I’ll Never Know If I Ever Had Coronavirus
And it’s likely that neither will a ton of other people
On Sunday, March 29th, I woke up feeling like crap.
I felt uncomfortably cold, then suddenly hot, then cold again all throughout the day (for most of which I was actually asleep). I woke up around eleven o’clock in the morning that Sunday after finishing season three of Ozark on Netflix the night prior. I fell asleep around three in the morning on Saturday night.
When I woke up on Sunday morning feeling terrible, I assumed that it was simply from a lack of sleep from the night before along with a combined lack of sleep from the days leading up to it. On top of that, my anxiety was at its peak due to the constant coronavirus news updates, a bit of cabin fever, and just overall uncertainty of what was to come.
I assumed that all of these factors must have contributed to a normal case of a declined immune system, which happens to me quite often (especially under stress). However, when there’s a global health crisis going on, it’s difficult not to assume the worst.
But, I waited a few days before jumping to conclusions.
On Monday, the next morning, the spikes in my body temperature were gone — I didn’t have a thermometer, so I never actually took my temperature to see if I had fever. Nonetheless, it was no longer an issue anymore. However, I did end up having other symptoms which were a bit peculiar. My sense of taste and smell were completely gone when I woke up on Tuesday morning.
At the time, health officials had only recently learned that a loss of taste and smell was another new symptom that COVID-19-positive patients were reportedly experiencing. Not everyone who tested positive for coronavirus had these symptoms, but a pretty high percentage did. So, I naturally went straight to a self-diagnosis of assuming that I had coronavirus.
My loss of taste and smell lasted exactly one week.
I partially started regaining my senses this past Tuesday, and with each day since then, it’s gotten a little stronger. However, each day that I went on without my sense of taste and smell, the more paranoid and concerned I felt about actually having the virus.
I began retracing my steps, thinking back to everywhere that I had gone leading up to the Sunday when I started feeling unwell. I went for a run outside the Friday before, but only for twenty minutes and I was completely out of the way from other people.
The Tuesday before that, I had gone to my local grocery store with my fiancé, but I made sure to stay away from people. And that was the extent to which I left my house that entire week. So, it just didn’t make sense.
My fiancé, who lives with me, had shown zero symptoms, which I thought was odd. I assumed that if I had it, then he would surely contract it as well given the fact that we’re together every hour of every day. I figured that it would only be a matter of days until he’d start noticing similar symptoms.
But that never happened.
His health has been at its prime. He never showed any symptoms. He never experienced a spike in body temperature. Never lost any of his senses. Never let out even a single cough. It was odd.
Knowing the difficulty that people were having with getting tested, especially those who had much worse symptoms than I had, I figured I didn’t necessarily need to get tested.
I didn’t want a test kit wasted on me if I was in perfect health and the only symptoms I had to show for were my loss of taste and smell. I had no fever (that I knew of), no cough, no scratchy throat, no trouble breathing, no body aches, nothing other than the loss of my two senses. And that, I could live with — but, now that I’ve regained those senses, there’s definitely no need for a test kit since it’s been a full two weeks since that initial day of feeling unwell.
So, all I’m left with now is this mystery of not knowing (and possibly never knowing) whether or not I actually had coronavirus.
I don’t know how worried I should be about living with this uncertainty. I don’t know if I should dig deeper to find out or if I should just let it go. I don’t know if I’m now immune to the virus or if I should be worried of potentially contracting it in the future. I don’t know if I should just be grateful to be alive and well. All I know is that I don’t know anything for sure and that’s the part that scares me.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, check out “All The Things I Took for Granted Before Coronavirus”
