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Previous post on the coronavirus: Sheltering in place – fine by me.
A brief update on how I’m doing. I caught the coronavirus last week and this is the sixth day since I started having symptoms. The only symptoms I’ve had have been body aches and some fatigue. I’ve been taking it easy, doing a lot of resting and drinking hot liquids and staying the hell away from other people. Today the aches are mostly gone, keeping me in the 80% of people who get the coronavirus and have mild symptoms.
I’m happy to spend time at home and have friends bring me groceries. I still take out my own garbage, but unless I’m doing that or collecting groceries from a friend at curbside, I don’t go outside. I’m not an exerciser. I only use my back entrance and have even taped over my front door to remind me to avoid using the inside stairwell all my neighbors use.
I’m getting good at Zoom meetings. I haven’t watched a full movie yet because my business has me still working from home, when I’m not napping. I’m also more of a reader and am currently re-reading Nassir Ghaemi’s A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness. I blogged about this fascinating book when I first read it in 2013 and will probably blog about it again soon.
My worst problem is that the charging port of my iPhone stopped accepting the charger. It’s as if a piece of rice is stuck up in there, but I’ve followed all the advice I’ve found online and I can’t get the charger to connect. So I can’t charge iPhonium, which is what I call my iPhone. Fortunately, being at home, I can do everything I need on my iPad and MacBook Pro. The only thing I need iPhonium for is phone calls and the connection to texting (I can text on my tablet, but only if I have a phone connection to SMS.)
So I pulled out an old iPhone I still had – thank DOG. It was state-of-the-art in 2014 and I’ll call it Hop-along. I deleted a bunch of apps since Hop-along won’t accept updates and I set it up so calls and texts forward to my iPad. I just use Hop-along for phone calls.
Aggravatingly, a minute ago my iPad rang, but Hop-along didn’t! A phone call went through Hop-along to my iPad which is the device I had to take the call on. Fortunately, it was a brief call and the caller didn’t know I was shouting into an iPad instead of talking into a phone. Come on, Hop-along! I think Hop-along is overwhelmed. I’ve been using it since Wednesday when iPhonium went down. Hop-along thought it was retired, but now it has to function in a whole new world that demands much more of it than it ever had to do in 2014, 2015 or 2016. It’s slow.
It’ll be nice to have a T-Mobile or Apple store to walk into so I can either get iPhonium serviced or replaced….in May??
And that’s it for me.
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No problem. I can't imagine how it would be for people who have anxiety on more severe levels.
Matt, there's a lot of anxiety about getting close to people and I know people who never want to leave their homes again. This is all terrible for people who already manage chronic anxiety. Thanks for writing.
Hi, I have only just seen your post and I haven't visited your page for some time. Sorry to hear you had Covid, at least it was only mild symptoms, but I can see you still were quite unwell with how you were lying on the sofa under a blanket. I have known of a few people like yourself who also only had mild symptoms, they said it was basically similar to having flu. There have been many horror stories here in the UK as well, I am still social distancing and washing my hands as much as I can. As I suffer from anxiety, the fears have been higher for me and I almost jump if someone gets close to me as sadly some people haven't been following the social distancing rules.
classikal- I know! I don't think I've even seen any stories of people with mild symptoms who recovered just fine. I also wish there were more news about people who have already recovered from the coronoavirus. I want to know if I can expect to be immune and non-contagious in another week or two. Or not…?
Thanks for the update on your progress through COVID-19. I appreciate hearing from someone who doesn't have a horror story 🙂