{"id":1849,"date":"2023-02-03T10:11:30","date_gmt":"2023-02-03T15:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1849"},"modified":"2023-02-03T21:58:46","modified_gmt":"2023-02-04T02:58:46","slug":"the-double-line-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/the-double-line-club\/","title":{"rendered":"The Double-Line Club"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
A faint second line still counts…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I managed to evade it for three years, but at long last, COVID caught up with\u00a0me. D\u2019oh.<\/p>\n

Because the virus has mutated a lot in the last three years and because I\u2019m vaccinated and boosted, this was a lot less catastrophic than it might have been in 2020. It was mostly \u201cBleah, this sucks\u2014pass the Tylenol\u201d as opposed to \u201cI am on a ventilator and will\u00a0<\/span>die alone in this hospital with only doctors in head-to-toe PPE attending because none of my loved ones are allowed in to see me.\u201d Honestly, if I hadn\u2019t taken a test, I might have gone on thinking I just had the seasonal flu that knocks me flat for a couple of weeks every few years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But then I realized my senses of smell and taste were gone. That\u2019s a common COVID side effect. Back during the quarantine, one of my morning routines was opening up jars of scented things in my bathroom to be sure I could still smell them. I had no idea how truly odd this side effect was\u00a0until it happened to me. Last Friday I was eating a bowl of ramen with tofu (one of the few things I could stand to eat with a sore throat) and it hit me: \u201cOK, my mouth is full of all these textures, but I can\u2019t actually taste<\/i> any of it. What the hell is\u2014uh oh.\u201d I ran upstairs after lunch and tried smelling my lotions and soaps. Nothing. The only thing I could still smell was nail polish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I like to cook and the idea of not being able to taste the things I was making was a bit disturbing. Fortunately, my smell and taste are already about 80% back. I\u2019ve heard this effect can last for months, but that doesn\u2019t seem to be the case for me.<\/p>\n

And that’s about it. I get hit by a wave of fatigue every afternoon, and I’m still hoarse and have a cough, but again, that’s no different from what I’d be dealing with if I had the flu. Mostly, I’m glad to see how much things have changed in the three years since this virus first made its way around the world<\/a>, leaving so much death and destruction in its wake. This illness wasn’t great, but it could have been much, much worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I managed to evade it for three years, but at long last, COVID caught up with\u00a0me. D\u2019oh. Because the virus…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,81],"tags":[45,48],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1849"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1853,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849\/revisions\/1853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}