My adventure with COVID 19

 I started back to work yesterday in a limited capacity after being laid up with COVID for three weeks.

It was only a matter of time, really. It just took longer to get to us because we were social distancing before it was cool. Really, we are located in the woods, halfway up a mountain, about a mile and a half from the closest paved road. We generally only leave the property maybe 2-3 times a month to get chicken feed and perishable groceries, pick up prescriptions at the pharmacy in the next town etc. It isn't quite at the level where you could call us "hermits", but except in the good weather when Wendy and Ellie go to homeschooler meetups our life isn't too far removed from hermithood. 

For the past two years that the world has been losing it's collective mind, we have simply shrugged it off and chosen not to play. We don't wear silly masks, armbands, or beanies with propellers on top because any thinking person can see that that nonsense won't stop the transmission of an engineered bioweapon. We don't get experimental, untested injections. We shake hands like normal people. We get together with other homeschooler families who think alike and do our best to live normally.

Yeah, we know exactly who brought COVID into our home. It was a guest who stayed here for nearly a week so our experience with it doesn't really give us any indication about just how virulent and easily transmitted it actually is. So much for that experiment!

At the end of the 1st week in February, the girls came down with COVID. 10 year old Ellie had a fever and was lethargic for two days, then it was over for her. Wendy ended up in bed for a week with the fever, aches and pains, coughing, and head congestion. After a few days of fever, it broke and life went on. The interesting thing is that I had no symptoms that first week and tested solidly negative on the (made in China) free tests that the government had mailed out, while Wendy was a solid positive.

It worked out well that I was not sick because I got to be healthy to take care of the girls while they were sick. Right when Wendy was snapping out of it, it hit me. First, I was just sorta tired and took a Sunday off. The next day I was in bed, sleeping all day and feverish.

The feverish stuff continued for about a week and ended itself with one miserable, sweaty night that left the bedding soaked with sweat.

Now two years ago, I had planned to treat the fever part of COVID with "The Bark" like thy would have in the 18th century. Peruvian Bark (yellow cinchona bark) is what was used to treat anything with a fever in the 18th century because it is a natural source of quinine, and of course quinine treats malaria. Not having much understanding about microbiology then, since it treated the fevers of malaria, it was used to treat all fevers, regardless of whether that makes good scientific sense or not. Basically, it is the colonial homesteader version of the synthesized drug "Chloroquine" which was used early on in the COVID scenario before big pharma figured out how to get stunningly rich with their so-called "vaccines" and endless boosters. The plan was to use it if anyone's fever was TOO high.

The body produces a fever for a reason when it is fighting off an illness. Our normal practice in this family is to leave fevers alone to do their thing unless it is too high. Since none of our fevers really reached a point I would consider dangerous enough to intervene, we just all took our turns sweating it out.

The effects of COVID are still lingering with the following symptoms:

1. Sinus congestion. I mean REALLY congested, but not my nasal passages. All of the little sinus cavities in my head are plugged to the point that I can barely hear (as if I wasn't deaf enough already!) and my balance is off so I'm staggering around like a drunk guy at times. I can breathe through my nose just fine though.

2. The sinus congestion dribbles down my throat and makes me cough & hack. Lungs are clear though. Going out into the cold air to take care of the chickens leads to a lot of coughing afterwards, no doubt having to do with the cold air hitting the warm lungs. This might be normal...I had surgery last year to open up the airways in my face and I am still not yet used to breathing in a chest full of cold air all at once yet because for most of my life I had to work at it.

3. Exhaustion. This is the worst of it. I have never been so friggin' tired in my life! This is a tired of a type I have never experienced. You lay down in bed and the feeling is just bliss! Laying in bed you don't even watch TV because holding up your head to watch TV and read the subtitles just seems like too much exertion. You don't read in bed either because holding up a book is too much work. It is the weirdest thing.

4. Loss of sense of smell/diminishment of certain taste functions. While the loss of smell is unsettling, it is the taste thing that pisses me off because I like food. Not all tastes are affected though. I can still taste chocolate. I'm not quite sure what I can't taste because it is hard to know when something doesn't exist, you know? Regardless, it is nothing that can't be overcome by adding more hot sauce and it makes me wonder what post-COVID cuisine is going to be like with hopped-up flavors to overcompensate for people's damaged sense of taste.

5. COVID-head aka "brain fog". This is a weird one, and I haven't fully thought through the hows and whys of it. COVID makes you kind of stupid. Not "dumb" in that you can't understand and ponder deep subjects...this doesn't lower your IQ in any way. What it does is interfere with your ability to work out the operation of your body. For instance, a week or so ago, I set out to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. It took about 4 or 5 trips to the pantry to get things, put things back, figure out what order to assemble the sandwich in, etc.  Yesterday I was heading upstairs after work and wanted to bring the mail, my empty switchel glass, and a little bucket I bring the day's egg in with upstairs all in one trip and shut the shop lights out in the process. The mail was laying on the stairs. The glass in my left hand, the bucket in my right. It probably took me 5 minutes of standing there picking things up and putting them down again to work out that I could put the stack of mail under the arm that held the glass, put the bucket down on the stairs, flick the light switches with my right hand and simply pick the bucket back up before going upstairs. It is kind of funny, but really frustration and it is getting old.

At this juncture, the way I am staying awake all day is by consuming 3 to 4 times my normal daily intake of caffeine. Each dose takes about 5-10 minutes to kick in and keeps me going for 2-3 hours. I realize that it is time for more when I am suddenly so damn tired that I find myself laying my head down on the table like a toddler who falls asleep in their spaghetti. (to clarify, I don't fall asleep in my food LOL)

Yesterday I felt functional enough to work in the shop and even to (gasp!) use power tools! I managed to get a couple of guns torn down & prepped before running out of steam and today I shipped them. Right before this all hit at the beginning of February, we had got in a shipment of stuff and I had just started to unpack the crates & log the stuff in...it has been sitting there ever since and I hope to get that squared away over the next few days in addition to getting stuff flowing out the door again.

Now, would I do anything differently if we had it to do over again?

Nope. Still wouldn't wear a silly mask. Still wouldn't get the experimental injections. Still would visit other families. Does this suck? Well, yeah. I've been sicker though. Sometime I'll write about the time I lost 30 pounds in three weeks with salmonella poisoning that I picked up at a fancy banquet with the Lt Governor of MA years ago. Like my daughter says: some things just suck.

Was this worth crushing freedom, the economy, global commerce, a couple of years of normal child development (for the non-homeschoolers out there), two years of social division and psychological stress over? Absolutely not!