Plague Diary: Plague Diary

[lydy]

So, I want to make a quick record of possible symptoms, in case I need to rely upon it later.  I'll put it behind a cut, because you may well not want it in your feed.  But I don't have any of the most notable symptoms.  No fever, no shortness of breath not explained by exertion, and reasonable SpO2.  

11/17:  Ate left overs, including some dubious brussel sprouts, and had a lot of diarrhea.  It lasted about four hours, I think.  

11/18: I went to the get my fingerprints done, and also stopped in the clinic to get my bloods redrawn.  I answered yes to the question about diarrhea.  Doctor asked me if it was just that one time.  I said yes.

11/19: Requested saliva test in what I thought was an abundance of caution. Because the question was on the COVID screening form at the clinic, I decided that I wanted to be sure I wasn't a danger to my patients.  This was literally my only symptom, and the diarrhea had become loose stools.  Since I have this from time to time, and I was under a lot of stress, I really didn't worry too much about being positive.  Went for a bike ride.

11/21: No significant symptoms, Went for a bike ride.

11/23:  Took the saliva test.  Went to several stores to finish up shopping for the trip.  Was in each of them a short amount of time, and never close to other people, but I am worried for them, now.  Specifically, I went to the Freewheel Cycle in Richfield,  Richfield Petco, the Walgreens at 66th and Nicollet, the Wedge, and the UPS store.  Dropped off the test at UPS. Went for a bike ride.

11/26: Felt very slightly light-headed.  Nothing significant.  This is also not one of the symptoms that they warn you about.  Had Thanksgiving dinner with my household.  In retrospect, I regret this.

11/27: Felt light headed first thing in the morning.  Got in my car and drove for 11 hours.  Normal rest stops and so forth.  Looked at my email about an hour out of South Bend, discovered I was positive.  Freaked out, called loved one, called my employer.  Stayed the night in South Bend, Indiana, in an hotel where there were loud parties.

11/28: Drove to Cleveland. Slightly light-headed in the morning. Informed my Airbnb host.  He met me at the property, stood probably 20 feet away, welcomed me and gave me details on the systems in the apartment.  He was incredibly kind and welcoming and I cannot say enough good things about him.  Hauled all my shit up to the second floor (nine trips).  SpO2 was in the low 90s after that exertion.I continue to have slightly loose stools, but again, nothing particularly notable, especially given the amount of stress. I have also had slight chest pains, but I get those from time to time, and they are probably muscular.  In any case, they aren't associated with breathing and they aren't on the left side. So, really who knows?  Persistent but not terrible head ache.  Taking ibuprofen

11/29: Was not light-headed this morning.  Slept well, Am, as I write this, very slightly light-headed, but I believe that to be a stress reaction.  Also, it's been about 4 hours since I ate, so that might have something to do with it.  Brief period of tinnitus.  Still loose stools. Persistent head ache, taking ibuprofen.

11/30:  No symptoms as of 2 pm.  Slept well.  I feel quite good, although I have a wee bit of cabin fever.  Per instructions, must stay in until Friday.  I wonder if I have enough groceries for that?  I appear to have forgotten to get potatoes, for instance.

12/1: Some isolated coughs last night, felt "bronchial" and some wheezing.  Would probably think it was a winter cold or asthma.  Only got about 5 hours of sleep, and so I am a bit tired today, but not catastrophic.  I have a head ache that seems to be waiting in the wings.  Not an actual headache, just the promise of a headache to come.  Also some slight, very very slight pain just under my collar bone.  Again, were it not for COVID I would discount it.

12/2: Woke up with a runny nose, murderous head ache.  Sinus headache, most likely.  Took temperature before I took ibuprofen, 98.4.  Have now taken ibuprofen.  Man, my head hurts.  Oh, also a bit light-headed.  This really seems like maybe sinuses?

12/3: 9 hours of sleep.  I feel pretty great, actually.  One isolated cough, this morning, and I continue to think that these are just normal winter asthma coughs.  I am doing grocery pick up again today, and I think again I will have the person put them on the ground, just to be super super safe. There are so many things I don't want, but chief among them is not not give this to another person.  (Oh, and in the really good news department, the one person I spent time with outside my household has her negative result.

12/4: Got less sleep than I wanted.  Feel perfectly fine, but I had a chat with David and my throat felt...strained?  Not sore, but as if talking took more stress than normal.  Could this be because I am talking to no one?  Or is it COVID?  Who the fuck knows?  Also, as I was falling asleep last night, I could hear liquid vibrating in my ear as I breathed, which is annoying.  Nasal drip is _not_ a COVID symptom, so hurray for that.

12/5: 10 hours of sleep, feel great.  Also, the nasal drip seems to have resolved.

12/6: Had trouble getting to sleep, but eventually got 9 hours.  I feel just fine.  Tomorrow, I am releasing myself into the wild.  (MDH said I could be released on 11/27, but I chose to be way way more conservative.)  So, the plan is to figure out where downtown Cleveland is, and drive there.

12/7: Terrible insomnia.  Got about 5? hours of sleep.  On the other hand, I feel just great.  So, yay for not being sick!

 
  

Comments

[dreamshark]

So... your first symptom was 11/17? That was almost two weeks ago! Which is nothing but good news, really. The most dangerous point in the infection is thought to be about a week after the first symptoms appear, and you sailed right through that.

How exactly are they determining quarantine period at this point? For a while they were saying something like two weeks from onset of symptoms and 3 days without fever. Of course that was back when it was believed that everybody ran a fever, which turned out not to be the case. Did you get any official quarantine guidance along with your test results?

[lydy]

I just completed an interview with the Minnesota Department of Health. At this point, they appear to be saying 10 days from first symptoms, assuming you are generally trending better? I'm not entirely sure, since I was pretty focused on my own situation. After some discussion, we agreed to go with the more conservative approach of 10 days from when I took the test, rather than 10 days from first symptoms, in part because my symptoms are fairly amorphous. So, they think I am ok to actually interact with another human come Friday. Which is great, really.

[dreamshark]

Yeah, either way works out pretty well for you. Of course, for all you know, that bout of diarrhea might have been the Brussels sprouts after all and purely coincidental. You may have just happened to discover an essentially asymptomatic infection that actually started a week after an unrelated bout of indigestion. If it had been one of the more common COVID symptoms it would be easier to construct a solid narrative around it. So starting the count on your test date is probably the safest approach.

This is purely idle speculation on my part, but of all the possible symptoms you report, the one that seems to me to be most suggestive of COVID is the tinnitus. Not because it is a hugely common COVID symptom (although it has been reported) but because temporary tinnitus is not common from other viral or bacterial illnesses. There are so many things that can cause gastric distress, headache, light-headedness, etc.

Anyway, so far so good. Hang in there!

ETA: Even more completely unfounded speculation, but I looked back at your excellent symptom diary and had a realization. Suppose that the diarrhea was unrelated. On Nov 18 you completed two out-of-the-house errands: blood draw and something to do with fingerprints. Not super risky activities, but probably higher risk than grocery shopping or biking. Five days later you took a COVID test that turned out positive. Five days is exactly the right amount of time for an infection to take hold. Maybe you got infected on the 18th.

If you want me to stop with the idle speculation, speak up. I can't help trying to analyze these things, but I certainly don't have to bother you with it.

[lydy]

I feel much more positive about the course of my disease after the conversation with the nice man at MDH. Weirdly, and i don't know how it fell out of my brain, I didn't tell them, initially about the contact at the fingerprint lab or the clinic. I was just about to call them back to tell them when the same nice gentleman, Tom, called me to ask about my travel. If I had traveled by public transport, there were concerns. So I told him about the clinic and the fingerprint lab, and he put that into the contact tracing form.

You're correct that it is certainly possible that I contracted it at the lab or the clinic. Thing is, we'll never know. And even if the diarrhea was a false indication, I'm genuinely glad for it. The positive test means that I have been able to notify the people most at risk, and I have been able to avoid a patient care situation where I could have truly harmed some one.

But on a personal level, I gotta say,, it's been a whole ton of frustration and stress.

[dreamshark]

Finding out that you are infected while you not only on the road but about to check into a hotel is pretty non-optimal. This would be a lot less stressful if you were home. I mean, obviously it could have been a whole lot worse (like you could actually be SICK), but still...

I'm very glad to hear that the MDH is being so kind and helpful.

And I guess it's nice that they are apparently still trying to do contact tracing? But honestly, this is exactly why contact tracing at this point in a pandemic is so futile. Look at how many places you went during the period where you may have been contagious. Other than your own household, not one of them is actually amenable to notifying the people you might have encountered. And you are a person who was being careful and limiting your contacts. Not quite as bad as "... and then I went to Mardi Gras" but still more health theater than anything.

[lydy]

I dunno. Seems like staffing up the contact tracing is a good thing. Seems like they will be getting at least some useful statistical data of the type you were complaining we didn't have. While it is clearly more useful for preventing spread when you have fewer cases and can really drill down, I don't see this as a waste of time. I see it as important, but more for populations rather than for individuals. I think that this is one of the things that is so hard about the pandemic. Things look very different in different frames. If your frame is individual risk, that is a very different frame from overall population risk. And if they get practice now, they'll be really good at it when the case numbers drop enough that they can track infections more specifically. They could, of course, just throw away all their progress and knowledge at any point, because people are stupid and governments are subjected to stupid pressures. But I think that saying that it's pointless actually is a) not true and b) possibly harmful.

[dreamshark]

BACKWARD contact tracing (trying to figure out where someone got infected) is always useful. And maybe that's what they are doing here. You are the one who talked to them - did that seem to be their focus?

But technically, contact tracing is about tracking down the people that you might have infected, and most epidemiologists admit that once community spread is well-established there is really little to be gained there.

[lydy]

So, I would think that the _backward_ tracing is exactly what isn't useful when the virus is widespread. What the nice guy I talked to seemed most interested in was figuring out who I had been in contact with and making sure that they were notified and that they isolated until they were certain they were safe. And that seems like a useful tool in preventing spread.

I'm just confused by what you've said. Can you explain or give me cites? Because it seems like the opposite is true, but perhaps I am misunderstanding something.

[dreamshark]

By backwards tracing I mean figuring out where infection took place. Tracing backwards up an infection tree is much easier because the further up the tree you go, the fewer branches there are. In your case, for instance, there are probably at most a dozen points of likely exposure in the given time period, even if you assume that casual short-term exposures while shopping might have been enough. Once you start moving down the tree there are literally hundreds: everybody in the Petco, the UPS office, the coop, the bike store, the drug store, etc. When the virus is new to a community it might actually be possible to notify everybody who ate in a certain restaurant on a given day that they might have been exposed. But when it is everywhere, the logistics are impossible. Suppose it was actually possible to contact trace every one of the 5,794 people that were confirmed positive in Minnesota yesterday (which it obviously is not, but let's just pretend). How many places did those 5,794 people go in the last week where they might have exposed someone? There's probably not a restaurant or bar or grocery store in Minnesota that didn't have at least one infected person in there in the past week. So what we really need to know at this point is how likely is it that 1 (or 2, or 10...) people in a grocery store or bar will spread the infection to someone else?

Probably the most useful information that we have about how the virus actually spreads is from super-spreader events, which is info you get from backward tracing. It has been obvious since the church-based outbreak in Seoul that aerosol spread was involved. The infamous choir practice in Seattle made it clear that singing (and presumably other forms of loud verbal expression) hugely accelerated the infection rate and that liberal use of hand sanitizer did nothing to stop it. And the dedicated testing stations for George Floyd protesters in Minneapolis was a brilliant way to gather data on the likelihood of outdoor spread with moderate mask use, even when people are shouting.

[lydy]

The conversation I had mostly concentrated on anyone I was in close proximity with for 15 minutes or longer. He did also ask about if I had been in a congregate living facility or prison, and if I had been at a church service, large social gathering, restaurant or bar. But since I answered no to all of those, I don't know what kind of follow-up questions he would have asked. He was not interested in the various shops I had been in, as I had not been in close proximity to anyone for any length of time while unmasked.

[thewayne]

Man, what I would give for brief periods of tinnitus!

Have you tried deep breathing exercises for your light-headedness?

Best of luck with it, sweetie!

[lydy]

I an sorry that you have tinnitus. It is unsettling even for two minutes.

I haven't tried deep breathing exercises, in part because the episodes are both reasonably short and quite mild.

Thank you for the good wishes. I gotta say, almost everyone has been super super supportive and kind, and it has made this whole ordeal so much better than it could be. I have not felt isolated or abandoned. The only person who was really mean to me was the hotelier in South Bend.

[haertstitch]

been looking for advice.
they don't really talk about
what one does if one has the damn virus.
they really don't know.

watching the daily briefing
there's a routine they see
if this ~ then, so matter of fact.
they aren't panicky like the beginning .
their sound system is degrading.blurry.
but the show must go on?

this is a good diary
do you have temperature change
taste change
do you crave certain foods
spoze anything to make it slow down
banana bread? cheese

hope your feel better sooner

[lydy]

Mostly the advice is "stay home, call if you get worse." There aren't any over the counter drugs recommended, that I've seen, though presumably if one is running a fever one should be taking aspirin or tylenol or some such.

I haven't been logging my temperature because it's always been pretty normal. Generally I think the highest it's gotten is 98.5, which is actually a trifle high for me, and the lowest...not sure. Some where in the mid 97 range.

I don't have any particular cravings, and am eating normally. I've been having some upset stomach stuff, but that is almost certainly stress. The loose stools seem to have resolved, as well. Oh, I had some stomach cramps right after eating some ice cream without taking Lactaid first. Serves me right, should have remembered the Lactaid.

[haertstitch]

its like forgetting beano
in front of chili

glad things have slowed down

;)

[womzilla]

In the early days, they recommended ibuprofen or acetaminophen for the fever and aches and a strong decongestant (not cough suppressant) for the lungs. Do they no longer recommend those? I know there was a brief period where there was some thought that ibuprofin might actually make it worse but that appears to have been borderline-kookery.

Also, as you know, I've been pushing vitamin D. There's not a *lot* of evidence that it helps, but the evidence that does exist is strong.