After all of the criticism I’ve directed toward Coronamaniacs and the Vaxxmongers over the past three years—in-person and online—I know that many of them have wished that I’d get very sick and die “from Covid.” If I had, they would have gleefully jeered me, as many did when lockdown critic Herman Cain died. Bear in mind that Mr. Cain was 74 and had Stage IV cancer.
But I haven’t died “from Covid.” Like the super-vast majority of people, I was never at any risk of doing so.
While I’d prefer to never get sick, I always knew it was possible that I might “get Covid,” just as I had gotten some other, prior, unnamed coronavirus-driven colds or flus. It’s how life is, has been and will always be. Many people seem to be sick lately. It doesn’t help immune function to be in the low light/low Vitamin D state of winter. And during the past three years of disrupted social life, our immune systems haven’t been properly tested.
Many have said that, by Spring, 2022, everyone had been exposed to Covid-causing coronaviruses. Maybe it’s true, though it sounds like hyperbole; I’m not sure how this could be known. Regardless, except for one February, 2020 day of malaise, and then a week-long dry cough with no apparent cause—perhaps a quick, nearly asymptomatic, pre-Lockdown brush with Covid, or perhaps nothing at all—I’ve felt fine for the past three years.
Last week, on the day after Christmas, that changed. My muscles started to ache. These aches spread and lasted for three days, accompanied by a tight chest and a banging headache. On Day 2, I also got a high fever. I let the fever crest until I took some Tylenol to moderate my temperature. Serial doses over the next two days quelled the headaches. My wife got sick the day after I did and exhibited the same symptoms. By our respective Day 4s, we each felt much better.
Aside from the fever, we didn’t have the publicized, original Covid symptoms: shortness of breath, dry cough and fatigue. Plus, for what it’s worth, we each tested negative on home antigen tests that my wife had gotten in the mail. Thus, we mutually guessed that we probably had some form of flu. I didn’t care whether or not I had “had Covid.” That diagnosis never scared me. I only cared that we felt sick for three days.
A day later, by coincidence—or perhaps because my computer was, in our surveillance society, eavesdropping on my wife and my conversations about how we were feeling, physically—this clickbait headline appeared on my screen: “The New Symptoms of Covid.”
I took the bait. The article set forth a revised list of symptoms closely resembling those that my wife and I had just endured.
Hmm. Maybe we did “have Covid.” The new kind. Because heaven forbid that anyone might think that they just got some unspecified sort of cold or flu, as they might have thought three-plus years ago.
