I got the ‘rona. Again.

(sigh)

I, like many people, had pretty much dismissed COVID as a thing, so I wasn’t expecting to come down with it, again.

Apparently the latest strain is pretty contagious and it lasts longer than older strains. I have two friends who tested positive for three weeks.

I don’t know where I was exposed. I live a pretty isolated life. We live in a rural area, I don’t see people outside of my family very often, and days can go by where I don’t leave the farm.

On Sunday night I started feeling bad: sore throat, a little congestion and a headache. In the middle of the night I got up to find I was running a fever.

Great. I should point out that I normally measure my temperature around 97F so this was high for me.

The next morning, out of an abundance of caution, I used one of those new Flu/COVID tests and it came up with a strong positive.

It’s funny. They say you have to wait 15 minutes in order to see if you have COVID, but both times I’ve had it that first test has gone positive immediately when the sample liquid hits that part of the testing device.

The last time I was infected there was no treatment. You just isolated and dealt with it. Now that there is a treatment, Paxlovid, I decided to try it out.

Paxlovid is not a cure for COVID, but it is supposed to help reduce the symptoms and speed the process of getting the virus out of the body. You take it for five days, twice a day, and each dose consists of three pills.

The main ingredient is nirmatrelvir (two of the three pills) which acts to keep the COVID virus from replicating, and this is combined with ritonavir (the last pill) which acts to prevent the liver from metabolizing the nirmatrelvir so it can fight the virus longer.

I really don’t have a comparison experience to know if it helped or not, but once I started taking it I never felt as bad as I did that Sunday night. I did have a bad side effect of a nasty taste in my mouth (dysgeusia) which tasted very metallic with a side of what I assume road kill would taste like. It was strongest a couple of hours after taking a dose but never totally went away. I have heard that cinnamon candy is good against it but I just ate Altoids by the handful.

In the clinical trial only 6% of the test subjects reported this bad taste but anecdotally it seems to affect a lot of people.

A friend of mine who recently got infected said that after he took the Pax for five days his symptoms came back even stronger. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.

Now you might be asking “why didn’t you get vaxxed?”. Well, I did.

I can only assume that the two weeks between getting my shot and my exposure wasn’t enough to build up immunity, or that the recent cuts in mRNA research means that the vaccine isn’t as effective.

The main issue I’m facing is kidney pain, well, severe pain in my lower back. At first I thought it was just from sleeping poorly (I’m old) but it persisted. The doctor doesn’t know what is going on but we’re keeping an eye on it.

Anyway, just thought I’d share. Go get vaxxed and keep wearing those masks.