I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

I finally got COVID-19 despite all of the vaccinations, and it’s pretty damned terrible.

When my spouse tested positive for COVID-19 on the 14th of this month (November 2022), I immediately took him to get Paxlovid at the CVS Minute Clinic.

I continued testing myself for the next 14 days and since I felt okay on Friday, I went to see my mom and cousins in Indiana for Thanksgiving dinner over the weekend.

Big mistake.

On Saturday night (actually early AM Sunday) in the hotel room, just hours after dinner, I woke up with all of the COVID symptoms. Mom took me and my spouse back to the train station, and we spent all evening on trains trying to get back home. I was starting to wheeze and gag and cough, but I had an N95 mask on and sealed it properly, and kept my head down and away from everyone else.

A simple carry-on bag felt like lugging around a dead elephant, and my lungs were on fire and filling up with fluid that had a “gritty, sand-like” substance in it.

We got home last night. I had been taking Tylenol every 6 hours on the way back to try to keep moving. I took a COVID test, and it was positive.

Since I had expected it to be, I scheduled an appointment at the local CVS Minute Clinic for this afternoon while I was still in Indiana.

I went to bed, and again, the COVID symptoms came back with a vengeance. Worse than Saturday/Sunday.

Sore joints, burning in the lungs, burning in the nose, sharp stabbing pains all over my body. Headache, extreme chills (so bad that I had to put my dental guard in to avoid tooth damage from chattering, and this while I was under two comforters and a winter sleeping bag splayed out as a blanket, and had a space heater aimed right at me.

Sinus drainage, sneezing fits. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria.

In such pain I was literally screaming, as best I could, before giving up and calling my spouse on the phone, dialing it with my nose, last night, to ask him…one….word….at…a….time to get me Tylenol, water, throat numbing spray, cough drops, and hot tea.

I had 3x monovalent Pfizer vaccine. For me it was 2/26/21, 3/21/21, 8/29/21, and then a bivalent on 10/6/22, and it was similar for my spouse.

Roy Schestowitz recalled that I drove across the state of Illinois and back 4x to get the vaccine sooner. I did everything I was “supposed” to do and still got it, and it’s kicking my ass.

I’m really not a complainer.

I’ve been sick before and just toughed it out, but this is next level shit. I’ve gone through more Tylenol in the last 3 days than I have in the 20 years prior to that. I usually skip it even when I have a headache because I don’t want to take the stuff. I don’t like taking a lot of pills. But now I’m even on experimental pills!

My spouse is now undergoing “Paxlovid rebound”, but the Nurse Practitioner wouldn’t prescribe me Paxlovid, because it interacts with three of my medications.

One of those I can’t stop taking and the interaction is potentially life threatening (came up on the screen in red).

Also, I have high blood pressure and am on medicine for it, and the Paxlovid can raise blood pressure.

So I’m not even angry at the NP for that. Handing me something that could put me in an even worse predicament than just COVID would be reckless and I’m glad she didn’t do it.

Most people, however, don’t even know what pills they are taking, or what they do. Mom’s a nurse, and she’s been one long enough to experience many people where if the doctor says swallow a pill, they swallow it, and if they say list your medicines, they shrug and go “uh nuh”.

So I know everything I’m taking and knew to talk to the NP about interactions. Many people are probably getting Paxlovid prescriptions when it risks damaging their body.

I ended up suggesting Molnupirovir (Lagevrio), which is currently under Emergency Use Authorization, in only the United States, iirc.

It’s not as effective, apparently, but it doesn’t have all of those drug interactions. It’s supposedly designed to screw up the virus by inserting the drug into the RNA, causing the virus to undergo catastrophic replication error.

Merck originally said it was 50% effective at keeping mild to moderate COVID from progressing to “hospital or death”, but later studies show it’s more like 30%. It still beats nothing. I took my first dose right away.

Pfizer brought a bunch of products to market that don’t seem to be leaving the people taking them much better off in the end. Bourla himself, I’ve heard, has had COVID twice?

To top it all off, I’ve never seen this many people in public, no masks on even, hacking and coughing. Usually not even bothering to cover it.

Mom’s starting to come down with symptoms, again. It couldn’t possibly past the incubation phase from when I was near her.

She said it’s probably that supervisor at work who wears her mask under her nose that stopped for 15 minutes to have a pointless conversation with her, and then tested positive.

Then I got another call today where she said COVID is in the building and bowling over everyone. Staff. Residents.

My cousin said it was in the facility she works in like that too.

But Biden said “Pandemic’s over, Jack!” and then got an ice cream cone.

And have you checked out these Black Friday deals?

Do your part for the ECONOMY.

Now, the mainstream media is bullshitting us and saying it’s “still out there” but “it’s very mild” and “deaths and cases are steadily going down”.

That has not been my experience in this matter.

I’ve been sick in bed all week with a bacterial lung infection. I didn’t seek treatment even though I’m insured. (United States healthcare system)

Last week, I started getting an itchy throat, which turned into a sore throat.

The sore throat turned into green sinus drainage, which moved down into my lungs, which produced so much green phlegm in my lungs that it caused frequent coughing fits that were the worst in my life.

This progression took from about Sunday to about Wednesday, which is when I tried to get a COVID-19 test. At this point I had an occasional high fever, chilling, and many other signs it could be COVID or influenza.

I went to one of those walk-in free COVID test places, but it was pretty ghetto and the lady there tried to induce me into committing fraud against the government because my insurance didn’t meet the format of their website and she “didn’t have time for this”. Eventually, she spoke loudly to everyone in the room that she was “sorry for the delay caused by ONE PERSON” and gave me a mean stare, so I took the form with me, exited out of the web browser on my phone without submitting anything, and tossed their pen across the room, bouncing off a wall.

I later called a government fraud reporting line and opened a case against them for attempting to defraud a government program for the uninsured.

So I desperately started to search for a place that I knew wouldn’t dick me around, and the closest thing with an appointment on that day was a CVS, a 15 mile (30+ minute) drive across the county, to which I added an influenza A/B test.

Two days later, results are in, no COVID or flu, but my condition continues to worsen. By Thursday night I had to sleep with the window open to let in cold December air to prevent the fever from getting out of control, while alternating with sleeping in a 0 degree rated sleeping bag with extra blankets on top and still chilling. The cough got so bad that I completely lost my voice and it was like sneezing directly through my lungs and out my mouth. It was so disgusting.

After the last disaster involving retail urgent care clinics, which I now know are entirely useless when it comes to respiratory infection thanks to the thousand dollar bill PromptMed Urgent Care in Antioch, IL sent us for doing pretty much nothing for my husband back in May, and the same general experience with my ex when he had the flu several years ago and we went to a Northwestern Medicine Urgent Care in Evanston, I knew to stay away. Even if my co-pay (I have good insurance.) isn’t that much, it’s still money down the toilet if they send you home and tell you to use Vicks Vape-o-Rub, Tylenol, and Mucinex, and some other things that I am perfectly capable of doing myself.

In fact, if you ask WebMD what to do about a respiratory bug or just peruse the cold and flu section at Walmart, reading labels, you’ll get almost the same standard of care as you do at the doc-in-the-box.

The thing is, they don’t prescribe antibiotics anymore. So there’s hardly a reason to go.

There’s this complete and total fabrication (or as my mom might put it, “A lie, straight from the pit of Hell!”) among doctors and nurse practitioners out there that antibiotics are “overprescribed”.

They are….to farm animals. 99% of all antibiotics used in America are used on farm animals that are not sick, to make them grow fat.

The truth is that in humans, the doctors and NPs hoard them, unless you’re rich (then you get anything you ask for because of client management), or unless they give themselves a fill to take on vacation with them (yes, one of the doctors admitted this to my mom once).

How do I know this was bacterial?

Normally, if they are entertaining the idea of shitting out some antibiotics, they take a throat swab and send it to a lab and see if anything grows.

Problem is, that takes 3-4 days even before COVID, and now all of the labs are putting a rush on COVID results because it’s all the rage, and so by the time your throat culture comes back from the lab, it’s 8 days later and you’re hospitalized.

As luck would have it, I had a bottle of amoxicillin 875 mg that the dentist called in “just in case” (you occasionally run into a doctor or dentist like this), and it was unexpired.

I _really_ hated the idea of using this because I had one fill and then that was that, but once the COVID and flu results were negative, I decided to take amoxicillin from the dentist.

Within 12 hours of taking the first dose, the symptoms started to let up, and just two days later, aside from a small cough and the wrecked vocal chords from the sickness, I feel almost normal.

It’s my opinion I’d be in the hospital now or shortly thereafter if not for having a bottle of amoxicillin on hand.

So why is it so hard to get a drug that’s on the WHO’s List of Essential Medicines, which retails for about $6 with a GoodRX coupon?

The truth is that the hospitals want you in the hospital.

In America, as soon as you walk in the ER, it’s about $12,000 (add another $9,000 if you took an ambulance), and then by the time you are admitted, they hang a bag of IV antibiotics on you, and then give you the boot, you’re holding a $60,000 hospital bill.

Treating the patient ethically loses a lot of money, so they make up this “lie from the pit of Hell” that we’re on the verge of antibiotic-resistant super bacteria that nothing works on.

Aside from a few “hospital super bugs” which have been around for decades, like MRSA and VRSA, and some gross people getting Syphilis and Gonorrhea and not finishing their pills and then having unprotected sex with more people, there’s hardly any looming danger.

One thing I’ve read, and thank God I’ve never been this desperate for meds, is veterinary antibiotics. Those are dangerous because of quality control and dosage issues (they’re not made to human standards).

Another are “rogue” online pharmacies. I once read a blog post about a man who had Hepatitis C. He was in America, so…..fucked. It cost $67,000 for the cure here, so he paid like $3,000 to a “rogue” pharmacy in India for some unlicensed clone pills and then just prayed they got past Customs (they did) and that they were what he ordered (he set one aside at the beginning so he could take it in to the ER if anything happened to him). In the end, he got lucky and his doctor couldn’t find any trace of the Hepatitis C at the end of that round.

What he did was illegal, it shouldn’t have been necessary, and at the same time, can anyone blame him for trying to save his own life?

On IRC today, I was musing that these idiots who voted for Trump are apparently finding all of the “pill pinata” doctors out there to smack and get Ivermectin out of. The doctors know it doesn’t cure or prevent COVID, but they dole it out to keep their patient happy, usually because he’s some kind of a rich asshole and they want their rich asshole clients to be happy.

I’d like to find a doctor that still practices medicine, period, and will treat my bronchitis and sinus infections.

There was one that seemed alright at one of the walk-in clinics while I was there for something else last year, but when I found out he was gone until January, I used my “Break glass in case of emergency.” bottle of amoxil.

This system is so undeniably corrupt. I mean, 20 years ago I could go see my family doctor, get in the same day, didn’t need insurance because it was $40.

He gave me amoxil for my sinus infection, sinus infection cleared right up. Life was good.

He was arrested for groping women and other illegal stuff going on in his office, but given the choice between going to see that fat pervert for $40 (or hell, even $100) vs. my insurance getting billed $1,000 by PromptMed Urgent Care to talk to Nurse Practitioner Melissa about glorified Robitussin (Mucinex) while I’m fucking choking to death on my own lungs, I’d take the fat pervert doctor any day.

Things have actually gotten this bad.

Between Obamacare and this latest generation of so-called “health professionals”, we are fu-fu-fu-fucked.

I don’t even know why the Mexicans want to come here if you can actually walk into a pharmacy and buy amoxicillin down there.

Getting a COVID test in America really isn’t that easy, and especially if you want the “free” one.

Before traveling to Indiana for a few days this past week, my spouse and I went to the local Walgreens to get our seasonal flu shot.

We are vaccinated (Pfizer) for COVID and have been for a while, but the flu is still out there, and it’s not a joke, and with the risk of that, or a co-infection, or taking up resources while hospitals need to deal with COVID patients, I didn’t want us to be responsible for contributing to an even bigger mess.

There will always be flu shot deniers and COVID deniers, and we can’t change that, but we can change our own actions in spite of them. Just as surely as even if you follow the traffic laws, there will always be that joker in the emergency lane on the freeway doing 140 miles an hour in his Lexus.

Anyway, so I get down there and see that they have free rapid (one hour) COVID tests available and I decided it wouldn’t be a major imposition to get tested before we left, since mom and my brother won’t get vaccinated, even as the area of the country that they live in has 7 times more COVID cases per capita than the one I live in.

Unfortunately, “available” only meant that the site lets you schedule one, and in fact, the pharmacist pointed me to one of these stupid things that looks like a pregnancy test, requires cell phones, bluetooth, and apps, and costs $40. So, so much for that. I don’t trust apps that much, unless they’re from the F-Droid store. So I didn’t do the test because I wanted one from the pharmacist and I have health insurance, but sending out to a lab meant we would have been around mom for a few days anyway before knowing one way or the other, and then there’d have been no point. It’s really frustrating that these instant tests you can buy over the counter are so pathetic. And it can’t just be “an” Android phone, it has to be one on “a list” of approved devices. You’re sneeerius? 😛

According to mom, the vaccine is “dangerous” even though there’s no real hard evidence that it is, other than some nutcases and frauds on Facebook who are so full of it that not even my dad has been receptive to them (and he’s taken Scientology audits), and she also thinks it is “ineffective”.

In Indiana, almost nobody wears masks and the vaccination rate for COVID is nearly 30 percentage points lower than it is in Illinois, but I suppose that the infection rate in her county is 7 times higher than mine because masks and vaccines “are ineffective”.

And the 7 times higher rate in that region of Indiana isn’t even accounting for the fact that fewer tests get administered there in the first place because Indiana has no “vaccinate or test negative” requirement on many of the jobs that Illinois requires it for.

If I felt that the danger of vaccination was greater than that of the disease, I wouldn’t be getting my third dose of the vaccine tomorrow. And I will be, because death or a double lung transplant are very real consequences of the disease, and having a sore arm for a couple of days and maybe taking a nap the next day aren’t really so terrible compared to that.

Edit: Well, I saved this article as a draft, and a week later, I’m back from Indiana and finally tracked down a COVID test that was actually free with my insurance, at CVS. I tested negative.

I felt that there were too many barriers to getting a test, and I think that the term “free even without insurance” that goes into “but there may be additional costs from the outside lab even though the visit part is free without insurance” bit was more than a bit shady.

I’m fully well aware that breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated people are rare (you’re 9 times more likely to be infected with COVID if you’re unvaccinated, even vs. a person who was vaccinated 6 months ago and has yet to receive a booster). An imperfect solution is better than none at all. And from what we can tell, even if you do get COVID, the vaccine means it will be a milder case.

Still, I didn’t want to be a Typhoid Mary that came back from a trip to a state where people don’t believe in science and are suffering very real consequences because of that and infect people here, even if they are among the minority with the same mindset.

It’s very odd that those on the right say they believe in freedom but then think that people don’t deserve freedom from them getting in their face and spreading a plague. They have a very distorted set of values. But I digress.

We’re playing the vaccination game by ear for a while. Thanks to self-entitled and ignorant people who won’t get the vaccine out there, this godawful thing is turning into something the vaccine is less effective on, and Pfizer has to go to work on a fourth shot that the Coronavirus will hopefully be less able to adapt to.

That’s good for Pfizer, I suppose. They can use all of the dummies and nutcases out there to help them keep selling the rest of us a reformulated vaccine, year after year, for a problem that could have been solved.

All while telling me how dangerous the vaccine supposedly is, even though side effects are usually (99.999% of cases) minimal, and “ineffective”, even though counties with lots of Republicans and low vaccination rates have 7-10 times as many cases per capita, these people are using things that actually do have no effect on COVID and are putting them in the hospital, having poisoned themselves with stuff like ivermectin for farm animals.

This after, last year, “Doctor Trump” was telling people to bleach themselves and take hydroxychloroquine, which is also dangerous and has no effect on COVID. He was hoping, however, that it would help his cratering approval numbers due to lack of any plan to keep COVID out of our country or at least shape the spread while we awaited legitimate medicine.

Didn’t seem to help him in the election, and the studies on HCQ were halted because the drug itself was doing harm and nothing at all to help with the COVID. It all goes to show how these lying Republican scumbags will go to any lengths to try to save their sorry asses at the ballot box, even as their own supporters suffer real harm.