Have I Survived COVID-19 Already?

The first deaths from COVID-19 here in Washington State were confirmed on February 29th, 2020.  (Testing at that time took almost a week to get results; it still does in some cases.)

 

Interestingly enough (in hindsight), I came down with what I called a “killer cold” that had me in bed, severely compromised, and isolated for ten days in mid-February. I mentioned that in this blog post on February 27th, which was my first day back on the court to play pickle ball after being down for ten days. (At that early date, there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the Tacoma area. The first confirmed case in Pierce County was March 9th. (Again, it took almost a week to get a confirmation following a test at that time, and tests were very few and far between.)

 

By the time I got back on the court to play pickle ball again after that nasty bout, hand sanitizer was readily available at the community center, there was a poster up about COVID-19 symptoms there, and  several of us began to re-discuss recent “colds” we’d had that just wouldn’t let us go, and how different they were from ones we’d had before. We were social distancing (well, I was) between games on the bleachers and using hand sanitizer like crazy. (In pickle ball, team mates are usually six feet away from each other, but not always, so it still felt like a pretty “safe” sport to engage in, since the scourge hadn’t hit Pierce County yet, that we knew of.)

 

During my ten days of self-imposed exile and isolation, I was raspy and  wheezy and could hear a high-pitched wheeze when I laid down to sleep at night and when I put my ears underwater in the bathtub when I soaked. I took Claritin and Mucinex (and an occasional inhalation of Albuterol as needed) and drank gallons of hot herbal teas to keep the secretions as loose and expel-able as possible.

 

The symptoms of COVID-19 (when there are symptoms–many people have it and don’t know it) include…

• cough (usually dry)

• shortness of breath

• fever

• digestive problems (nausea or diarrhea)

• headache

• sore throat

• “At the onset of the illness, you may experience a loss of smell or taste.”

 

I had dry cough, shortness of breath, headache and I experienced a complete loss of taste and smell. (The loss of taste and smell was so pronounced that I even mentioned it in the February 27th blog post.)

 

I don’t believe I had a fever, but I never did take my temperature because what I had felt just like a “killer cold” to me. (I’m susceptible to bronchitis and pneumonia, and have a PneumoVax and flu shot on board; have for years.) I don’t remember having a sore throat at all. But headaches are extremely rare for me, and mine were very minor, but they were there, definitely. I also had some nausea. I did experience sporadic “chills” intermittently, even when well-covered in blankets.

 

The good news is that as soon as I started feeling compromised, I isolated immediately. I disappeared altogether from society and stayed in bed or in my office. I slept a lot.  But if I did have it, that means I was incubating it for some time (days? a week?) before it actually got hold of me.  I wasn’t playing pickle ball or wally ball while ill (or the weekend before I fell ill) because I’d had a falling out with Jackie and was steering clear of her then.

 

There is no test available right now to see if I’m carrying antibodies from earlier exposure, so I will probably never know. Nor will the others in my sports group who experienced similar symptoms and were “knocked out for the count.”

 

Here’s the article that got me revisiting the possibility:

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-i-have-coronavirus-symptoms-antibody-tests_l_5e7cb319c5b6cb9dc19b74b4?ncid=newsltushpmgnews

 

The good news in all this, if I did survive having it, is that I now have antibodies that will work to keep me safe. But I can’t assume that; I have no actual proof that that’s what I had.

 

It is an intriguing possibility, though…