I came home from travel a few days ago. I was feeling pretty sick and though I had credited the sniffles I had to allergies, a slight fever I’d had the night before made me think it was possibly a bad cold, potentially the flu. But my wife told me to take a COVID test and it came back positive. So I got COVID-19 in 2022.

The strange thing is that this run of COVID is very much like a sickness I had back in March of 2020, but tested negative for COVID then. So did that test in 2020 have a false positive? Did I have a strain that the test then couldn’t detect? Was it all part of a massive government disinformation plot? Whoa, there… that last one is a bit of a jump, isn’t it? Probably a false positive or a strain we didn’t know how to check for.

As it was, the onset of my illness in March of 2020 was brutal. For me, it hit hardest in my GI system. After that, I had congestion develop and a shallow, dry, annoying cough if I spoke too much. I felt tired and had dizzyness.

September 2022 saw me with symptoms that came on much more mutedly – thankful for that – but still echo what I had in March of 2020. I had some GI trouble, but nothing as dramatic as March 2020. Everything else is pretty much the same.

I had no vaccinations in 2020. In 2022, I had had a full set of initial vaccinations plus two boosters, with the last one in April, about five months ago. But the vaccinations themselves aren’t as effective in preventing the current strains, although I’m happy to credit them for making those initial symptoms less severe. Very happy for that. I’ve got no shortness of breath or other indicators of something more severe happening, and I’m very thankful for that, as well.

There’s a line from a Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho plays a doctor. Someone questions his experience and Groucho declares he was involved in the influenza epidemic. When his detractor asked what he did, Groucho said, “I got the flu!” Well, along the same lines, I was involved in the COVID pandemic… I got COVID. 🙂 For me, it’s nothing serious in terms of symptoms, but it’s also something to keep an eye on. It’s a new disease and there is still much to learn about it. In my case, it’s mild enough to treat with OTC medications and I’m fine with that. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to go out and about some time next week. Until then, I keep an eye on my work email and the other eye on a game, YouTube, or a streamed show.