One thousand, three hundred and eighty-three days after the first case of Covid-19 is registered in Poland, I finally catch the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Or rather, the SARS-CoV-2 virus caught me. After more than three and half years, my luck ran out - probably the result of complacency (not wearing a mask despite evidence that infection rates were rising dramatically). I took the Covid test twice, last Saturday (day four) and Thursday (day eight); both gave the two-line positive result.
Where did I get it? I somehow think that it was on board the local train from Zielona Góra to Zbąszynek, the Gęsiarz - crowded, lots of older people, lots of coughing and general air of malaise about the passengers.
Now, SARS - and I had forgotten this - means Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome; yet after ten days with the virus, I can say that in my case it was neither severe, nor was it acute, nor was it respiratory - I just felt muscle ache and fatigue with fever for the first four-five days; the rest of the time spent slowly recovering.
In the summer, I bought a pulse oximeter; testing my blood oxygen levels throughout this infection, at no point did the readings fall below 96%. Excellent result! A very slight cough, some very slight nasal congestion, no runny nose. The first few days had me shivering with cold (despite being in a warm kitchen and bedroom); I'd go to sleep with a t-shirt under my pyjamas and a woollen jumper on top. No significant fever dreams to report though. Flashbacks to February 1976, a heavy flu episode ahead of my university interviews. Just that it's taking such a long time to shake off...
Another interesting thing struck me. Nothing I have experienced over these days felt new or unusual to me - all symptoms were entirely familiar to me since childhood. Covid doesn't feel strange or novel.
Soundtrack to this bout of illness - Country Life by Roxy Music, released 49 years ago - at the time of its release, I took this to be another step away from the sublime peaks of Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, vacuous pop tunes lacking the otherworldly strangeness that Brian Eno's input delivered. Over the years, however, I have acquired a liking for the second and third post-Eno Roxy LPs, considering Siren to have the edge. Stranded beats both though.
The first onsets of my symptoms coincided exactly with the health ministry's daily figures hitting their peak for the current wave of Covid-19 infections, with a seven-day rolling average of 2,649 cases announced on Thursday 14 December. Since then, the numbers have been retreating. Of course, this is merely the number of cases notified to the healthcare services that require intervention. Deaths peaked a week later (21 December) at 23 a day (seven-day rolling average), a far cry from the 600 deaths a day from mid-April 2021. Given the large numbers of family, friends and colleagues all under the weather with either Covid or regular flu, I can assume that the health ministry's data is out by three orders of magnitude and that right now, at least three million Poles are nursing Covid symptoms.
My biggest regret in all this is that I have had to stay indoors, so no walks for ten days, which means that having been on target for beating my 2019 record for walking, I'll be significantly down on my 12,200 paces/day ambition for 2023. And there were four days with zero exercise (on top of six earlier in the year, usually the result of work travel rather than laziness) when I felt most crap. So December has scuppered my plans to have made 2023 my healthiest year ever. In 2024, I will be another year older, so have I passed my physical peak?
This time two years ago:
Television times
This time three years ago:
New asphalt for Jeziorki - or Dawidy?
This time six years ago:
What did you do in the First World Cyber-War?
This time seven years ago:
Solstice sunset, Gogolińska
This time 12 years ago
Extreme fixie
This time 14 years ago:
Poland's worst railway station
This time 15 years ago:
Last Christmas before the Recession?
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1 comment:
Hello Michael, hope you're feeling better. I see no reason why you would not be fitter in 2024, age is just a number and as long as you feel fit go for it! I was out today on our Christmas Day bike ride that I normally do with my wife, nothing major only about 20Km but looking at your blog reminded me of last year when out on Christmas Day and were overtaken by a couple of 'serious road' cyclists who we later caught up with at a junction, the elder of the two who turned out to be 86!
Having been reading some of your earlier posts, I had to smile with your post about Zbąszynek as I transited through there on a number of occasions as my uncle lived in nearby Zbąszyn but the mainline trains back in the 1970s and 1980s didn't stop there. I had many visits to Zbąszyn to visit family. My uncle and family originally living on the top floor of a building that was a Jewish school pre-war and had been converted into flats but had no running water [six flights of stairs to the hand water pump outside] and a toilet block behind the building. They later built their our house [and business] in the centre of Zbąszyn. Most of our trips out there were via the long drive from Perivale to Zbąszyn in my father's 1963 vintage Ford Cortina Mark I estate [1198cc] that was normally loaded down with the whole family and supplies for family out in Poland. He had that vehicle until well into the 1980s. In later years my father acquired an old left-hand drive VW Camper van [from someone he knew who had worked in The Netherlands for a number of years and then had brought it back to the UK] so the journey to Poland became a lot nicer, although still very slow!
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