Still alive after the month of Hell. (COVID and Shingles)

For the last month, I’ve been in bed watching TV.

I’m actually quite annoyed at how long this has all gone on.

It all started when I came down with COVID late last month and I went to the CVS when I got back into Illinois and used their clinic to get Molnupiravir to treat it.

After a couple days on that, I started feeling better. I completed my 5 day course and other than a post-viral cough, I felt fine.

A couple days went by and then more trouble. I had a blister in my mouth.

Then another one on the other side, both on my upper lip.

Before I knew it, I ended up getting a mouth full of sores and lips cracking and bleeding.

I called the doctor and she asked me to come by and she’d give me some Valtrex.

We had assumed that it was an HSV-1 outbreak because I’ve had it for about 20 years, and it never crops up except as a mild nuisance about once every 5 years, usually in the winter, and I go on some Valtrex for it and it clears back up quickly.

I ran out of Valtrex again, and my mouth continued getting worse. By last Saturday, my gums had turned completely white and I lost all of the feeling in them, and what I could feel stung, itched, and burned.

The doctor looked at the photos I sent and said I was having an oral outbreak of Shingles, and called in a lot more Valtrex, and here I am a week later, and day 13 of _this_ (day 7 of Valtrex) is the first day I’ve eaten and brushed my teeth without pain.

The correct color is coming back to my gums. My lips are healing. I can feel around my mouth again.

For over 10 days, I was popping pain medicine for my mouth every time my watch beeped. I had it set so that I wouldn’t take more than the maximum dosage, but as soon as each dose wore off, my teeth started to ache (all of them did) and the soreness came back, and I was laying here biting down on a cough drop on each side to help take the focus off of that until I could have more pain pills.

I think I went through more pain medicine between the two infections than I have in the past 30 years, for everything, put together.

I thought the COVID was bad until it let loose the Shingles, which was a fair deal more painful. Not that the COVID was pleasant. There were times when I was coughing so much crap out of my lungs that I kept a bucket next to the futon I’ve been sleeping on so that it could go directly into that.

I had to wear my nightguard even with all of the blankets in the house on top of me because I was chilling so badly that I was afraid I’d crack a tooth and need to go to the dentist when it was over.

The COVID was bad even with the vaccinations and the medicine. And as a bonus, it woke up some dormant infections that a healthy immune system normally suppresses without any help and caused a massive explosion of pain and suffering from that too.

There are still people out there joking about “going back to calling it the flu” or something and a media that runs stories like “Is it the flu, allergies, or COVID?” doesn’t help. You’ll probably know.

I wouldn’t wish this on most of the people I hate.

There were at least three points where if I was in a civilized country I might have gone to the ER out of an abundance of caution, but in the US, pretty much all they do is get you to sign financial responsibility forms, do a hell of a lot of nothing, and then send you home to wait for a bill that costs more than most of the cars I’ve owned.

If you can avoid COVID, avoid COVID. It’s probably not worth doing whatever it was that got you infected.

I get that people have to go to work, but we all need to continue to be vigilant and not take any extra stupid risks.

According to the CDC, I outlasted 97% of Americans as far as when COVID hit me the first time. I have no doubt that some day I’ll likely get it again, but I’d rather minimize it.

There are people out there getting it 3-4 times per year, and not even treating it with pills, and by that point it’s just absolutely devastated their body, and you can tell by talking to them that they’re not right anymore. Not good.

I keep rubber gloves in my car for the gas pump, hand sanitizer, we still wear face masks if we do go somewhere even if those around us don’t, and I don’t do any of my grocery shopping in the store anymore.

But it’s a given that my spouse has to work in person and the customers and coworkers are idiots who don’t understand that they are playing with fire. If I get it again, that’ll be why.

Now that I know how it’s likely to play out, I do plan to always have some COVID tests on hand so if I feel weird at all I can test and get to the medicine quickly, and I’m going to have a bottle of Valtrex ready to go so that if HSV or VZV outbreak follows, I can start on it as soon as the first blister appears.

I’ll at least have the advantage of it not being my first time down at the rodeo.

I do have no doubt in my mind that I may have been hospitalized or dead (or wishing I was dead) had I not gone on the two rounds of antiviral medication.

I’m luckier than most Americans in that I have decent enough insurance that I can see the doctor and get prescriptions filled without worrying too much, but like most Americans, we fear the hospital bill more than what sends us to the hospital. 😛

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.