Halifax! Covid and a hurricane!
(read this in the style of the Scorpions, pls and thank you)
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the near-impenetrable brain fog I am currently experiencing, for which reason it is likely to be quite short, but I hope it is also at least slightly amusing.
Tl;dr: My partner and I both caught Covid, and on this lovely Autumnal Equinox day, a hurricane is bearing down on Nova Scotia.
Interesting times, folks!
Given my current extreme inability to organize thoughts, let me do this in the form of a self-directed FAQ:
So how’d you catch Covid after all this time?
Well, I think it was mostly dumbassery attached to my overconfidence about being in Canada, where the vaccination rate is so much higher and the government has dropped a lot of its regulations. My best guess is that it happened at the climbing gym, where a bunch of newly-minted university students and little kids were jamming up the place on Friday evening. Back home, we were masking in the gym; up here, we’ve gotten more lax. The more fools us.
The sad part is that we had all these marvelous plans for this past weekend—we were going to spend our microcovids at a house music event and a goth night. We made it to neither thing, but still managed to get sick! Bummer.
How’s the symptoms?
Bizarre. On the one hand, I am now absoutely certain I had Covid in June of 2020, in spite of the negative test and the mystery as to where I could have caught it. The symptoms are near-identical, and about as unpredictable as then.
Monday night I got a sore throat and felt increasingly wiped; I took a rapid test and had the faintest of lines, almost invisible except under a cell phone light. That night I simply could not get warm under the covers and had terrible muscle aches. I woke up with a metallic taste in my mouth, which hasn’t returned.
Tuesday I woke up, took another test, was definitively positive, and proceeded to stay in bed the entire day and eat almost nothing. Tried soup around 9:30 pm, but couldn’t finish it. My partner pushed fluids and got me all kinds of meds.
Yesterday I woke up feeling considerably better, though still weak and with cold symptoms. Then last night I started to spike a fever again, which felt like my skin being on fire, and my head filled up entirely with mucus, replacing my brains. I barely slept last night, catching a couple hours that were full of torture nightmares, and then a couple more that were interrupted by Halifax deciding that Today Was The Day to tear up and repave the street outside my bedroom window.
Today I just feel like I have a bad cold, but also like I’ll hit a wall at some point and need to go nap.
Oh, and nothing tastes good except sweets and fruit. So that’s fun.
Wait, what was that about a hurricane?
Oh yeah, so the remnants of Hurricane Fiona, which devastated Puerto Rico earlier this week, are headed for Atlantic Canada, and we’re about to find out whether we’re going to lose power or have a tree crash into our house or something. So that’s fun.
Intrepid partner is currently out securing water and Sudafed and battery packs for us. (Wearing a well-fitted N-95.) I am trying to get up the will to cook so we can have food in the house. We have an electric stove, so if the power goes out we can’t heat it up, but we have ice so the fridge can be used as an icebox for some amount of time, and if we really need to we can use the gas grill downstairs.
Halifax! Grilling in a hurricane!
Sorry, folks, this is apparently as good as it gets when my brain is porridged by Covid. Also, I seriously do not know what is going on with this video, which I don’t think I’ve seen since I was nine and I’m sure I was damn confused by it then as well.