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.

Are we finally post-COVID thanks to Paxlovid?

Are we finally post-COVID thanks to Paxlovid?

I blogged, previously, that my mom and my brother both came down with COVID-19 and the flu at the same time.

I leaned on them to go get Paxlovid, because they both sounded like hell over the phone, and it took some doing, but they finally agreed.

About the only side effect they both had from the medication was that if they ate anything a couple of hours after one of their doses, it had a strange “metallic”-like taste to it, so they both had to take it, quickly eat breakfast, and then not eat anything for a while. Then eat dinner, then take the pills again at bedtime.

I was fairly impressed by how fast the antivirals turned both of them around. I thought for sure that we were going to be talking about hospitalizations and that I’d be in Indiana consenting to medical care for both of them while they were unconscious on a ventilator.

The fact that President Biden now has COVID-19, and is on Paxlovid, and it’s basically just a cold, even at his age (he’s not in good health….better than Trump, but they’re both quite old), makes me wonder if there’s even any rational point to take more vaccinations, or if we should just plan to go to a test and treat center if and when we have any actual problems.

I don’t leave the house very much and my spouse goes to work (still wearing an N95 mask). Neither one of us have had COVID as far as I know. The major reason I thought “Oh shit!” when I heard mom and my brother had it was because neither one was vaccinated for either, and, when I asked mom what the plan was, she said “Nothing. We’re just going to ride it out. What else is there to do?”. (She’s a nurse. A nurse should know better!)

After they both took it, she’s back to work and doing her running around again, and she’s gone from not even knowing that there was a pill for COVID to leaning on the Nurse Practitioner at the nursing home she works at to quickly prescribe some whenever a resident tests positive. So at least something good came out of this, I guess.

I noticed today that I had been credited on someone else’s blog related to the Lenovo scandal in 2016 (with the BIOS lock). They were talking about everything I had to go through, including filing an antitrust complaint with the Illinois Attorney General, to get GNU/Linux to work on the Yoga 900-ISK2, and talking about getting Arch Linux to work on theirs.

But I was disturbed to find them promoting Ivermectin for COVID in another post. The one about Arch on the Lenovo was good. I’m glad that lots of people are interested in GNU/Linux replacing Windows on their computer. but I was displeased to be mentioned on a site that suggested Ivermectin is a cure for COVID that is being covered up.

We have actual pills for COVID that shut it down now. The Paxlovid, and the other one from Merck that’s somewhat less effective, Molnupiravir. There’s no reason anyone should be dying of COVID at this point other than their own stubbornness. These are wonderful medications that were developed at a speed that would have been unbelievable not just within my lifetime, but only 5-10 years ago, for any disease.

In fact, I was recently banned from a NSFW room on a Discord server, of all places, for saying that male circumcision was basically a waste of money, and had no merit. The debate devolved into a free-for-all where I was slandered, without evidence, as an “anti-vaxxer” (nope), and an AIDS denier (hardly….I’m a gay man and I know all too well what people are going through with HIV, knowing at least 8 people with it, although not having it myself), and all sorts of other things.

I brought up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation experimenting on Black African people with it, by (lying and) promising that it would make them “totally immune”. 12 million “snip and releases” later…. (They make it sound like they’re running a trap-neuter-return program for feral cats. Don’t you love the racism?) HIV/AIDS is still one of the major problems plaguing the continent.

There are no conclusive studies showing that male circumcision lowers the risk of HIV/AIDS. What lowers the risk of HIV/AIDS and where the money should be spent, are preventive measures such as condoms and PrEP medication, which work.

The racist Gates Foundation and racists in the US federal government aren’t the only ones to spout this HIV/AIDS prevention bullshit as it pertains to Male Genital Mutilation. My mom told me it lowered the risk of HIV many years ago when I complained that I was circumcised as an infant without my consent. That couldn’t possibly be why they did it. They had only isolated the virus that causes AIDS 15 months before I was born in 1984. People had little idea what spread it or what might protect against or prevent it. Paranoia was rampant. There wasn’t even a drug that people who had it could take. The first one wouldn’t be out for another three years. You can’t tell me that anyone knew anything about what circumcision may or may not do in 1984 as it pertains to HIV/AIDS. Don’t even try!

The simple truth about circumcision was that religious fundamentalists wanted to ruin your sex life and the whole idea was basically thought up by the guy who invented the lamest breakfast cereal ever, Corn Flakes. John Harvey Kellogg.

I fear we’re always going to have conspiracy theories about things like COVID, or HIV. It will never end.

The “why” of the pace of getting COVID therapeutics to market so fast when everything from HIV vaccines to cancer to the flu have been mostly a bust.

The truth is, simply, that some problems are more difficult to solve than others.

There’s also the obvious effect of world governments willing to throw any amount of money at whoever solved the problem of getting their economies running again.

In the end, the US government cares nothing if my mom and brother live or not, but they passed laws to give people COVID drugs so that people won’t be too spooked to leave the house and buy things and cause the economy to seize up.

COVID treatments being “free” in the US to anyone that needs them is also a revolutionary idea, in the US anyway. When mom and my brother got sick, she was worried about what the pills would cost. It was the next place her mind went right after “I don’t think they can do anything about this.”.

For people not in the US and unfamiliar with our system, she actually had a good point on that one. Usually, when you’re sick, the doctor visit alone is very expensive, then they prescribe you a bottle of pills that could cost hundreds or even $2,000. The entire concept of “I’m sick, but the medicine will be free.” was a foreign idea to her entirely. But they went to the pharmacy and got it, no charge.

I was talking with one of my doctors about bipolar disorder, which is a condition that I have that needs medical treatment. We can’t discuss “What is the best, most advanced, most likely to work, least likely to have side-effects?”…..because it always comes down to money. My insurance only likes to cover generics. If you want them to cover Vraylar or Latuda or other more recent treatments, you have to get pre-authorization, and even then you’ll pay half the retail cost. The whole setup is so you won’t even fight it. Your doctor is not going to submit 4 pages to the insurance company trying to get you pre-authorized to be on something when his time is valuable. You’re not going to ask him to, because even if he did and they say yes, you’re forking over $700 for a month’s worth of pills.

I’m just glad there’s something I can take that the insurance will pay for. That’s how everything works here.

Each states is somewhat different too.

In my home state of Indiana, where they live, their system of government has a bunch of “Townships” leftover from the 19th century. They never managed to get rid of them entirely. In many cases, the state just started giving them odd things to do, and in some cases that includes “poor relief” of various kinds. Like, if your landlord is about to evict you, you can take the letter to the Trustee and they may decide to help you with your rent.

One thing that I thought was weird is that Indiana law also tasks the Trustees with dispensing insulin to the poor. Insulin can cost thousands of dollars a month in the US if you are uninsured. People self-ration and die of diabetes all the time. It’s terrible. This happens while other people watch and do nothing to change the system.

In Indiana, if you’re poor and need insulin, you can “go ask the Trustee”. However, state law also says they can refuse to help you if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. That means if you stole a TV set from someone 40 years ago when you were 18 and haven’t been in any trouble sense, and have served your punishment, a township Trustee can sentence you to death for that at age 58.

The legislative Republicans have been called back into a special session next week to ban abortion, because they’re “pro-life”. Figure that out…

Mom wants to know why I won’t move back. She was also stunned to hear that when CNBC compiled the Ten Worst States to live in, Indiana was at #8, mostly for being stingy with public health and only spending $76 per resident, per year. (And having lousy access to childcare.)

“We’re very pro-life here in Indiana! We’re so very pro-life that we will literally watch you die, when we could easily help you!”

I think for their next trick, the Republicans should go find someone who is drowning and refuse to toss them a life preserver in order to teach self-reliance.

Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

Mom and my brother both got COVID days before we were supposed to go on vacation.

First, some background. My mother and my brother don’t believe in vaccines, or most medicine in general. Yes, she’s a nurse.

They both voted for Donald Trump twice, even when it was clear that he was grossly incompetent and telling his followers to literally commit suicide to try to boost his approval ratings going into the 2020 election.

Mom repeated pretty much all of the Trump/Republican propaganda about COVID-19. That it was overblown, that the Democrats were making it all up. That it would be gone by August of 2020. That the vaccines were dangerous, and “don’t work anyway” despite evidence to the contrary that they were at least a lot better than nothing.

Also, that the FDA was “involved in a conspiracy” to deny people Hydroxychloroquine and a Z-Pack (despite the study where the people who got it had many more deaths than the placebo group) and then, later, Ivermectin of course.

I begged with her to get a vaccine, I pleaded with her. I even set up an appointment at an Indiana pop-up vaccine clinic, and she failed to appear after telling me she’d go, and said COVID wasn’t that big of a deal and the vaccines were “causing people to develop heart problems”.

(It has been proven that heart problems from the vaccines are very rare, and that COVID causes over 1,000 times more people who get it to develop heart inflammation than the vaccines, and now she and my brother have COVID instead of a COVID vaccine.)

She wasn’t having any of it. She’s a Christian, and it’s not mainline Protestantism where you just show up and there’s nothing radical going on and you bring a slow cooker full of meatballs every now and then, and everyone’s pretty level headed like most churches in Indiana were just 25 years ago when I was a kid and lived there.

In her church they believe some pretty far out stuff, like that if you grow long hair you can cast out demons and shit.

It’s….appalling, it’s hardly believable that in the 21st century that so many people like this exist, but they do. They’re out there. And they’re the reason why the United States of America has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the whole world.

And she doesn’t just attack COVID vaccines, she attacks ones that have been around for decades and prevent some pretty terrible stuff, like Hepatitis A and B, and Pneumococcal Pneumonia.

In fact, when she called me yesterday to say our vacation was off, leaving me with an expensive two bedroom condominium that I can’t get refunded, so I might as well go and enjoy it now with my spouse, she said that she also has the flu. I suppose it goes without saying that she never gets vaccinated for the flu either.

So after President Biden said that he was going to make it mandatory for healthcare workers, she became even more insistent that she’d just sign religious exemption forms at her employer and go around putting the health of herself and those around her at more risk than was ever necessary, pretty much because she didn’t like President Biden.

I even tried to mention that Trump himself (after he recovered from COVID-19), slinked off and took the vaccine himself, quietly.

In fact, by the time Trump came around and said at one of his rallies that his supporters should just get vaccinated and that there was nothing wrong with it, and they should just do it, they started booing him. He created a monster, and then he couldn’t escape that monster himself, and so after dipping his toe in the water, he never brought it up again.

So, then it gets worse, right? I asked my mom now that she was sick with nausea, vomiting, fatigue, headache, chills, and a temperature of 103 F, if she would go take the pills, and she said no, and then I had to get my cousins after her.

Then finally after I leaned on her and told her that the government pays for Paxlovid (the pills that keep most people who get COVID from going to the hospital, ending up on a ventilator, and dying) and that I didn’t want “two funerals” next week where I was in Indiana burying her and my brother (who has many underlying medical issues), she finally got up and went and got the Paxlovid, and the Nurse Practitioner is calling some in for my brother that he’s supposed to start taking tomorrow.

War breaks out over the telephone, between me in Illinois, and mom in Indiana, because some people would almost rather die than eat crow and admit that they were so horribly wrong and they need to do something now before this really turns into an emergency.

My spouse and I have both gotten our flu shots every year, and we’ve been vaccinated and boosted with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

I had a small argument with him that we were going to the pharmacy to get the booster, but it wasn’t anything like what I’m going through with my mom and brother. I don’t hate them. I just wish they’d knock this off and admit, finally, that their blind political devotion to a failed politician and Facebook conspiracy kooks nearly cost them their lives and that if they somehow pull through having COVID and the flu, they have the scientists and doctors that they were ridiculing throughout the past few years who created the antivirals and prescribed them to thank for this.

Their church didn’t seem to help them. Everyone in church shamed her for watching their livestream while COVID was raging on hard for the first few waves. Then she even admits you go there and someone is always sick with something and wants to hug you anyway.

Very nearly everyone in her church has had COVID, sometimes three times.

A friend of hers there and her husband, who are both a couple of real dimwits, said they’d never get tested again because “the health department was asking all of those nosy questions”.

We need higher standards for healthcare in America, sure.

The fact that you have nurses who don’t believe in medicine and so many doctors who are incompetent and with the bedside manner of a tarantula who just don’t care is frightening.

The only reason I have hesitancy to get medical attention is because there are so many errors, and so many doctors with no skin in the game, who keep the cash register running while they say “We’ll wait and see if this thing that’s bad today while you’re here gets worse before we begin to think about prescribing medicine.”.

In fact, last Christmas, we went to see mom and my brother and eat dinner with them. My spouse was vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and I wasn’t (although I did get Prevnar-13 the next month and plan to get Pneumovax-23 in January). I was around mom who insisted she just had a post-viral cough.

Then I got back to Illinois and came down with Pneumococcal Pneumonia. I spent a month with it, on the couch, blowing my nose, wheezing, hacking up green stuff, running a fever, and trying to find a doctor that would give me antibiotics, and finally one gave me azithromycin and it went away. (Negative for strep, flu, and COVID of course, which I told the doctor at the Urgent Care right away.)

My spouse, vaccinated for Pneumococcal Pneumonia, never got it. That was the one vaccine I did not have, and it’s not because I’m a nutcase, but rather because the CDC didn’t recommend it for my age group.

So I went to the pharmacy when I got better and started the series. I lied and said my doctor told me that I have risk factors for Pneumococcal Pneumonia and that I should get the vaccines.

Most of the doctors I ran into at the Lake County Illinois Health Department should lose their license, honestly. And with walk-in clinics it’s hit or miss.

I have decent insurance, so I’m lucky in that I can just try again until I get a doctor that knows what they’re doing and agrees to treat the problem.

Luckier than a lot of people in this country.

It’s easier to tell a little white lie to get the Pneumonia vaccine in your 30s than it is to get Pneumonia, run into a stack of doctors who don’t want to help you and tell you to go to the ER if it gets worse, and then end up with a $12,000 ambulance bill and $50,000 to the hospital when the doctor could have treated you with $15 worth of antibiotics and chose not to.

What blew my mind this week is my mother has Medicare starting yesterday and my brother has totally free healthcare (Medicaid), and they admitted that the plan was to wait around for this thing that’s killing everybody like them to mop the floor with them and then end up in the hospital where it’s a coin toss rather than to take some free medication that’s actually quite good at shutting down severe illness.

As for the vacation, hopefully things turn around by next week. I mean, it ruined their trip to the state park, which I was paying for, but hopefully it won’t get a hell of a lot worse for them than that and my spouse and I will be hiking in the park and watching the bald eagles while mom and my brother just have a shitty month instead of dying.

I’ll let you know.

But for the record, please take your vaccines, or at least don’t wait to start the antiviral medications if you get it.

You’re someone’s family member, and very few people really have to die of COVID-19 at this point. If you choose to die of COVID-19 simply to prove a point, it’s like putting your family members through a suicide.

It’s a choice you make that’s selfish and it’s wrong of you.

As for my family, it seems like every time we plan something, mom and my brother are sick. They even got me with Pneumonia last year. I guess we’ll still go and visit, but I’ll be up to date on my shots this time around.

The really sad thing about my mom and brother and Donald Trump and Joe Biden is that if they absolutely insisted on dying over Donald Trump’s lies, Joe Biden wouldn’t know, and they’d be victims of the 2020 election conspiracies that Trump was engaged in, like the last Japanese soldier on the island who refused to admit that World War II was over, and kept shooting at people until 1973.

Trump sees his supporters as pawns. If he gets them killed, he doesn’t care. He’s an immoral person to say the least.

Thanks to Donald Trump and various Facebook cranks, my life traded paint this week with the possibility of burying my mom and brother.

He doesn’t care that people like my mom, who couldn’t answer half the questions on the practice citizenship test, didn’t really, honestly, and truly believe in COVID despite the fact that she’s a nurse and has seen it wipe out nursing homes,, and even when she got it herself, she was still in this state of denial while the hourglass was running on doing something about it.

This country really went wrong when people like her and my dad let a failed businessman take hold of the highest office because they made decisions based on emotions and prejudices instead of the facts at hand.

They’ll always be my family, and I love them. I just wish they could see that when they give in to fear, and ignorance, and hatred…they suffer for it as well.

As for whether religion is to blame?

Religion is crazy stuff, but it’s the result of of all of these things, not the cause. Even if we were lucky enough to have religion disappear tomorrow, we’d still have bigots.

There’s plenty of bigots who don’t believe in God, I’m sorry to say, but the truly disgusting thing is that most of the bigots are religious because it makes it easier to play it off as “It’s not me, man….It’s all here in the book, yo!”.

Religion is a problem in the family that I’ve been dealing with since a long time before COVID came around and is a completely different subject entirely. But one of the problems is that it really messes with people’s heads, and then they think they can just, like, pray, and stuff will get better on its own without medication, or effort, or work, or a drive to improve themselves.

Self-improvement is the only way people grow. Religion is truly evil because it stops people from growing and makes them fine with how things are and should not be.

I’ve never been happy with the way my life was, and I suspect most people aren’t. Some turn to drugs and alcohol, others to sex and gambling or cutting themselves, but religion is in that group. And they hate it when you say that, but it’s there.

I liked how Rick Sanchez put it. If I recall correctly, “Passively accepting that horrible things are happening is a quality I admire in my food animals. When I don’t like how things are, I change them!”.

Every day above ground is a small victory.