One Man’s Coronavirus
Just starting with mild to moderate Coronavirus symptoms? Then read on for my experience and what I found helpful during 4 weeks of Covid-19.
For the last four weeks my wife and I have had ‘mild to moderate’ Coronavirus symptoms. We didn’t need to be hospitalised, but our GP paid us a visit at one point. And during this time we have learnt a few things that I thought would be worth passing on to fellow sufferers, always with the caveat that this is not medical advice but just my personal experience. Neither of us have any underlying health issues of which we are aware. We are 57 and 61 years of age.
It all started some two weeks after lockdown. First my wife Judi developed a cough, and the next day a temperature, and the day after that her heart rate spiked at 135, while sitting in bed, and she collapsed. That is when we had to call the doctor, who diagnosed ‘probable Coronavirus’ — we live in the UK so we would have had to go to hospital to be tested. For the subsequent three weeks Judi continued to cough and only four weeks later have the symptoms begun to subside.
Meanwhile, I became breathless, developed an elevated pulse and, at night, developed the Covid red-toe! I too had a temperature briefly. And only now have I started feeling somewhere approximating to normal again.
During the past month the advice that we have found most helpful has come from GP friends and from national newspapers, in the US and UK, rather than from Government Guidance. Here are the three things we found most helpful:
The Pulse Oximeter
This is the device that the doctor attached to my wife’s finger when she examined her following her collapse. It is available online for around $25 and tells you your pulse (hardly revelatory in the age of the FitBit) but crucially also your blood oxygen saturation level (SATS), which turns out to be highly useful for this particular infection. This is explained in this New York Times article.
In short New York doctor Richard Levitan noticed that Covid-19 patients can experience low oxygen saturation levels (92 or below) without experiencing breathing discomfort. By the time they made it to hospital their SATS level was as low as 50 and they could be in an advanced stage of pneumonia.
Monitoring your SATS level enables you to spot potentially adverse developments early and pick up the phone to the NHS helpline or equivalent. The earlier you receive medical intervention, the less likely it is that your condition will deteriorate to a stage where you need a ventilator.
While my lungs felt like they were full of cotton wool, my SATS did not dip below 92 and thankfully I didn’t need to make that call.
Prepare for the long haul
Covid-19 has been like no other infection I have contracted. It is not like a cold or flu that builds to a climax and then drops off over the period of a week or so. It hangs around. This article in the Guardian sums it up. At the start of the outbreak our local hospital was making follow up calls to confirmed cases three weeks after they had been discharged to check that they had recovered. They discovered that no-one had done so in that period and have now extended it to six weeks.
If you have Covid-19 you need to prepare for being ‘gaslit’ by the virus. One day you feel like you are on the mend and might even be suckered into getting up off the sofa and doing some housework. The next day — bang! — it is back with a vengeance. You must have just been imagining it. Some newspaper wags have dubbed it the ‘Coronacoaster.’
My advice would be if you are in the slightest doubt about the authenticity of your recovery, choose a box set, podcast or a book, or take a nap, and engage that parasympathetic nervous system. You will need all the energy you can conserve to deal with the infection.
The persistence of the virus takes a mental toll. You begin to experience just a little of what sufferers of conventional chronic illnesses know; that chronic physical illness can affect your mental health too.
Avoid sleeping flat on your back
I write this, but let’s be honest, in four weeks I haven’t figured out how best to sleep. When I say sleep, I think three hours is the longest sustained period of rest I have managed.
However, at an early stage a GP friend said that sleeping flat on ones back is not advised for chest infections of this sort. My friend suggested sleeping in a reclined position — halfway between flat and sitting bolt upright. Some publications have reported research from Zhangda hospital in China that suggested sleeping on your front might help, on the basis that it helps to relieve pressure on congested lungs, and many respiratory physiotherapists would support this view.
I suspect personal physiology comes into play when determining the best approach, but I opted for a hybrid approach, spending half of the night on my front and half of the night reclined. I didn’t do this systematically but this is how it tended to pan out as I tossed around trying to find a position of ease.
So, there we are. Just a brief piece in which I have shared my experience in the interest of helping you make sense of this illness if you find yourself in a similar position. I hope that you’ll never need to refer to it, but it’s here just in case…
Post script
So, here we are, 9 weeks on from the original infection and still not well. Both my wife and I are still on the Coronacoaster. My wife still has a cough. I struggle to sleep through the night: most nights I wake up at some point feeling that my lungs are full of cotton wool and I have to experiment with various sleeping positions before I can get back to sleep.
And seemingly we are not alone. Today’s Guardian reported four case studies of people in a similar position. Still, there have been 60,000 excess deaths in the UK (the excess of deaths over the normal seasonal trend is the most accurate way of estimating Corona deaths, as the 40,000 widely reported are only cases that have tested positive for Covid-19. Many people died at home and in nursing homes before testing became widely available). So we count ourselves among the lucky ones.
Stay safe, my friends.
