I, like many others, believed I would never get COVID. I wear a mask everywhere I go, and I make sure to sanitize every couple of minutes. Although I take precautions due to the pandemic, many people don’t. Because I work in retail and work five to six days of the week, I have close exposure to almost all the customers that come and go throughout our store. I do also continue to go grocery shopping, mostly because I am too broke to pay the delivery fee. So on January 18th, I tested positive for the coronavirus and here’s how it went:
I want to start off by saying that the worst part wasn’t just the pain that came as a result of getting COVID, but it was the stressful forty minutes that I had to wait for my results to come in. My anxiety was through the roof because it was supposed to be a fifteen minute test. I one-hundred percent thought that the test would come back negative…obviously it didn’t. I got tested as soon as I felt a headache and body aches. The first day started out as just about that. I just had a massive headache and slowly started to get body aches. The second day is when my taste and smell started to fade away. No one tells you how hard losing your taste and smell really is. You eat the same foods that you did prior, and it still feels the same, however, you can not remember what it tastes like at all. I am still slowly starting to get my smell back and as a result, my taste is somewhat coming back. The third day, I started having really bad congestion in my nose to the point that I could only breathe out of my mouth. I also had the worst sore throat that I had ever had in my life (the sore throat was probably the worst symptom that I had). I was constantly eating popsicles to ease the pain and I was also talking about four showers a day because that was the only thing that seemed to help. By the fourth day, I had a bad cough and still had all the other symptoms that I have already mentioned. I ordered nasal spray for the congestion and cough drops for my throat. How I felt on day four continued for about two more days. By day seven the sore throat started fading and the body aches too. On day nine the only symptoms that I still seemed to have was the loss of taste and smell. I am now two days free of COVID, and I am slowly getting it back. I also lost my concept of time throughout those ten days and I am still getting back to my normal routine. I know I was supposed to be sleeping a lot because I was sick, but I found myself sleeping about six hours per night with no naps during the day. This could have been due to my lack of being able to breathe or the constant coughing.
Thankfully, I was in quarantine with my sister, so I wasn’t lonely. I am also taking six online classes, so there was no excuse for me not to be able to do my homework. I finished four seasons of One Tree Hill which consumed about 3,318 hours of my quarantine (seasons six through nine) and also got about halfway through the complete series of Marvel films. I went through two boxes of tissues and two boxes of popsicles and drank a ton of water and blue Powerade. In conclusion, I do not recommend getting COVID. It was nice to have a break from reality, but the symptoms are no joke and I am still healing from them.
I would rate this experience a 4/10 (a really hard time in my life, but not the worst thing I have been through).