And thankfully, I don't seem to have any lingering symptoms. (Though my sinuses are a bit, "Hey, where is that nightly Benadryl, that was great!) Here was my timeline - and it was WAY longer than I would have preferred...
Day 0 - Symptom onset, did not test cause I wrote it off to general cat-wrangling fatigue.
Day 1 - Light positive (Not me thinking, "Maybe this is already the tail end of it?" HAHAHAHA!)
Day 2-7 - Very positive
Day 8 - Light positive
Day 9-10 - Positive/Negative depending on the angle I held the test under the light - OH, FFS.
Day 11 - Barely positive regardless of lighting - ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Day 12-14 - True negative three days in a row!
Day 2 of testing, my symptoms had resolved. Did the nightly Benadryl help? IDK, but it certainly didn't hurt. Overall my symptoms were fatigue & achy-ness, slightly scratchy throat, and a bit of a headache. I was also very lucky in that my symptoms were brief & genuinely mild.
I find I keep saying "genuinely mild" because I remember in the early days when they were telling us, "Oh, like 80% of Covid cases are mild" and we all thought, "OK, well, mild isn't too bad, right?" and then we found out that "mild" just meant "you'll be flat on your back for two weeks, but you won't need to be admitted to a hospital."
Honestly, had I not needed to test for my acupuncture appointment, I may very well have written it all off to walking A LOT in Baltimore and the vet visit being physically strenuous and mentally stressful cause I was worried about the kitties behaving. (Thankfully, I did have an N95 on at the vet appointment, and yes I should have tested before it, but it just completely slipped my mind.)
According to the current CDC guidelines, I could have been out & about with "additional precautions" on Day 3 of testing and just done whatever on Day 8. I was still fucking positive on Day 8 and if I'd followed the CDC guidelines, I could have easily infected someone else. Granted, I wasn't gonna do whatever, I'm still masking up indoors and I'm gonna make sure I don't get distracted and fuck up again - but jesus, what shitty guidelines.
Can't help but wonder if the change in guidelines is just a tacit acknowledgement that so few people have dedicated sick leave, and thanks to 50+ years of being told in America "if you can't do it on your own, you suck" - a lot of people don't have the support systems they need to get through an extended isolation period.
I haven't seen a soul in a mask in I don't know how long. And because there are so few people actively taking any precautions, if you are trying to actively take precautions, you gotta be pretty damn perfect about it right now.
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