Hello again.
It's been a long time since I've posted anything. But I'm hoping that will change and I'll be providing you with lots of helpful info, great giveaways, and pieces of my heart. The latter is what I want to address today.
What a year it's been. Last I "spoke" with you, I was running a senior in-home care company and was simply too busy to blog on a regular basis. Well, that changed. In December of 2020, the owner and I decided it was time to close our business for good. Let's just say the pandemic wore us out. It wasn't that we didn't have clients... we did. We just couldn't find employees to fill the shifts. By the time we were done, we had an 85% no-show rate for interviews. It was beyond discouraging.
January rolled around and, honestly, it was a really good month. I was enjoying having time off and not being on call 24/7, as I had been for the previous 4 years. Life was good.
And then... Covid. My husband started getting sick on February 1st. I kept telling him it wasn't Covid. Then my eyes began to burn. And my glutes ached big-time. He had chills and couldn't get warm. His head hurt. Five days later, he woke up with no sense of smell or taste. We knew then, and a rapid test confirmed our self-diagnosis. For 3 weeks, we suffered. Covid morphs into something new nearly every day when you're in the midst of it. Anyone else out there know what I'm talking about? For me, I experienced the gastrointestinal version over everything else. For a good 10 days or so, I felt like I was in labor, yet no delivery of a baby came along as relief. It.was.hell.
Even though I'm asthmatic and diabetic, the virus never took root in my lungs, so I was able to stay out of the hospital. I credit that with the 10,000 IUs of Vitamin D I was taking for months, hoping to ward off this insidious disease. It didn't prevent me from getting Covid, but I do believe it kept it out of my lungs. I coughed from time to time and I watched my pulse ox readings faithfully, but like I said, I was never hospitalized.
Eating was something I forced myself to do. It's hard to want to put food in your body when you can't even taste it and you know it's going to send you right back into the bathroom for another round of "let's pretend we're having a baby." I lost 20 pounds that month. Unfortunately, once the appetite returned, so did the weight. It was nice while it lasted. By the end of February, it was over... for the most part. Today, I'm still feeling the effects of the brain fog it brought my way. I search for words, say the wrong ones, and lose my train of thought in an instant. And I suffer from night sweats, so my sleep is always disturbed. But at least I can breathe and I don't seem to have any other symptoms many of the long-haulers have.
My husband, on the other hand, did not fare so well. A couple of weeks after our "recovery," he started to experience some pretty brutal pain. It started in his shoulders, then his hips, his thighs, down his arms, and eventually attacked his hands... so much so that he lost the use of them at times. This continued until the beginning of June when we finally found a doctor with answers. Up until then, we simply heard the same thing: "It's post-Covid and we really don't know what to do about it." That day, we had a name for his pain: polymyalgia rheumatica or PMR for short. And there was hope. But there was another issue to deal with.
As if the pain wasn't enough, he also had to go into the hospital for a scheduled inguinal hernia operation. Since he is a heart patient, he couldn't have laparoscopic surgery. Nope. They had to cut him open. And that's when the new problem began.
Stop on back tomorrow for part 2 of story of 2021. It gets worse before it gets better. But it does get better.
Sharing my story,
