I have heard that Covid hits everyone differently. For me, it began like a cold. I was working on my car one evening, and I began to feel run down. Every December, I catch a cold, so I wasn’t that surprised when my throat started hurting, a headache set in, and my energy level evaporated. I was prepared with Robitussin, because the same cold hits me every year around Christmastime. The sore throat passed quickly, and then I just felt tired. I also coughed a bit and was congested. It wasn’t that bad, so I carried on as normal. The first sign that something more was going on happened the day after Christmas. I woke up in the middle of the night soaked in sweat and freezing cold. The night sweats would continue until I was through the worst of the illness. This is also when I began to experience body aches. I spent most of the weekend after Christmas sleeping and laying around. I began to suffer from a constant headache and to cough more.

By Monday, I was exhausted all the time, regardless of how much I slept. The muscles in my eyes had begun to hurt, and my headache had gotten quite severe. I slept more than half the day and went to bed early. Tuesday morning, I decided it was time to go to the doctor. My whole body hurt and my stomach went back and forth between nausea and cramps. That morning, I got a positive Covid rapid test. The test itself was easy. The nurse swabbed my nostrils with a Q-tip and set up the test. 15 minutes later, I had my answer. I was told to take a variety of vitamins and other medicines. I spent a large part of the day calling people I had been in contact with to let them know they’d be hearing from the health department. This was perhaps the hardest part of the whole ordeal. As sick as I got, I hated telling folks that they would have to quarantine, and that I had exposed them. While my wife and I went through the process of being sick with Covid, my kids had to quarantine because they had been exposed. They also had to stay away from us so they weren’t exposed further. They spent the next week living upstairs in our house, while my wife and I lived downstairs. We all wore masks when we left our respective rooms, in order to minimize the potential for passing the bug around.

For the following week, dealing with Covid was a lot like having a really bad case of the flu. My stomach was upset, my head and body hurt, I coughed constantly, and my head ached. My wife lost her sense of taste and smell midway through the week. It took about 7 days to reach the point where I could get up and around. I continued to deal with extreme fatigue in the week that followed. Nearly three weeks since my symptoms began, I still am dealing with low energy and daily headaches.

One difficult aspect of being sick with Covid has been dealing with the kids being quarantined. All three of the kids wound up missing the first week of school for the year. They all did their schoolwork from home. In addition, a handful of other kids I had contact with wound up quarantined for the week as well. Dealing with the virus has been miserable, but negatively affecting the lives of my family and friends has been the hardest part of the whole ordeal.