Diaries of an isolating man: days 3 & 4

Day three:

My positive PCR test result was confirmed by text message at 9.11 pm last night.  I can’t recall the last time I ever received good news in an SMS at nine o’clock at night.  Indeed, I don’t remember the last time anybody sent me a text at that hour.  The result wasn’t a surprise, of course.  I already knew from the lateral flow test I took on Tuesday afternoon and the way that I had been feeling for most of the week that I have Covid.  I hadn’t been more confident of a test outcome in my life, not even when I sat my Higher Modern Studies and History exams.  But I suppose it’s always nice to have administrative confirmation of these things.

I treated myself to a rare bit of fresh air today when I went outside to the recycling bins with a bag full of empty 500ml Highland Spring water bottles.  It’s the first time I have been outdoors since I went for my PCR on Tuesday, though the novelty very quickly wore off once I had tipped my recycling into the blue bin.  The communal garden at the back of our block of flats isn’t very much to look at.  It’s a small area, with enough space for a clothes rotary, while the grass has all the appearance of winter about it.  You could easily walk around it without having to stop to catch a breath, even if at present that says more about me than the size of my garden.  On the other side of the fence, the garden looks onto a handful of parking spaces and behind those stands the back of a solicitors office.  In hindsight, I could have done with a bigger garden and a better view, but then when people were in the property market back in January 2018 nobody was thinking about what would happen if they needed to isolate during a global pandemic.

To compensate for the shortage of space in my surroundings, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the trip to the Balkans that I’ve missed out on making during these last two years.  I have long been hopeful that if international travel becomes less complicated in 2022 then I will be able to go on my cross-country rail journey, and having a ‘Covid recovery’ on my vaccine passport might even go some way to making me look good.  Specifically, I have been researching Bosnia, which has quickly become the country I am most interested in seeing.  Even though tensions seem to be simmering again in the region, it is still quite a bit more appealing than the view from my garden.

Reading TripAdvisor reviews of bars in Sarajevo and taking out the recycling can’t fill an entire day in isolation, however, so to add a bit of excitement to my afternoon I decided to put on a load of washing. Filling the washing machine has never been an activity that I would describe as being thrilling, but when even so much as walking from one room to another seems to be running the gauntlet of another episode of sneezing or a coughing fit, it brings an element of adventure to the chore. I don’t even have that much of a need for all of the freshly-laundered clothing I now have considering that I won’t be going anywhere for another five days and I’m not exactly dressing in my finest corduroy to sit amongst dying houseplants, but it passed another day and at the moment that’s all that counts.

The communal garden isn’t very much to look at

Day four:

Tonight is the first Friday I haven’t spent in a pub since the restrictions in Scotland were eased to allow indoor hospitality to resume last June, as well as being the first Friday that I can remember where I haven’t had a single beer, which is ironic since I don’t remember most of the Fridays when I do drink beer.  Despite having a fridge full of lager and nothing better to do, it seems that it would be fairly foolish to load my body up with alcohol when my immune system is already busy trying to fight off something it has never dealt with before.  So instead of sitting in Aulay’s and having the Plant Doctor make fun of my new-found fondness for corduroy, listening to Geordie Dave address me as Penfold, or hearing all about whether the barmaid who has a talent for naming business ventures has done better with her resolution to stop drinking than she was when I last saw her on Hogmanay, I am guzzling water and watching the second – 2 hours and 57 minutes long – episode of the Beatles documentary Get Back.  For the first time, I am experiencing regrets over having ever joked about a hangover as being me “suffering from the Tennent’s variant.”

All things considered, my experience with Covid to date hasn’t been as terrible as it might have been.  I’m determined not to become one of those bores who tells people that the virus is no worse than the common cold but, really, my own symptoms have not been all that different to the cold – it just isn’t any cold I have ever had before.  Covid shares many of the same symptoms, only they’ve all been jammed into a revolving door and you can’t be sure which one is going to fall out and introduce itself next.  I began to try and keep track of them in my notebook, but my head started spinning even more than it already was with the Covid fog by doing so:

• When I awoke on Monday morning, I felt as though I had something small and fairly insignificant sitting on top of my chest; a throw cushion or a library book, something like that.  It meant that I had to work a little harder to regulate my breathing, which isn’t the kind of effort you want to be making first thing in the morning.
• Additionally, I had a persistent cough and a steady sneeze.  I felt certain that it was Covid, but I tested negative on the final lateral flow test in my box.  Monday was probably the day where my symptoms were at their worst, yet I didn’t show as being positive until the following afternoon after I got my hands on another box of LFTs from the test centre.
• This is a virus that seems to be all about producing sounds:  the sound of the phlegm trembling at the top of my chest each time I inhaled before coughing on Monday; the way my breathing went from resembling a hurricane blowing through a whistle factory to the slow opening of a bottle of soda water.  It is fairly normal today.
• Subsequently, the coughing and sneezing have tapered off.  I had recently bought a packet of 10 packs of pocket tissues and a box of 225 facial tissues, and with the way I was feeling on Monday, I was concerned that I might not have enough paper to see me through my isolation.  But as of today, I have blown my way through about half of one pack of pocket tissues.
• On Tuesday I couldn’t do more than 15 minutes of yoga without my nose dripping all over the mat.  By Wednesday I had developed into something of a shy sneezer.  I could go several hours without so much as a sniffle, then I would stand up to walk through to the kitchen and I would suddenly fire off eight sneezes in a row.  It made me think of the one guy in a group who never says very much until he’s had a couple of beers in the pub and then you can’t shut him up.  A shy sneezer.
• Many of my symptoms seem to come out at night.  During the day I can be sitting around eating the potato and leek soup I made while I thought I was still healthy and feel almost nothing, making a mockery of the idea that I am confined here until next Tuesday.
• There is pretty much a constant dull sensation in my head – a sort of brain fog – that only ever becomes a headache at night, or first thing in the morning, or if I’m trying to focus on something.  This is by far the worst of my symptoms.
• I struggle to sleep at night and often I have had to get up two or three times within an hour or so to use the toilet.  It’s hard to say if this is a symptom of Covid or of getting older.
• I haven’t experienced any fever, but there have been times when my hands have become pretty cold.  However, my flat is notoriously chilly, so it could be that.
• My ribs felt a little sensitive on Wednesday morning, which was likely from all the coughing the night before.
• My thighs were sore on Thursday, but I think that was from the yoga I tried on Wednesday.
• There is definitely muscle fatigue, and a 39-minute yoga video is about the limit of what my body can do at the moment, although today I managed it without once falling over and I was so happy about it that I could have wept.
• The constant brain fog is like trying to find the right radio frequency, back in the days when people still had to turn a dial to tune into radio stations.  I’m looking forward to when it finally finds a song I like.

With the exception of the brain fog and accompanying headache as well as the occasional pitiful cough, I feel I’m more or less over the worst of my Covid symptoms.  Having said that, given the option, I would much rather be waking up tomorrow with the Tennent’s variant.

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