, and they didn’t help.

A couple days later I lost my sense of smell, and my sense of taste became kind of funny - I was still able to taste, but it was like there was a second, foul taste in my mouth at all times. At this point I recognized it was likely covid, and was really worried because my wife is asthmatic. A couple days later I got one of the worst coughs I’ve had in my life, my throat got totally torn up, while she was totally fine. She ended up being totally asymptomatic. I got a little feverish at one point, but that wasn’t bad at all, and I never had any issue with shortness of breath.

I think March 28 or 29 was the last day my cough was really there, and the foul taste left my mouth and my tastebuds went fucking haywire oversensitive for a full day. Like, I was feeling nauseous because the inside of my own mouth was tasting too strong. Then when that died down I got a bitter metallic taste in my mouth for maybe a day, and then my sense of taste was normal again.

So at that point, my eyes are still kind of fucked and I still can’t smell anything, but whatever, covid beaten. That wasn’t too awful.

April 2, I started getting lightheaded, and over the next couple days that gradually gets stronger and I start feeling weak all over. I don’t really know a good way to describe it other than weakness, it’s like all my muscles are drained at once. Not really centralized anywhere, but a little more noticable in all four limbs and in my chest. When I realize this isn’t going away I get scared and go to a hospital for the first time in my life. After a couple hours I get discharged because they find nothing wrong.

The next day it’s still there and I call my gp. Can’t come in because I’ve just recovered. They prescribe stuff over the phone that doesn’t help. At this point, I still haven’t seen any news that covid can cause long-term symptoms and I feel terrified. Because I’m scared, I admittedly call my doctor more than I should about the medicine not working. When they finally let me back in, the very first thing they do is give me a psychiatric profile where they ask me questions like if I ever hear voices other people can’t hear. I totally feel like a lunatic, in addition to feeling awful physically.

Decide to switch doctors, do tons of tests. Everything turns up like I’m healthy and the new doctor slowly concludes it’s 100% an anxiety problem. My eyes still feel infected, diagnosed as allergies. Go through increasingly strong allergy drops which don’t help, eventually I stop pressing on this because it’s going nowhere.

The symptoms have changed to waxing and waning, where I go through good weeks where I feel amost normal and bad weeks where I feel awful. I also have weird issues with numbness - my limbs fall asleep really easily and sometimes take a while to recover. Smell is starting to come back, in that now I can tell when there is a strong smell, but not distinguish.

Switch doctors again and I am definitely a crazy person, and in my (physically) good moments I question whether I’ve imagined the entire experience.

So tonight I’m typing this up while lightheaded and feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck, and my eyes are visibly red. The past three weeks have been bad. I don’t feel confident I’m sane, and I don’t have much optimism for this getting resolved anytime soon.

tl;dr I’ve had a bad time with it.

I am 15, so I don’t have a lot of consequences. I was only feeling bad for one day and that’s it. But when I done my test I could contaminate people so I had to stay at home.

My father however did not have the same experience. He felt really bad and needed to go to the hospital to make a scanner. He was very afraid. But now everything is fine, he stayed for a few weeks in quarantine and will get back to work tomorrow.

My mother felt bad and was very tired, but that was basically it.

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i had a minor fever for a couple of days and now my favorite vegan shawarma tastes awful, which is luckily the worst thing that happened to me during covid :)

For me it actually started with heart arrhythmia, my heart beating erratically at times and scaring me. Then my lungs grew swollen so much that I could barely breathe for a few days.

It took months before heart and lungs were both back to normal.

Is this a three year old post?

it just crossed my mind that if any of lemmy’s users actually died because of coronavirus we would never know it :/

I was sleepy one day. I had three naps that day instead of one. That was about it. Wouldn’t have even suspected covid if I hadn’t done the test.

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