CV-19 Just another survivor story.

CV-19
Just another survivor story.

The first thing I would say
is that it hurt like fuck
kind of like having someone kick you in the chest with something pointy and hard
like tap shoes
or someone sticking their finger into your lung hard and pressing it till it collapses.

My nose was swollen shut, I had like a millimetre of air flow
and my mouth was so dry that every breathe was an excruciating rasp

That was when I decided to go to emergency.
I was so tired, I needed to sleep,

but I felt if I was to doze my breatthing would stop
I felt like my lungs were atrophying and just wouldn’t fucking pump

it was past 2 in the morning
the ambulance, the waiting time, the shitty hospital

I was sure it was just my asthma, I needed my inhalers and had no antihistamines.
I hadn’t had them for about 2 weeks and the first grass cutting of the year had started the day before

There were no “symptoms” on the news then,
the first cases in north america had just been detected on travellers

I didn’t go to emergency.
I took the strongest circulatory stimulant I had
2 hits of acid
drank several cups of coffee
and stayed up all night

mostly lying in the bottom of the tub with the curtain closed breathing as much steam as I could to loosen the dryed out slime in lungs enough to cough out some pieces that allowed me to breathe.

I went the next morning to the clinic
but I didn’t get any help
and no one suggested I had cv-19
because it was a downtown eastside British Columbia clinic
so no one cared
and no one there,
at that time
was informed about the symptoms or fever or anything
all they talked about then was a dry cough and whether or not you had been overseas.

So.

I went to the clinic and was very tired,
I still had no money for antihistamines but I knew they would give me my inhalers, one of which acts like an antihistamine.

I had a fever and my bones ached and I was sneezing
all of which are normal for me after grass cutting day if I don’t have antihistamines.

So I go,
and its a shit show
there are 5 junkies in visible sight outside the clinic
the harsh ones
inside is misery and stupidity
lonely poor people using the clinic as their social interaction
I can barely stand I’m aching
My eyes itch
she tells me it will be 2 hours for me to see a doctor
I can’t take the misery so I go for a walk
I buy 2 cans of beer and know I can get some antihistamines in a different neighborhood
like $5 for 10
so I know I will have those later
I drink the two beers feeling like shit
cold
waiting in downtown east van

I get back to the clinic with 35 minutes to go
after 5 I can’t take the junkie misery
the place is filled with the breathing and smell of really harsh junkie humans with sores and coughs

I tell the clerk I can’t wait here anymore and will come back the next day
She doesn’t care.

I go buy some antihistamines

They help.
A lot.

At home I continue to soak in the tub and try to breathe

The next day I go early to the clinic
and I get a doctor in about 20 min

At this point covid is still not prevalent in Canadaa and there is no lockdown
there is still no set of symptoms to look for except a “dry cough”

I see the doctor
I tell him its normal for me to have sneezing sniffles, congestion, hacking up
I explain that I have had
sneezing, runny nose, hacking up white sputum, aching bones like a fever.

These are all common symptoms for me in the spring
since I was 13 ish

spring time asthma and the same in forest fire season
perfumes do me in tooso the doctor fills my prescription for my two inhalers and a nose spray
he suggests I do a lung check to see if there are better inhalers

there is no suggestion of covid

I go, and head to my old neighborhood to see the pharmacist.

I stop to see my cousin
she wants me to stay and chat but I tell her I can’t
I cover my face with a scarf there and don’t stay long

In case it isn’t my asthma I tell her
because it really was starting to hurt in my leeft lung
badly
a dull pain
like my lung muscle was suffocating or something

The news is still talking about dry lungs and dry coughing

I have big wet sneezes and when I cough thick white goops comes out
My lung hurts
like its burning
which is common if I’ve inhaled pollen
until I cough it out it burnss my lung

When I use the inhalers and the antihistamines I get almost immediate relief
so I figure its just the hay fever

for the next 2 weeks I have constant chest burning, I use my flovent inhaler each morningad it maakes me immediately hack up a lot of shit

I have several times where my neck stiffens on one side
extremely painful
and I feel like someon kicked my lung and collapsed it.
If I don’t take the antihistamines my chest burns

my nose swells up inside and I can barely breathe, I use the corticosteroid nose spray ind it goes down enough to breathe

I don’t really notice a temperature
on me but I become hypersensitive to heat changes
I have to turn the heat off
if the heater runs during the night I wake up with my lungs and mouth completely dry

I’ve always had touchy heat and low vetilation,
so I can’t say for sure

there is nothing on the news about your lung feeling collapsed, or coughing phlegm, or sneezing, or extreme burning in lungs, or stiff neck, or sore kidney are and associated cloudy urine

They just talk about a dry cough.

I scrape through the next 2 weeks with my inhalers and antihistamaines
and gradually it clears up

hay fever doesn’t “clear up”

so anyway

a month after I contract it
the pain in my kidneys is finally gone.

So I guess i should tell you
I got it from the EMERGENCY waiting room at ST.Paul’s.

A junkie from main and hastings attacted my on the city bus
no transit police aided me
I went to emergency myself with a dislocated shoulder
in there
waiting
there was a german woman sniffling badly and a south american with sweaat all over his face.
The waiting area is small and close
and I remember thinking
wtf.
Lets sniffling contagious ppl sit in the waiting area with a sickness alert
but I was in too much pain to care.

3 days later I started to sneeze and sniffle,
and a week later I couldn’t breathe.

I wish there had been reliable symptoms posted
I don't believe there are as yet even

I have understood about various pathogens, virii, bacteria, insects, poisons since my early teens

I read a lot and I actually read a lot of older books
I read science
In my early twenties I was a fan of hesse and his recurring theme of the black plague made me investigate the plague. Then there is Camus of course, showing us the opportunism and lynch mob madness and chaos a plague can create. And then there are all the infected zombie games over the years.

In my studies of science I learned about Brownian motion where small particles hold aloft heavy ones for quite a distance, and about liquids dispersed in air, and viral/pathogenic methods of infection.

I wear sandals in the public pool because I've gotten rashes from poorly cleaned public places and learned to wear sandals, put something on what you sit on, and of course
use the hotub early in the day so you haven't got the soup of the 30 previous people on you.

I don't sneeze on busses, I don't crowd in to people, I don't spray when I speak

I don't normally touch a lot of foreign objects now.

I lived outside with my dog for a year and a half while I was homeless for about 4 years.

But I kept clean.

The symptoms I think you should know aabout are these:

I had sneezing and increased chest phlegm that was white.
I am normally a chain smoker who spits up black in the morning.
White is antibodies, which does actually occur to me in a major allergy attack, but this was a different.

I went back and forth when it got bad after a week, I would have lots of clear phlem with very white chunks in them, then I would be so dry my breath was weezing and hurting, back and forth.

Temperature sensitivity.
If my thermostat was on even half a degree too high I would break out in a sweat.

I felt like I needed to rip my skin off several times
I couldn't breathe and I was constantly too hot or cold.

I needed to go walking
I would sleep at day and walk all night
I needed air and my suite doesn't have a balcony or airflow
If someone had tried to keep me from going for a walk at night I would have tried to kill them and myself I needed to walk long distance along the water at night or I felt I would suffocate to death.

No one helped me with it.
My MHSD rep  at Elizabeth Fry had mocked me and delayed/obfuscated my request for a bed for over a year, and I couldn't get any emergency funds.
They were being cunty and discriminatory and mocking like always
and I didn't have the energy to deal with their shit

So I went through all this sleeping on a camp mat

You all want to "get back to normal"
I don't give a fucking shit.
At all.
Nothing changes either way for poor people like me,

The bank gets the bailout not the people
just make a war or disaster every ten years and you can throw the people's money into the rich hog crowd.

They will try to use this as an excuse to tag and track everyone now

Fascist pig society.

Am I digressing?

I survived it myself.
Why don't you just give money to people who have it and then you'll get a real picture of how many there are
I tell you as I write this the world news says about 2 million cases and 250k deaths

I tell you it is 3 - 4 times that much

We are already at 2 million deaths worldwide as of today I say.
We can argue about it in 10 years.

Nor only could I not breathe
I almost had a heart attack several times
it would feel like my lungs would stop pumping
like I had to force myself to breathe like doing pushups.

it also felt like muscles in my neck on the side and in back would tighten incredibly and my chest and heart too like that muscle was being starved of oxygen

it was incredibly painful and was probably from BLOOD CLOTS which apparently occurs in a large percentage of people.

It felt like someone hit me in the chest right over my heart with the end of a broom handle.

I would wake and drink 3 cups of water and immediately take an antihitamine to reduce the nostril swelling and burning chest.

Personally I think steam rooms would help people, antihistamines, then night it was worse I do believe if I hadn't taken the acid I would have suffocated in my sleep.

I wanted to talk about my kidneys though.
I didn't attribute the lower back/kidney pain to the virus because I had been doing some crunches over the previous week, but I believe the pain in my kidneys actually started quite early like 5 days in.
My kidneys were still sore and discharged some really dark cloudy smelly pee about 3 weeks later.

Maybe that will help someone else identify the real thing.

Walking, steam, flovent+hacking up, salbutamol sulfate to help breathing, loretadine antihistamines.
I also consistentlt took microdoses of lsd through the hard part where I couldn't breathe.

I'll think about it some more and see what else

I can remember.