03/17/2024
I have been really ill this last week with Covid. Avoided it for four years, that is until my wife brought it home from Las Vegas Nevada after visiting our daughter for 2 days. I warned her not to bring back Covid I a heard it is spreading there. Well she did. Tested positive the next day. I avoided her for several days, hoping not to get it, but did. Last Sunday, I began to feel ill. Did a Covid test and came out positive. That night all hell broke loose. A sore throat unlike any that I have ever had in my entire life. Each time I swallowed it as as if I downed a glowing red hot coal. I have never had a sore throat of such intensity before. For three days I suffered actaually foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. I could not swallow my own saliva, and it became foam in my mouth. We automatically swallow up to 1.5 liters of such each day, and this allows us to maintain hydration. Unable to rest and sleep I was awake for near 3 days, dehydrating as I could not take in any fluids. Though I chugged down to swallow the three Paxlovid pills in the morning and evening with excruciating pain with each swallow. By Tuesday, it was crisis time. Very dehydrated, I lost consciousness, and Diane called for an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I had hit my head on the floor boards, very hard, and also did something to my left leg in the fall. I regained consciousness, before the arrival of the ambulance. At the hospital they did a CT scan of my head to see if I did not have a brain bleed. They did a number of other tests of my blood, and X-Ray of my chest showing that my lungs were not so far involved. I was dehydrated and a IV brought my hydration up. All the while each swallow was as if I had swallowed a fireball. So rather than enduring that I spit out my foam into a spit bucket that was given to me. After six hours the doctor finally came in and told me and my wife that there was nothing that they could do for me. That I would just have to endure Covid and keep ahead of the symptoms. As much as he saw from my charts I was OK having Covid so far. But said that if it becomes an issue in my lungs and breathing becomes a problem, then intubation the the preferred treatment. So I was discharged with some medication that could supposedly deal with my sore throat,. the worst sore thought I have ever had. I would hot wish it on anyone. So today, Sunday, the 17th, I am recovering. Fireballs down the throat gone, but a transient soreness remains. Some coughing, and a foggy feeling in my head. For four years I avoided Covid and it got me good. I do have a underlying atuo-immune condition that has kept me form getting ill with Covid or any other disease for the last 20 years. I have not been sick one day over that time, till Covid "knocked on my door." That auto-immune system battled a unknown virus in the Summer of 1975 that nearly killed me. Till 1986 I was not ill, till my daughter got Chicken Pox, and then gave it to me, that nearly got me too. Then not ill after till 1991, when as a National Park Ranger I contracted Hanta Virus. That put me at deaths door. I recovered from it over the months after. All well till Jan 2003 when I came down with my auto-immune response to a spider bite on my head that resulted in ADEM. And that incident 21 years ago nearly took my life. I had a cubic inch of my left brain removed. And it took me months into two years to basically recover from it. Had Jesus, of whom I saw in my coma 21 years ago not send me back... I would not be writing this now. There is a reason for everything I suppose. Though I fail to see a reason for Covid. Now I must be mindful that my auto-immune system (disease) does not go on as it did 21 years ago. I just cannot lose another inch or so of my brain.
