My Strange Covid-19 Experience
I may never know if I had Covid-19.
On Saturday, I traveled for work, staying with a friend at the arrival city that night. I wore a mask and distanced to the degree possible in the airport, which is joke by the way. It was standing room only at the Alaska Airlines gate at SeaTac. I had seriously considered driving the 24+ hour drive to avoid the airports and waiting for the plane I wish I had. The inadequate waiting area seating was still arranged back to back, so you were literally inches way from several of your not so closest friends pretty much anywhere you chose to sit. I chose to stand with everyone else who chose to stand, which may have been worse as we tried to stay out of the way of the steady stream of passengers to and from other gates passed.
On Monday, I showed up at the plant with 3 other engineers to install some machinery. I spent 2 hours in an out of the office of the likely infected person, who we will call Greg, ironically filling out safety paperwork.
On Tuesday, I got a call from the plant informing me that someone I had had direct contact with had tested positive. It could really only be one person, Greg, and I had his phone number. I called. “Was it you?” “Sigh.” Paraphrasing: “I’m sorry man. My [family member] was sick on Saturday. I didn’t think it was Covid, but they tested positive. ”
On Wednesday, we all took PCR tests. I was the only one with subjectively significant contact. I called the county health department and explained the situation. To my horror, their very unhelpful advice was that there are no restrictions for travel from Washington as long as you wear a mask. “But…Butt…Butt……..…Sigh. Thank you.” I sent everyone else back to Seattle and hunkered down locally myself. One of the engineers was staying in the same Airbnb. It seemed the risk of him traveling was lower than the risk of staying with me.
On Thursday we all got negative results, except Greg. I called Greg, who still hadn’t received his result, but he was now symptomatic.
On Friday afternoon, I went out to get some things I might need (I was staying in a hotel with no cooking facilities, no microwave, no fridge) when I felt this bizarre sensation in my chest. It was cold in a very vivid way. I chalked it up as as psychosomatic. By 4:00, the vigorous debate that had been raging in my head for several hours came to a close as I surrendered to the notion it wasn’t in my head.
I had two symptoms at that point. The first is very difficult to describe. It was as if I had gone for a long swim in Puget Sound (54–57f) and the rest of my body had re-acclimated warm air, but my chest was perpetually still fresh out of the chilly water. Another way I try to describe is that it reminds me of the sensation of a cold IV fluid freshly introduced in my arm and radiation into my shoulder, but instead it is radiating from my sternum into my pecks. This was joined by the sensation that my sternum was bruised on the inside.
On Saturday, I woke up after a horrible night of sleep with the same symptoms joined by a couple more. The classic head cold feeling — skull radiating heat into space — but no cough, sore throat or congestion and visual hallucinations.
If you’ve never done psilocybin, we probably don’t have a common reference for me to convey what this symptom is like. I’ve practiced Vipassana for years thanks in part to Sam Harris. When I’m tired, I sometimes experience visual hallucinations similar to what I’m experiencing now while meditating. But, I’m not meditating and I’m not relaxed. It is a little like the floaters some of us suffer in our visual field due to proteins in the fluid in our eyes, except they take on a much more vivid quality. In meditation, I anyway, have spent tens, maybe hundreds, of hours contemplating the difference between what is in my visual field as a result of the light striking my retina and what is in the visual field of my imagination or memory. Most of the time, I experience the difference as the visual field from sight being orders of magnitude more vivid than memory or imagination and it doesn’t even occur to me to question which I’m gazing upon. On psilocybin and sometimes while mediating, it is as if the vividness is turned up so high on my imagination, that it leaks into the visual field of my sight.
I’m not sure, but think a hot dog just floated past my face.
A few years ago, I made the decision to stop consuming information from sources I didn’t pay for to the degree practical — no evening news, no talk radio, no live TV, nothing that uses an advertising monetization model. It has been life transforming for me — literally, but I’ll have to save the details for a different post. One of the things I now pay for is content from Chris Masterjohn. He has a doctorate in nutrition science and his tendency to be pretty conservative with info that doesn’t come from a well designed study resonates with me. Based mostly on information from him and Peter Attia M.D., I’ve been doing several things to prevent and mitigate coronavirus. The most relevant one here is iodine.
I suffered chronic sinus infections for decades until one day, I poured some of my daughter’s amoxicillin in my neti pot and snorted it out of desperation. My ENT was incredulous at first, but wrote me a prescription with refills. Later, I’d discovered a post from Dave Asprey on iodine saline for sinus infections and switched to that with equal effectiveness. A few months ago, Chris put out some content on how to make a .5% iodine in saline solution that has been demonstrated to have a similar effect on coronavirus to 70% isopropyl alcohol. Unlike 70% alcohol, it won’t put you in the hospital with burned sinuses when you use it in a neti pot. I use 5 drops in my neti pot. Much more and you’ll really wish you hadn’t. Don’t ask me how I know. YMMV. Like Chris, I’ve been using it anytime I’ve had or expect to have potential contact with Covid-19.
I also take Vitamin D preventatively and have been sucking on zinc acetate lozenges and taking vitamin C these last few days. That, and I try to get at least 100 miles a week on my bike.
I slept relatively well on Saturday night and woke up with same symptoms and generally feeling like I’d wiped out on my bike, but have no external scrapes and bruises. I keep expecting the cold in my chest to resolve, because in a warm room, that is what it would do. It’s been going on for almost 48 hours now and the bruise in my sternum has morphed into this persistent awareness of my lungs. They don’t hurt per se, but they don’t not hurt either. It reminds me of my first hemorrhoid. “Doc, I’m more keenly aware of my anus than I’d like.”
So now what? I haven’t tested positive. (I’m long past the point where they said they typically call if I was positive.) Assuming it eventually comes back negative, the only two possibilities I see are: I have it and one, or the combination of, iodine, vitamin D and zinc acetate have foiled the tests or I have something else. One theory is that it is Covid-19 and the iodine, or possibly zinc, suppress replication in my sinuses and throat keeping the virus below detectable levels where it matters for the testing and preserving my sense of taste and smell. It is an awful big coincidence that something ripped through my lungs 6 days after I traveled and 4.5 days after exposure to a known case.
There goes another hot dog.
