If anything good came out of the pandemic, it's that for a year or so, much of humanity did its best not to spread around a disease that caused a relatively high number of people to get sick and/or die. While we can debate how good we were at that, or are given the vaccination holdouts, the interesting side effect of all that disease transmission mitigation is that we had historically low instances of all of the usual stuff. US flu cases were down an insane 99% in the last part of the year, which seems impossible.
Two things we can expect in the next year is the largest year-over-year flu case increase in history, obviously, but also, a lot of us are gonna get sick with something for the first time in a long time. My last thing was some mild flu-like thing in the fall of 2019, I think. Friday, I woke up with a sore throat and crazy sinus pressure, which I think is a sinus infection, or maybe just what one would consider a "head cold." First day I had a fever of 100.7, though this came pretty late in the day. The second day I was at 99.6. Today I was normal, but dealing now with fatigue from non-sleep and some productive coughing. Perfect way to end my week off. <eyeroll>
Of course, the first thing you think, and everyone is apparently anxious to ask, is, "OMG is it the Covid?" With breakthrough infections among mRNA vaccine recipients around 1 in 500, and none of the stereotypical symptoms or sequence of symptoms, it seemed highly improbable. Indeed, through the worst of it, none of it felt unremarkable or exceptional. It was bad enough that I wouldn't have wanted to work, and I watched a lot of TV and movies. Two movies had John Lithgow, can you guess which?
I'm not sure this even came about from exposure to other people. I creatively tried to breathe water the other night, which led to me coughing and pushing it up into my sinuses. Almost without failure, water into my sinuses results in bad things, but usually it's because I don't swim right and took a bad turn in a water park. Or there was the time I inhaled very fine pepper at the Paris breakfast buffet in Vegas, and briefly made faces like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction when she tried to snort heroin. Stuff that isn't air in those cavities are bad news. Sure, it could have been being around people in the theme parks, but because of the weather, we weren't in crowded places much.
Mostly I want to use this opportunity to complain about the fact that a third of my time off was wasted in bed, and I want a do-over.
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