Scattered Thoughts . . .

T his past weekend, Sheila and I headed to Saratoga Springs for a youth hockey tournament.  Lukey's team was playing in this tournament and Sheila and I enjoy visiting Saratoga Springs so we made reservations the moment we heard about this tournament. I didn't sleep much, if at all, on Thursday night due to a painful sore throat and what seems like a head cold.  When we got out of bed on Friday morning, I immediately tested for COVID.  If I tested positive, we would be cancelling our plans for the weekend and staying home.  I tested negative though so we packed up and headed out within a couple of hours.   False negatives are a big issue with these testing kits so you are supposed to test again at 48 hours.  If you test negative again but are still symptomatic, then you're supposed to test again another 24 hours later...   and, I think, once again 24 hours later if still symptomatic.  We're back home now, 48 hours later, and I tested neg...

S heila and I were both sick with a stomach virus this Thanksgiving.  For me, it started Wednesday evening...  for Sheila, it started on Thanksgiving day.  On the positive side, it only bothered us for approximately 24 hours each and, today (Friday), we each got our appetite back. We missed the planned usual Thanksgiving dinner at Sheila's dad's house since we were both sick.  We ate very little this Thanksgiving Day.   Today, Friday, we both got our appetites back so we finally had some food and actually had an exceptionally nice and tasty dinner! I slept most of the afternoon today to make up for all the sleep I lost while feeling miserable and nauseated through the night the night before Thanksgiving.  I was awake long enough here and there to watch bits and pieces of the University of Dayton blow #2 ranked UConn off the court at the Maui Invitational Tournament.  That was an extremely impressive win and it made both of us quite happy! ...

I 've been feeling very lousy since late last week and I can't help but wonder if it is yet another bout of COVID for the sixth time.  We saw all the grandkids earlier in the week last week and went on a cruise on Lake Champlain with our group so I was exposed to the general public and a lot of tourists during a period when COVID spread is "high".  I feel so consistently lousy that I really can't help but wonder if I have COVID again. Here is a quick list of my current problems: - consistent breathing problems most often when lying in bed - thick-as-paste mucus...  although, this is much less severe than in the past...  so far - I have a little bit of a dry cough...  sometimes producing this thick-as-paste mucus - sore throat - swollen glands - a relentless sinus headache - ear aches, coming and going - my joints ache more than usual - I'm exhausted - I haven't had a fever but I'm experiencing chills occasionally - I just generally feel like poop - the...

W e were supposed to head out of town this past weekend for one of the largest train shows in the US but I have still been struggling with this latest and very long bout of COVID as well as a secondary infection and other secondary health issues.  My health had been slowly improving over the past week (finally) but I was still not feeling well enough for a trip out of town.  Actually, it was not even a close call.  I definitely was still not feeling well enough to do anything other that a few minutes of household chores. Truthfully, due to contracting COVID yet again during our first trip out of town since the before the pandemic, I have no desire to risk going out of town for the foreseeable future.  This virus is far too contagious and far too debilitating especially when combined with my primary illness.  Besides, every time I get this insidious virus, I'm sick for months and things get dangerously bad every time.  It seems like whenever I let my guard d...

I finally tested negative for COVID and we needed a few things from the market so we headed out of the house tonight.   This was my first time out of the house since we were in Manhattan the week before Christmas so I've been stuck in the house for quite some time.  Tonight, I quickly learned that I'm still not ready to be out and about. I'm definitely exhausted and that was the first thing I noticed while walking down our first aisle at the market.  My breathing isn't great but it has been far worse in the past.  I was breathing more heavily than I should have been simply by casually strolling down a couple of aisles in the market.   I just generally feel lousy and that was very noticeable tonight before we finished our first aisle.  My nose is still running a bit but that is so minor that I typically would not even mention it.  I mention it only to make note, for future reference, that my nose is still running. Overall, I'm feeling lousy a...

For the most part, today was yet another rather miserable day. I thought I might get to writing more about our trip to Manhattan a few weeks ago but I'm feeling so lousy today that I opted to avoid writing about the trip.  At the moment, due to getting this horrendous, lingering, debilitating virus during this trip, I have absolutely nothing good to write about this trip nor do I want to travel ever again so it is best that I do not put any of my current feelings into writing.  This sentiment about travel will likely change...  in time...  perhaps a very long time...  but, at the moment, this is how I feel.   I slept most of the day, again, and I generally feel quite miserable.  I had a little bit of energy after sleeping most of the morning but that only lasted about a half hour before I was feeling quite miserable again.  In that half hour, I managed to fix my telephone line in the house and I wrote about that in a previous blog entry....

I noticed today that my runny nose has now changed from being a clear, slightly viscous liquid to an opaque yellow mucus which is a sign of my body fighting off an infection so I contacted my doctor's office to ask what I should do.   I was told that since I'm past the 10 day quarantine period then they want to see me tomorrow or I need to head to urgent care if I can't get an appointment tomorrow.  My doctor's office is overcrowded so, lately, it has been difficult to get a same day appointment so I wouldn't be surprised if I need to head to urgent care instead. So, in anticipation of my doctor's scheduler asking if I am displaying any symptoms of COVID and/or have tested positive, I decided to test again this evening...  It is two weeks into this horrendous virus and I am still testing positive! My fever still comes and goes in waves.  I have a cough and I'm coughing up phlegm.  As I already mentioned, my runny nose has changed from clear fluid to opaque...

I finally managed to slow down my runny nose and watery eyes enough to get some sleep.  That was brutal for a few days!  Pumping a bunch of extra H1 blocker anti-histamines helped with this significantly.   Because I was experiencing the cascading anaphylaxis symptoms (twice in two days), I decided to use different types of H1 blockers to stabilize my body...   Benadryl, Periactin (a high dose emergency medication), cold capsules...  I would alternate from one to the next every two hours.  This seemed to knock down the cold/flu-like symptoms as well as keep me away from anaphylaxis for the past day so that is good.   All those extra anti-histamines also helped me get some sleep.  I was exceptionally drowsy from the medications.  I was also exhausted from the illness but the drowsiness really knocked me out.  I slept all day yesterday other than getting up to use the bathroom and eat.  Then I slept for 11 hours last n...

I think I feel a bit better than yesterday morning but that isn't saying much.  I still feel lousy.   I'm a little over 24 hours into this rebound and I can say with absolute certainty that this rebound is far worse than the original viral infection almost two weeks ago when I tested positive for COVID. I have a fever yet again.  It comes and goes but my temperature is currently at 100.5  degrees.   My nose is itchy and sort of burning which makes me want/need to blow my nose constantly.  Tons of mucus is flowing out of it anyway.  Lying down in bed is impossible.  Within a minute or two, I'm sneezing and my face is covered in mucus from my nose.  Needless to say, I only managed to get a few minutes of sleep at a time through the night last night.  I just cannot sit up enough in bed to get some sleep but I seem to do better on the couch...  of course, I'm still sitting mostly upright on the couch when I sleep.  I'll ...

I 've had COVID since we returned from Manhattan.  I tested positive the day after we returned home.  All in all, this bout with COVID seemed to be a relatively minor case.  The only troublesome symptom this time around was breathing problems requiring daily breathing exercises to help clear my lungs.  Other relatively minor symptoms were a fever that came and went a few times throughout the day, a bit of a sore throat, swollen eyelids, and joint pain.  In the past, I've experienced far, far worse so I was pretty happy and confident that this would pass relatively quickly. I was wrong.  The other night, I noticed that my sinuses were hurting.  I assumed they were hurting because they were so dry after many days of taking cold medications.  I had been taking cold medications since returning from Manhattan so I thought that perhaps the cold medications dried out my sinuses.  My plan was to stop taking the cold medications and use my saline nas...

I 'm still feeling mediocre...  not great, not terrible, sometimes feeling "fair", sometimes feeling lousy, from one to the other in waves...  overall, however, I'm feeling a bit better than yesterday so that is good.   My throat is still a bit sore and my stomach isn't the best.  I don't have much of an appetite.  My eyelids are puffy interfering with my peripheral vision which is a symptom I experienced my first time with COVID in 2020.   My headache seems to be gone and fever is mostly gone but  I'm still taking full doses of cold meds though and they have heavy doses of acetaminophen in them so that is likely taking care of any mild discomfort and fever.  I assume the cold meds are minimizing my runny nose too.   Even though I am feeling better than yesterday, I'm still not well though. Sheila, on the other hand, is getting worse even though she is still testing negative for COVID.  I suspect she does have the virus....

I spent about 24 hours sick with a stomach virus.  It wasn't horrible but it was pretty lousy.  I'm typically not a puker but I had a very difficult time keeping everything down especially when I was lying in bed.   This virus started shortly after going to bed on Mother's Day so I must have picked it up on Saturday when I went to the Post Office to send a package.  I suppose it is possible that I picked it up on Mother's Day from Whitney or Ellie but it is more likely that I picked it up the previous day at the Post Office.   I spent almost all of Sunday night going to and from the bathroom.  Even when I was not in the bathroom, lying down to sleep was not much of an option.  Lying down just allowed the puke to move upward more easily so I spent my little bit of time in bed in a sitting position.  I think I may have gotten only one to two hours of sleep Sunday night before being awoken with a mouth full of puke.  I didn't actually...

Just about all of my "cold and flu" symptoms seem to be behind me but my level of fatigue is still quite overwhelming.  I spent just about all of this past weekend sleeping.  I awoke only to use the bathroom, eat and take medications.   I still have some minor symptoms of a cold...  some gunk in my nose and running down the back of my throat at times.  The fever has been gone for days though so that is good.  Headaches still come and go but are so minimal at this point that they are hardly worth mentioning.  I still get bouts of difficulty breathing but that could be due to my primary illness since I do experience this regularly anyway.  What I was experiencing a month or two ago, however, was well beyond my usual breathing problems (since being on medications to control these problems).  Overall, most of these untested, undiagnosed "cold and flu" symptoms seemed to have dissipated.  The fatigue is worse than usual though. ...

I haven't been writing much lately and I know that most people think that no news is good news.  That sentiment, however, is completely wrong in most cases.  We really have nothing but lousy news about lousy health to report.  I'm still knocked down with a miserable cold of some sort.  I feel quite lousy and because my body is fighting off a cold, it is making my mast cells even more active.  The mast cell disease causes my mast cells to be overactive already so adding more over-activity due to a cold makes my primary illness a bit worse.  I find myself seesawing between extra medications for my mast cell disease and extra medications for the annoying cold. All this sickness nonsense started sometime between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  I think it was a cold at that point.  Then, sometime in January it sort of progressed into a flu bug with lymph nodes swollen and painful, exhaustion, bone and joint pain, and all the typical cold and flu sym...

This has been an absolutely brutal Christmas week so we have postponed Christmas until... well...  until things improve significantly. I haven't even written lately because my own health has been that poor.  I've still been trying to recover from a disastrous attempt at a colonoscopy in early September. It has been a terrible few months as far as my health goes so I have not written here in the blog nearly as often as I normally do.  Sheila is still struggling with terrible side effects of her cancer treatment.  Sleep is difficult for her for various reasons including pain, headaches and night sweats.  The sleep deprivation takes its toll on everything. On top of all that, she's even been trying to shake a nasty cold for the past two weeks. While Sheila has been trying to shake her cold, I developed her cold a few days ago and a nasty cold it is. No amount of cold medications have been able to even slow it down a little bit. I was up all through the nig...

My health often resembles a see-saw... my health swings upward and I experience relatively good days... then swings down and I experience rather miserable days... back up... back down... sometimes it balances in the middle for a relatively short period if I managed my health effectively and luck was on my side but, more often than not, it seems to move up and down like a pendulum moves side to side. Yesterday afternoon the see-saw started moving downward... after a little bit of dinner (I didn't eat much because I was feeling poorly), I had hoped that my health had leveled out in this short period before bedtime though... no such luck... Apparently, this see-saw continued on its downward swing through the night.  I was quite sick and in the bathroom for far too much of the night when I preferred to be and needed to be sleeping. Actually, I was overwhelmingly exhausted and struggling to keep my eyes open even while I was sick as a dog.  I really hate these nights. It tak...