Friday, January 14th, 2022, 12:42

Mood: LOL I LITERALLY STILL HAVE COVID

Hola amigos. What's good? Shit got kind of scary yesterday ngl. If you're sick of me talking about covid, skip to the bottom of the post where I say I'm done talking about it. (Be forewarned: my isolation hobbies have gotten absolutely ridiculous, so I'm gonna be talking about extremely trite and obnoxious things.) But if you're interested, either because you yourself have EDS or because you have covid or, if you're lucky enough, both. Stick around.

So, yesterday, I woke up raspy asf and feeling like my upper respiratory system was straight-up full of just cheese. You know how cheese, like, when it melts, it just coats everything it touches and won't come up? That's what my upper respiratory system felt like, just like someone had melted a bunch of parmesan and just left it like that. It was fucking gross. So I went to take a super hot shower to try to steam everything loose, and I parked my ass on the chair when I was done and I was just wiped the entire fuck out. My temp had gotten up to 99.6-99.9F: my first fever since I got covid 5-7 days ago. And my HR was 110-130, even when I was sitting down. I was like, oh shit, it's gotten actually bad. Like I legit have bronchitis now.

So, this is pretty consistent with the usual symptom timeline of covid. It'll be like "milder" for the first 5-7 days, and then it'll make its way into the rest of the respiratory tract where it will really start to fuck shit up. Usually, if someone needs admitted to hospital, it'll be in that 5-7 day window. I was starting to really freak out. Fortunately my dad and Pat's mom are both RNs and were able to talk me down and tell me next steps. Heather brought me a breathing machine in case I need it but my physician's office told me don't bother with the machine, just go to the ER ASAP if I legit got to where I couldn't breathe. It was definitely the scariest point of this whole covid experience, and keep in mind I am still 100% considered a mild case.

I literally cannot imagine going through this without a vaccine. I know a few other people with comorbidities who got covid unvaccinated, either because they had the OG covid and we didn't have vaccines yet or because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and they ended up in hospital in that 5-7 day window needing steroids and shit. I can totally understand why now. My bronchitis from this has been so bad there has been times where I've felt like I'm just drowning in my own secretions. I know that's gross, but bear with me. I'm oversharing because I think everyone needs to know, especially people with comorbidities, that this is a serious fucking disease and to take their health seriously.

My risk factors are that I have EDS/POTS, bipolar (apparently mood disorders are a risk factor, go figure, I wonder if they're controlling for living conditions), and I did smoke cigarettes and vape for 13 years. I quit in August 2020. But other than this my BMI is normal range, I exercise regularly with cardio 2x per week and then I try to do strength 2x per week (but usually I'm just like, whatever, my office is a one-mile walk round trip from the nearest parking lot), and I'm vegetarian and do not eat dairy. I use zinc and vitamin c as well. I don't even drink coffee. And, of course, I'm double-vaccinated with Moderna and boosted as well. Like, I take really good care of myself. I was diagnosed EDS on January 6th, 2020, and then that plus this covid shit gave me a serious reality check about my health. I do not fuck around with my health now, at all. And I would say this bout of covid bronchitis has been about as bad, maybe a little better, than when I got bronchitis in 2010.

For clarification: in 2010, I was a serious alcoholic living in poverty with a bunch of other punks, and we didn't have any heat in our house in the dead winter of Wisconsin. I was eating like shit--like literally we were eating out of the garbage and food pantries exclusively--and had just recovered from a case of intestinal parasites a couple months prior, which I had gotten from eating out of the garbage. I was really not even drinking water, only whiskey and coffee, which was exacerbating my kidney stones bad. I smoked like a chimney and had since tenth grade. Like, I was bad, y'all. I eventually got a cold which turned into bronchitis, and I just stayed having bronchitis for almost a month until I mentioned on the phone to my dad that my cough had gotten so bad I was pulling abdominal muscles. He ended up picking me up from my house, obviously seething with well-warranted disappointment that I let myself go so bad, and took me to the urgent care. I ended up recovering after about two weeks of antibiotics from that.

That was still a way worse case of bronchitis than what I have, but I juxtapose the two cases to illustrate just how bad covid can get. If just covid can cause me to suffer almost as severe a case of bronchitis as I basically gave myself living in squalor and being a serious alcoholic, we need to take this shit seriously. Again, granted, I do have a lot of those comorbidities, and all of them except my smoking are on account of my genetics. However, this is how fucked this disease is. I just really hope I stay on the mend. Thanks to everyone who has checked in on me and sent their well-wishes. I also am very fortunate and privileged to have a job where I can work from home, and supervisors who are reminding me that I'm human and need to recover.

OK, IF YOU ARE SICK OF ALL THE COVID TALK AND WANT TO JUST KNOW THE WEIRD STUFF I'VE BEEN UP TO IN ISOLATION, READ BELOW!

So one person I've become really fascinated by is Grimes. Like ??? first of all, if she hasn't already been diagnosed autistic, I am 100% sure she's autistic. For another, I've watched a lot of interviews of hers today and like other nonmusical content, and... the juxtaposition between her older communist ideological and aesthetic appropriation, and just how completely socioeconomically out-of-touch she is with the rest of the world, is just totally fascinating to me. I watched a bunch of her TikToks where she has suggested a bunch of policy solutions for wealth redistribution, including having people play video games for a living and like having AI generate wealth for us, and none of them are in keeping with actual communist or even socialist ideology, wherein the wealth is politically redistributed. She jumps through so many hoops to avoid just confronting the reality that, under a more communistic or socialistic society, her baby daddy would have his hundreds of billions of dollars taxed and redistributed.

That's another story. I really agree with her complaint that it's creepy and unfeminist to bring in her relationship when analyzing her own work or ideology, so I'm not gonna do that, but I really have to laugh for a moment because Grimes and her baby daddy remind me so much of me and my baby daddy. My baby daddy is a wonderful man and we have maintained a close friendship since our separation, but he's like def a capitalist blowhard and a total Tesla fanboy. So, like, I just find that hilarious to the max. Like, one of the world's richest superbillionaires has a musician goth gf, lmao. What is even the time we live in? I have to think about all of the artists out there who are struggling because, unlike Grimes...

  1. they didn't come from an upper-middle class family.
  2. they didn't attend a prestigious university like McGill and take fucking psychoacoustics classes.
  3. they can't afford a Macbook with Garageband or Ableton.
  4. they really can't even afford a ton of gear.
  5. they can't afford to not have a job and spend 100% of their time on their art.

Like, none of this shit has anything to do with her billionaire baby daddy. I actually know a few people who were kicking it around Montreal whenever Grimes was still known to everyone as "Claire" and doing the struggling indie artist thing. It's not really that they had anything bad to say about her personality, but did mention that she was from a more privileged part of society relative to most people in the scene. One of them even pointed out that he was unsurprised that, as she got older, she wanted to return to being wealthy and comfortable.

I sometimes wonder if it surprises anyone to know that I put on this front of, like, someone who works at a university and has all of these really cerebral professional interests... but, in reality, I preoccupy my time with really vapid shit. I had this dream that I moved back to Madison and my dad decided to jump ship from the Philippines and move back to Madison too, and he lived in one of the hippie co-ops. I ran into another woman who had left and then returned to Madison, and we were talking about how great the bus system was and how many biking options there were. And, yeah, I miss that shit--but I don't miss feeling culturally pressured just constantly to perform intellectualism, lest I be not taken as seriously or something. It was really weird, idk. Maybe it was a lot of the people I hung out with? I know a lot of people who feel this way, though. I have never felt at Ball State like I can't tell friends or colleagues there that I enjoy stupid reality shows and trashy celebrity gossip. It's like the UW made it completely incapable for people from Madison to compartmentalize between the work of academia and, like, having other hobbies and interests and shit.

Idk. I really want to go to IU for my PhD whenever Siren is more grown. I hope Bloomington isn't the same way. I always liked the relaxed vibes I got down there whenever I was there, although I've joked to others that it's uptight. I had a friend from Sacramento tell me once that I was destined to be unhappy because I grew up in Madison and it fucked up my standards. Then he told me I should move to Davis. Lol. Maybe I am just destined to spend my whole life in midsize college cities, floating around campuses until eventually dying in an ivory tower surrounded by books. Sounds on brand.