I’m going to repeat some advice I gave you a while ago: don’t catch Covid. I was going to suggest that you “avoid it like the plague“, but I’m not sure it’s really appropriate. In my case, Covid the second time round has been far worse than the first time.
I managed to catch Covid this time, almost certainly, on a transatlantic flight in early September. The symptoms – a cough, aches, a brief time with a temperature, tiredness, shortness of breath and what felt like a stinking cold – came shortly after. Some disappeared, but nearly two months on, some haven’t and it’s really getting irritating now.
I’m still getting tired quicker than I should, I have had some breathlessness which isn’t helped by the arrival of colder weather and the usual return of my asthma and a long, lingering cough that simply won’t go away.
After a few weeks of slow, glacially slow, improvement, I contacted my GP because you never know what it might be and I was given on-line advice to contact the pharmacist, which I did and was recommended various medications which have not made a scrap of difference, other than battering my bank account. So, I contacted them again last week because I still have that cough and it’s going away oh so slowly.
And now I’m off for X Rays, referred not by a doctor but some sort of practitioner, which, as you can imagine, I am really looking forward to. Who doesn’t enjoy a trip to a hospital to see if you’ve got some fatal condition that is inoperable? Hopefully, I haven’t but that of course won’t prevent me from fearing the worst. “Just tell me the worst, doc“, is something I can’t imagine saying. More like, just make up something nice and very minor and tell me it’s all going fine.
It could be old age, it could be my lifestyle, it could be a million things causing this stuff, but I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it’s Covid related. Apart from those who have died of the thing – and I know a good few people who have – it seems to be having a grim effect on those of us who thought we’d made it through, although there will always be some kind of conspiracy theory nut job who will be convinced that my cough is wholly down to Mr Pfizer and his vaccine. As we say so often, you can’t educate pork.
“It may just be pneumonia,” suggested my medical practitioner. Phew, what a relief. Only about 20,000 people in the UK die from it every year. What could possibly go wrong?
