Lost of taste and smell | Such a weird experience!

Logbook

This post is written over a few days, as I'm still very weak and not in the mood for my laptop, don't mind the spelling errors if they appear or the boring layout. And it may go from one topic to the other, my apologies upfront. This is mostly a diary so I can read what I felt when looking back. Thanks for understanding!

Absence due to illness

Last week was quite a busy week for our family because early in the week I started prepping stuff for our daughter's birthday. I tried to divide the tasks over the days so it wouldn't be too much work. But my boyfriend suddenly fell ill, and even though he kept working (home office) I had the idea, that maybe I'd be next, so I made sure I had all groceries for her birthday and tried to get the job done in time.

It took a few days before I felt worse than he did, while he was already on the way to recovery. Thankfully, I felt good enough to make sure our daughter had a nice birthday and it wasn't too much about me feeling like crap. So mission accomplished.

The next day, something changed

Until that point, I didn't even consider that we might had/have covid-19 but I stayed in from the moment I made sure we had all needed items. During the weekend my boyfriend and kiddo went to the supermarket and bought some stuff with a specific smell to it. He gave me a piece of the sausage and I said: "Well, this is no good, it doesn't taste like anything, I'd not buy that one again". He looked at me as if I'm out of my mind and said: "Seriously? You can't taste that? Here, smell the sausage in the package." It was then when I discoved I'd lost my taste and smell.

I hadn't even noticed until that point. So maybe it came gradually, or maybe I just felt like having the usual loss in smell/taste when having a cold.

Funny testing started

My boyfriend instantly baptized my illness as covid, and started testing my smell and taste, no luck after some attempts, while my nose was not runny anymore, that was the weirdest thing about it. He thought, if I hold vinegar below her nose, she MUST smell it.
I find vinegar repulsive and even opening it from a distance can make me feel nausea, so this must work.

I sniffed and sniffed with my nose close to the bottle, nothing. So that was that. I lost total sense of smell and taste.

It's such a strange experience

Your brain plays tricks on you when you can't smell or taste anything, let me tell you that. It's weird as can be, and I can't imagine that this will stay as is for a longer period, I sure hope I'm not amongst the group that has this issue for months in a row. It's like eating cardboard all the time, the only thing I can taste is when there's enough pepper or salt on something, but it takes quite a while before I taste it.

Weird skin aches

Although I haven't tested (it's a waste of money and I'm self-quarantining anyway) I'm 100% positive that it's corona, the weirdest thing happened before I started losing smell and taste. Where my boyfriend mainly complained about a very strange pain in his shoulders, which felt odd, I had a very strange (but painful) sensation all over my skin for a few days before I started getting more ill.

I recently cut my hair short, and I had to sit in the sofa, holding my hair up because the skin in my neck could nog handle the hair touching it, it was super painful. The first night this happened, I thought I was just in need of a shower, and took one. But just hours later, it started to appear more and more. Not only in the skin of my neck, but weird places on my arms, legs and back as well. Even places where the skin didn't touch any surface, which made it very odd.

Due to this strange thing, I said a few times, it's off from a normal cold, maybe it's corona. I couldn't predict that within a few days, my sense of taste and smell would be gone.
One upside to that moment is, that the skin aches disappeared at that time. So at least I got rid of that. The loss of taste and smell doesn't hurt, it's annoying but not aching or anything, so I prefer having that over skin aches all day.

Headaches, coughing, and runny nose

First, I had a runny nose btw, and also coughing (the cough is still here, unfortunately) but these symptoms just point to a normal cold, so I didn't think much about them until these other strange and typical symptoms appeared. I wonder how long the cough will stay, quite fed up with that too.. The headache has been present for at least a week, and disappeared a few days ago, but is present again currently.

I felt ok-ish and then worse again yesterday

A normal cold (those that I had before) would maybe make ill a few days, and then recover, more or less like my boyfriend did. He could even continue working where I could barely look at my laptop. I woke up, sitting in the sofa, covered in a huge blanket, looking like a zombie staring at the tv or something. I felt weak the past days, but even weaker yesterday. I decided to crawl back into bed at 4 pm, as I needed it. I got a bit of a temperature again, and took paracetamol to drop the temp. It worked. After several hours in bed, I took a shower and felt ok again thankfully.

A lot of vitamines probably made this a lot easier on my body

Feeling what I felt, I knew this feeling could have been 10x worse, but when my boyfriend started to experience his first cold-symptoms, I also started taking high dosises of vitamins to help my body recover in case I was carrying the same thing wi me. I took at least (but a few times double) 3 grams of vitamin C and daily 4 grams of vitamin D. I forgot about the Zinc, until yesterday, so started taking that as well. We have been stacking up vitamin C in powder form since wave 1 and since we had it then, I have been taking high dosises of it every time I felt a cold pop up, and usually only half a day was needed to recover. This time, it was heavier to overcome, clearly. Even after all these grams of vitamins, I'm still falling in the category of being ill and weak. But not worried, I will survive lol.

No test for me

Yes, I'm curious if it's really covid-19 but will it change anything in my recovery? Nope, and on top of that, we have been staying in a lot throughout the full pandemic, if any of us felt ill, we stayed in, sometimes all three of us, and sometimes even a week or 2 in total. My boyfriend is without symptoms for long enough to leave the house and I sleep in another bedroom, hoping the kiddo won't catch it either.

That was it, for now, I'm heading back to my sofa. I soon hope to be able to write a decent post again and one of a better topic :)
Thanks for sticking it out until the end!

Image created in Canva