Part 1: In the beginning
December 2021 - February 2022 (Month 0-2)
In early December 2021, I had COVID for the first time. It started with the kids who tested positive back in the days when the City of Berlin operated their own PCR testing facilities. They even performed genetic testing on the virus that the kids had, and it turned out to be the long since forgotten Delta variant. We had no idea how to isolate inside the house though and weren’t even in the habit of wearing masks. So we didn’t really do anything special and figured, as everyone kept reassuring us (the public), it’s just like a bad cold. Less than a week after the kids tested positive, I developed my first symptoms and indeed, the first few days were not fun, but not the worst either. Around Day 5 things took a turn for the worse and I developed fatigue, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, dizziness, blurry vision, insomnia, nausea — about 20, daily fluctuating symptoms.
At the time, I kept thinking and being reassured that most people recover fully within the first few weeks, and even if it takes three months, that’s still a “normal” recovery timeline. But as the weeks ticked by and Christmas and New Years passed, we were forced to face the reality of this course and cancel our first event, our annual family ski trip to Austria. This seemed like such a huge, dramatic thing to have to do as I was still clinging to this idea that this is all going to pass me by in a few weeks, maybe a couple months. I had what was classified as a mild-moderate course and everyone kept saying, “you’re young and healthy, it’ll be fine”. Insert eye roll emoji. Over the course of three months, things slowly improved and I even tried to go back to work part-time for a few weeks. It felt like I was still within this magical window of “normal recovery”, but all I could really think about was Long COVID.
Maybe I missed it, but did you get the vaccine before you got covid?