siiky
2022/05/31
2022/07/07
en
Late at the night of 2022/05/17, while reading Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue before going to sleep, I started feeling sick -- tired, minor headache, and raspy throat that started earlier during the day. The following morning I felt like total shit: I could barely stand, my head was killing me (the first real head ache I've had in many years!), felt dizzy, my mouth dry as a bone yet water seemed like it did nothing. There was no goddamn paracetamol in the house, I would be alone until 19h~20h, and needless to say I couldn't go to the pharmacy myself. Luckily, my dad managed to escape work for a bit to bring me some, at around 13h... or 14h?... Don't remember now... Still hadn't eaten anything the whole morning, and I wasn't even hungry -- though this by itself isn't surprising since I started skipping breakfast close to one year ago, but let's leave that for another post -- and I slept most of the time -- sleeping was fuckin' great! The paracetamol really helped, my unscientific and uninformed guess of a reason being that I rarely take any meds -- don't usually need 'em or I just 我慢 motherfucker! Because I can. Anyway, this was basically it for the first day: sleep, sleep, sleep. At the end of the day I did a COVID self-test and it gave positive -- "Why settle for B- when you can have A+?", says Nicole's dad (insert appropriate Samuel L. Jackson motherfucker meme). At dinner I had soup but couldn't bring myself to eat even one third of what I usually eat. "Weird," I thought, and shrugged back to sleep.
Thursday morning woke up at like 7h again... and still feeling like shit... Went through the bureaucracy of registering myself as a possible positive in the national health system and scheduling a confirmation lab test. Turns out, you don't actually schedule the test, you just wait for some code from the health system, and then you can go to any lab at any time and use the code for a free test. Went for mine at 14h, close to 15h. Damn nurses or whatever they are, sticking the damn cotton swab into you till it touches the back of your neck, and laughing all the while. For lunch I tried some chicken nuggets (of those you can just stick into the microwave), and guess what, it tasted so salty I couldn't taste anything else, at all, only salt. Had some bread afterwards -- at least that just didn't taste like anything. At dinner I had some soup again, but I could eat even less of it than the previous day. It tasted so bad I started feeling ill, nauseated. It's not that it didn't taste like anything, because of lack of smell and/or taste, but that it really tasted bad. I even tested it: smelled a some chocolate cookies, and they smelled fucking great! But tasted like shit...
On Friday I woke up already feeling hungry, probably because I hadn't eaten that much since it all started. But I was so tired I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, close to lunch time, I was feeling even more tired and hungry. Since soup tasted like shit, but bread didn't, I decided to try something somewhat similar-ish, that I like a lot: tuna pasta! Except I made it plainer than radio music: water, pasta, tuna, and the smallest pinch of salt you could possibly pinch with your pinchy fingers. I was feeling so weak while cooking that I mouthed a coffee-spoonful of sugar for fear of passing out. I made it, managed to cook some without falling on my side, and still to get back to my room with food to eat! And I was so glad the pasta didn't taste like shit! I even went back for seconds! はい、お代わり！ It was enough for lunch, dinner, and lunch the next day (not that I made that much, I just didn't eat that much).
This food-tasting-like-shit-and-feeling-indisposed-afterwards continued throughout the following week, after I was supposed to be COVID-free already. But I'm alright now, I think, and making plans for eating out one of these days.
Reading it back, I don't think I managed to convey well enough how bad this part of the experience was... I'm not even sure that was the intent of the post, but wanted to make it clear now that it really was the worst part! If you can help avoid it, do! You really don't want food to taste like shit, it sucks ass. And if you do end up catching it, sleep as much as you can, it really helps.