I can't believe it's been 3 weeks since my last update. Things move so fast but at the same time it's been pretty steady. Like a rocket steadily shooting up into space. About a week and a half ago I got home from work and S was still up. He was home that night. He said he felt like crap. He's a king of vaguery so I have to ask a bazillion questions to get the facts out of him. What he described basically sounded like a sinus thing but I asked him to call the doc anyway just to basically start a paper trail if needed. He argued a bit about it and said if he wasn't feeling better by the end of the weekend he'd call her. After all it was Easter weekend so he didn't want to bother anyone. He ended up sleeping that day and when he woke up he felt worse. I pushed again for him to call the doc and he ended up calling the doc over his work and the guy in charge of the Corona response either over Travis county or all of Texas. I forget which. Anyway, he talked to him for a good 20 minutes and announced to me that he was no longer able to go back to work until he tested negative and would I prefer him to go stay in their quarantine hotel? Um hell yes. Go! He started packing and by the end of it he was feeling really weak and winded. He left and I started wiping everything down.
Here we are 10 days later. We have both tested negative and I feel fine but he continues to be sick with no improvements. Mostly what he feels is overall pain, probably due to a fibromyalgia flare up, and general weakness and malaise. He is back home but I have him in quarantine at home. He is relegated to his room, his bathroom and the garage. I bring him hot meals when I'm able to and he asks for it. Everything else he has access to on his side of the house. Just a few minutes ago he said his oxygen saturation went into the 70s for a bit and took 5 minutes to get up to 97%. I'm concerned about him needing oxygen or worse, a ventilator. Prognosis is really not good for people with Covid who end up on vents. Most of them die and they die alone. I'm going to try not to go there mentally because that's a bad place. He is emailing the doc and hopefully he will be okay until more assessments can be made. The test has a 30% false negative rate so we can't just assume he's really negative and if he is negative and they won't retest then they need to be testing him for whatever it is he does have so he can get treatment for it because this shit is not going away. Since both of us have tested negative, they allowed me to come back to work. I have mixed feelings about it because I feel like the collective relief over our test results is a false sense of security. I don't believe Shaun is truly negative for it, and I think he should still be in quarantine away from me. I have high risk of carrying this thing to my patient which is super scary. It's a hard line to walk. I am doing everything I can to be safe though.
The other frustrating thing is trying to walk that precarious walk of taking this illness very seriously with also needing to cut through any bullshit because Shaun is notorious for exaggerating illness to get attention, which he refuses to accept responsibility for. He gets angry if I even suggest it but it's happened so much it's definitely a pattern. He likes being fussed over and taken care of which is hard wired into him by his mother. She's the same way. Okay I get it but in this situation there's way more at stake so we can't be doing this fuckery dance we usually do. I need numbers and facts and all that other psychological bullshit needs to take a backseat for other less serious stuff. So I basically waffle between being worried and irritated. I really can't deal with the baggage right now and wish I could make it stop, at least for this. He usually gets it if I have him pretend he's a caller and how much his answers would irritate him if someone else were answering the same way. GRRRR! It gets me worked up just thinking about it. Happy thoughts. Happy trees. Happy flowers. *sigh and deep breaths*
I feel like we're all just waiting to take our turns in the barrel.
Count is over 840k known cases so far and almost 47K known deaths in the US. I think I might invest in a UV wand for some stuff. I'm kinda scared to touch my cat after S pets him. This world is so fucked up.
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