#unrelated but i don’t know if it’s covid or the flu but i’m sick as fuck :(

[echomimus]

happens everytime

[timotey]

Ficlet: Their House, So Quiet

Dark Blue Kiss/Our Skyy. PeteKao. Post Our Skyy. A coronavirus fic!

I know nothing about the quarantine regulations in Thailand, so I based it all on how it’s done in my country. Just... hand-wave all inaccuracies. Creative licence is my Get Out Of Jail Free card!

They’ve been so careful - and yet!

😷😷😷

The coronavirus? Is a bitch.

It’s invisible and it spreads like wildfire. One of Kao’s students brings it to school and then Kao brings it home and both he and Pete get infected. They’ve been so careful - and yet! When the test results come in, they’re so very, very glad that they live alone and not with their parents anymore.

They’re put in quarantine - on house arrest, basically - with meds meant for handling the symptoms rather than curing the illness since nobody really knows how to cure this damn thing in the first place, and they’re told to call if anything changes; the hospitals are too busy to admit people who don’t really need it. 

And Pete doesn’t need it. Headaches, muscle pain and fever, that’s what falling ill with COVID-19 feels like to him. It’s the worst case of flu he’s ever had, sure, and he feels just awful… but, well, that’s it. 

Kao, though…

(Nobody will ever tell him why that fucking bug hit Kao so hard and not him.)

“I’m sorry.”

That’s the last thing that Kao says to him - he only mouths it, really, soundlessly, voicelessly, because he simply doesn’t have enough breath to spare and say it out loud - before they take him away. The fool. The idiot. The… Pete would be furious with him for... for apologizing of all things - if he weren’t so scared.

He’s been scared ever since he woke up to Kao gasping for breath, to his lover uselessly trying to suck air into his starving, uncooperative lungs. The fear came with the realization that Kao, Kao was sick. That Kao wasn’t just feeling lousy, that it was really bad. Serious.

When the EMTs in their scary white suits and masks and shiny goggles finally leave and the front door clicks shut behind them with a terrifying finality, silence settles over the house again and Pete sinks to his knees. And he cries. He feels terrible, he aches all over and he’s hot and just a little dizzy - and also terrified and sad and lonely. He wants Kao but Kao’s not there with him and it’s… it’s breaking his heart.

(He never knew their house could be this quiet.)

Over the following weeks, Pete talks to his dad. And to Kao’s mom. And to his friends. Even Mork, his old arch enemy, calls him! He talks to all of them on the phone and through the door when they deliver groceries to him so that he doesn’t starve to death. He has so many people to talk to - but the one person he wants to talk to, whose voice he needs to hear and desperately so, is out of reach. He feels a loss as profound as when his mom and his little sister left him.

Kao ends up in the ICU and they keep him there for over a month. They put him on a ventilator, then on something else, some even more sophisticated ventilator - when Pete realizes what that means (that Kao’s not getting any better, just the opposite), he smashes half the dishes in their kitchen in his rage and despair, so terrible... so  impotent - and then, then they try out something new on him, some experimental medication, as if he were a guinea pig and not… not Pete’s Kao.

But it helps. It helps! 

When they tell Pete - Pete keeps calling the hospital as often as they allow it, if he can’t be there with Kao, for Kao, then he at least needs to know - his relief is overwhelming that his head swims with it and there’s a buzzing, rushing sound in his ears. He sits down so hard he misses his chair and hits the floor, bruising his tailbone. He doesn’t care. Because Kao… Kao is better. Pete’s never heard more beautiful words spoken in his whole life.

(When he tells that to Kao later on, about his bruised ass, Kao laughs!)

It takes another week for Kao to get well enough to be able to talk to Pete. By then Pete’s given and confirmed a clean bill of health, yet when his phone rings and he picks it up and Kao’s face pops up on the screen so very suddenly, so very unexpectedly, he’s so overcome with... with feelings that he gets a little dizzy.

Kao looks haggard and sallow and he must’ve lost good twenty pounds in the six weeks that Pete hasn’t seen him. Kao’s voice is raspy and cracked and he can’t get more than ten words out without having to put his breathing mask back on to pull oxygen into his rebellious lungs. He’s so weak that a nurse has to hold the phone for him. But when he smiles at Pete and croaks out, “Hello, love,” Pete’s heart could burst. And when they hang up only moments later - Kao’s eyes are already falling shut again - Pete just sits there, clutching the phone hard in both hands, and shakes all over.

(He loves this man, he loves him so much!)

It’s two more weeks before Kao’s finally, finally allowed to go home. Kao’s mom and Pete’s dad pick him up from the hospital because, though he’s now officially virus-free, he’s nowhere near healthy. It’ll take time for him to get back on his feet. Time and care - that Pete’s determined to provide which means staying as bug-free as possible himself to protect Kao’s broken immune system. And that means venturing out as little as possible. Little price to pay for having his lover back home.

Their parents drop Kao off early in the morning when it’s still cool outside and the driveway is dappled in sunlight, passing through the trees. Pete’s waiting for them at the doorway, impatient, excited and a little nervous. Why, he doesn’t know. He just… he wants Kao, so badly! 

In the end, Pete can’t wait anymore. He doesn’t let Kao’s mom help Kao out of the car, he runs up himself and he pulls the backdoor open and… and there he is, his Kao, smiling up at him a little shyly with his eyes, his mouth hidden by a black mask. Pete takes Kao’s hand in his and pulls him out of the car carefully. And then he just… he hugs Kao.

He wraps his arms around his lover and he buries his face in Kao’s neck and he breathes in Kao’s scent - now almost overwhelmed by sharp smelling chemicals - and when Kao hugs him back, something tightly wound in Pete’s gut loosens. Kao’s so thin - Pete can feel his ribs even through the hoodie Kao has on - and he’s leaning heavily against Pete, letting Pete hold him up… But it is Kao, his Kao and he’s back home. 

(“Hello, love.”)

Kao’s road to recovery is not smooth. His cough is unrelenting and his joints still ache. As it goes on, the doctors reluctantly admit that it might be permanent, the damage done to Kao’s lungs, at least. Pete doesn’t know what that would mean for Kao’s career as a teacher - he needs to be able to talk in class and the whole day long, really, whereas now, anything longer than a few sentences leads to a coughing fit - but they learn to work around it for now.

Moving their bedroom downstairs, inhalations and massages - these things, they don’t really fix anything but they lessen the strain on Kao’s body. And they make Pete feel better. Which is something that Pete can’t seem to explain to Kao, that helping Kao helps Pete, too.

Because there’s something… off-kilter inside Pete. It’s been there ever since he held Kao in his arms, urging him to breathe, just breathe, please while he called for help. In that off-kilter place, his fear that Kao will die resides, still eating away at him even now, when Kao’s back here with him, in his arms.

But when Pete’s allowed to help, when Kao lets him run his hands across Kao’s back, along his spine, massage his sore muscles and relieve him of his aches, it makes Kao’s presence real to Pete. Because in that moment, Kao’s right there, under his hands, warm and alive, even if a little too thin for Pete’s comfort - and Pete doesn’t have to think. 

(At least not about the bad things. Those are left for private moments, shh!)

And when Pete’s done with his massage, he kisses Kao’s shoulder lightly and Kao, half-asleep and boneless, smiles and mumbles into his pillow, “Love you.” And Pete’s heart is so light.

“Love you, too.”

[exeggcute]

glad to know you are mostly recovered from covid! if i may ask, could you describe how where your symptoms or at what pace you got them? the information i've got from both medical / govermental sources in my country is contradictory at times. also, what would you recommend drinking if i found myself to be with covid?

first off: WATER!!! drink water!!! I mean you can probably drink whatever as long as it’s moderately healthy and you’re staying hydrated (my drink of choice while sick is red gatorade. it has to be red or it doesn’t work though) but water is always a safe bet

also I’m happy to share my experience, just know that (1) I am not a doctor, just a professional Sick Person and (2) I never officially got tested thanks to a shortage of coronavirus tests in my area, but I’m pretty damn sure my symptoms were aligned with covid-19, so take that as you will

the first thing I noticed was a sore throat... but I have sore throats allll the time because of my other health issues, so I didn’t think much of it. I did start to notice my sore throat was getting better (from a previous mystery illness that knocked me out for a few days, and which I initially thought was strep but was probably just a bad cold) before suddenly getting bad again. I also had a day where my sore throat was especially pronounced and I had that Really Tired Feeling you get when you’re sick. I guess we can call that day one, but at this point I definitely didn’t think I had corona

that night I noticed some chest tightness, which I initially wrote off as an anxiety attack (and considering my extremely anxious personality and the fact that we were battening down the hatches for a pandemic, that seemed like a fair assumption) but using my inhaler didn’t help--in fact, it made the pain worse! but it did pass eventually, more or less, and I forgot about it

(side note here that if you think you have corona, do NOT use your albuterol inhaler or any kind of steroid inhaler unless you’re having a legit asthma attack with wheezing and all the works. using your inhaler can make the corona symptoms worse, but obviously if you need to use it then it’s important to keep using it. consult your doctor. also another similar note: if you think you have it, stay away from most NSAIDs if you can, as those can also make things worse. tylenol is okay though as long as you’re careful about the dosage--not as a corona thing, you just always need to be careful with tylenol dosage. and it’ll help keep your fever down, which is important!)

then over the next day or two I noticed the chest pain flare-ups but wrote those off as well. they were short-lived and mainly seemed to happen at night, but the inhaler always made them worse. around this time I also started experiencing some general GI upset for a few days (not to get too into that...), but I have a very touchy digestive track and was taking antibiotics at the same for other unrelated reasons, so I was like “well it’s probably nothing” but was starting to get worried.

then about five days later, the chest tightness really made itself present. like, it lasted all day and was constant. I was concerned but not immediately freaking out, and it was really windy that day so I kind of chalked it up to allergies, but as a very allergic person I’ve never had chest tightness like that from allergies (and my other allergic symptoms have improved considerably since I started allergy shots, so it would be weird to have a new symptom crop up out of nowhere like that).

then the next day, and the next day, the tightness wasn’t going away. this was clearly not allergies. I started to seriously think about corona tests, and I even called my primary care doctor, but she was extremely dismissive (all she did was call in a prescription for an old allergy drug that never even worked for me in the first place) and it was downright impossible to get tested. I was freaked out, but not entirely sure.

it’s about day seven at this point, and the chest tightness is in full swing. when I first wake up, the pain isn’t really present, but after about an hour of wakefulness my chest starts to get tight, congested, and kind of has that rattle-y feeling when it’s full of mucus and crap from the postnasal drip. not much congestion otherwise, but I’m so hopped up on antihistamines at all times that I don’t really get congested in general. the best way I can describe the chest tightness is that it feels like when I exert myself and my asthma makes my chest seize up and it’s hard to catch my breath (aka every single PE class I was ever forced to take as a kid), but my inhaler doesn’t do shit. my throat is still hurting pretty bad too and I feel vaguely fevery, but I don’t have a working thermometer at home. overall I just feel shitty, like that feeling you have when you know you’re sick (and I get sick a lot so I’m pretty well-versed in that lol). for quarantine purposes, this is the day I’ve been counting as the “first day” of having obvious corona symptoms, but it was really predated by the things I described above.

several days pass like this, I keep trying to get tested and call all sorts of places but it’s all dead ends. I also develop a slight cough, which mostly comes in bursts or when I speak/eat. by day twelve I manage to get a primary care appointment, and they do an EKG to make sure it’s not cardiac pain (the EKG came back fine) and a throat swab to see if it’s something bacterial (it’s not). they do confirm I’m running a slight fever, although my body temperature is usually so low that even a fever of 99 is high for me. my primary care doc basically tells me to fuck off and stay home, which I was already planning on doing. she also didn’t even wear a mask or gloves to look into my throat, despite the fact that all the other nurses in the practice were wearing masks and gloves when they interacted with patients... so I’m not exactly full of confidence in her judgement here.

the night of day thirteen, the day after seeing my doctor, I have a night where I can’t sleep because my airway feels restricted (both in my chest and my actual throat being swollen from pain). I used my inhaler, like a fool, and when the inhaler didn’t help the first time I tried using it two more times. big mistake! I ended up lying awake gasping for air, taking huge gulps just to feel like I was getting the teeniest bit of oxygen, and feeling stabbing pain when I took these deep breaths. I was too afraid to sleep and almost made my girlfriend drive me to the ER but I hate going to the ER so instead I just tried to calm down until I got exhausted enough to fall asleep around dawn. I also kept alternating between sweating buckets and shivering to death, no matter how I kept adjusting the temperature and my blankets, so I assume I was having a crazy fever that night.

the next day, roughly day fourteen, I decided to suck it up and go to the ER to get a chest x-ray. they said my x-ray looked fine, which was encouraging (hopefully no permanent lung damage there), and they took a flu swab and a strep swab just to rule those out (both negative, of course). at least two other people were there with me in the ER complaining of similar symptoms, but they didn’t have any tests for us so the doctor just told me to go home, act as if I had it, and keep taking tylenol and drinking water. this doctor is also the one who told me to stop using my inhaler--and the fact that my inhaler kept making the pain worse is one of the things that really tips me off here that I probably had it.

things are pretty much uneventful for the next week: still having a tight chest, a fever that seems to come and go, sore throat, cough. no more crazy attacks like that one night.

by day nineteen (yesterday) I start to notice a bit of improvement in my chest pain. it’s not gone, but it’s not as bad and I’ll have slight reprieves from the tightness. today is day twenty (more or less, my numbers are a little rough here) and I actually felt okay most of the day. by the evening the tightness returned and I’m still coughing every now and then, but far less often. I think the fever is gone and my throat doesn’t hurt too bad, either! I’m well past the point of being contagious, so I actually went to the grocery store today and got a few things. I’m not totally out of the woods yet, but I think (knock on fucking wood) the worst has passed.

anyway, I hope my anecdote is helpful for you, and I hope you stay safe and healthy!

[transadvice]

Hello, So I started T recently, and while I know a good deal about the changes that will occur, I have a specific question. How do I know the difference between the scratchyness/soreness of my voice starting to change, vs the scratchyness/soreness that comes with the onset of a respiratory illness? This is important as I need to know whether I should be wearing a mask, due to the concentration of COVID19 cases in my area. Thanks!

I think a lot of us are struggling right now with the question of, “Is it COVID-19 or is it an unrelated, but similar symptom?” I’m not a doctor, but based on my crash course via public health announcements and articles in the last few weeks, here’s what I believe to be true:* The most common symptoms of COVID-19 are fever and cough. If you don’t have those symptoms, it’s likely (but not 100%) to be something else. How You Can Tell The Difference Between COVID-19, Cold, Flu, and Allergies* Sore throat is possible, but not a common symptom of COVID-19. Only about 14% of the 55,000 confirmed COVID-19 patients in laboratory tests reported a sore throat. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus* Face makes protect others from droplets when you cough or sneeze. If you’re not coughing or sneezing, you don’t need a face mask. https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public/when-and-how-to-use-masksOne of the hardest things to accept, I think, is going to be that you might get sick and you might never find out if it was COVID-19.In some sense, it doesn’t matter. In my area, at least, tests are hard to come by, doctors’ offices are full, and doctors don’t want sick people to spread the virus to others in the hospital, so they are urging people who do not need ventilators or other emergency care to stay home and treat the symptoms with home remedies, such as over-the-counter painkillers, cough medicine, fluids, and rest. Whatever your symptoms are, regardless of if they are from COVID-19 or another reason, treat them at home, and prevent the spread to other people with social distancing and hand-washing. Because we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and because COVID-19 has an incubation period, we should all be washing our hands and practicing social distancing, regardless of if we have symptoms. In other words, if you’re sick, stay home / wash your hands / treat your symptoms. If you’re well, stay home / wash your hands / treat your symptoms (if any). As far as the testosterone sore throat, based on my totally nonscientific observation, it usually happens within a few weeks after you start T, and can last weeks or months on and off (some people experience it the whole time their voice deepens, which typically takes about a year). It can be accompanied by hoarseness or croaky voice, or voice breaking (just like cis pubescent guys). This is another treat-the-symptom situation, whatever makes you feel more comfortable with a sore throat: tea with honey, ice cream, cough drops, hot steam from the shower, etc.Also: congratulations for getting on T! EDITED TO ADD: As long as this is my trans men and COVID-19 post, here’s some good info about binding in this time

[ruminativerabbi]

Interconnectedness

I suppose I shouldn’t admit this, but up until a few weeks ago I don’t believe I had ever heard of Wuhan. Given that Wuhan is a city of eleven million people (which makes almost a third larger than New York City), that is probably not something I should be particularly proud of. On the other hand, one of the more amusing side-effects of the information-overload age is the way in which people (and, yes, myself included) regularly speak with easy familiarity about people and things they hadn’t actually heard of twenty minutes earlier. Also in that category are ethnic groups like the Rohingya or the Uighurs or the Yazidis that up until just recently were familiar names in the West solely to professional ethnographers. But so are places. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Hubei Province either—despite its huge area and more than 58 million residents. Of course, now I mention Hubei Province and its capital city, Wuhan, in the same offhand way I naturally speak about Oslo or Madrid without pausing to identify them as the capital cities of their respective countries. Nor is “information-overload” an exaggerated turn of speech: I just googled “Wuhan” and Google returned 250 million hits in 0.61 seconds.

And while I’m in confessional mode, I suppose I could also admit that I hadn’t ever heard of coronaviruses until just a few weeks ago although I, of course, mention them in my daily speech without any further explanation as though any educated person would naturally know what they are and why they matter. This is slightly less embarrassing to me than not knowing where Wuhan is—coronaviruses were only identified in the 1960s, when scientists first saw the link between something called “infectious bronchitis virus” that attacks chickens and two different kinds of viruses that are found in the nasal cavities of human beings suffering from bouts of the common cold. So at least in that regard I’m only sixty years behind the times. (There have apparently been people living in Wuhan, on the other hand, for about 3,500 years.) But even now that I’m all caught up on coronaviruses, there are still details that surprise. One is that there are only seven strains of human coronaviruses known to exist—some relatively well known (like the one that causes SARS—severe acute respiratory syndrome—or the one that causes MERS—Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome), others (like the so-called New Haven coronavirus, correctly called Human Coronavirus NL63) dramatically less so. Of course, all seven—including SARS and MERS—have now been eclipsed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. (Here too, I surprised myself by not understanding until just a few days ago that the 19 only references the year in which it was identified, 2019, or that the name for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 was chosen specifically—so the head of the World Health Organization—for its blandness…and to avoid irritating the Chinese government by naming it after the country in which it was first identified.)

For a person like myself with no training in epidemiology, it’s hard to keep track of the statistics that have been coming out so quickly over these last days and weeks or to know what to do with them exactly. On the one hand, this is a very new thing: it was not even three months ago that the virus was first identified in Wuhan. In that time, though, more than 80,000 cases have been confirmed—in every province of China and in more than two dozen other countries including our own. The first individual definitely known to have succumbed to the disease only died in Wuhan on January 9, but since then there have been just over 2,700 deaths attributed to COVID-19. As of this week, however, just 38 of those deaths have taken place outside of China. Should that statistic be more reassuring or more upsetting? It’s not that obvious to a lay person like myself. Nor am I sure how to pair the number of confirmed cases with the parallel statistic that more than 27,000 people diagnosed with COVID-19 subsequently recovered from the disease—and that, despite the fact that there is no specific antiviral treatment available. It’s even less obvious to me how to negotiate the outside-of-China numbers with respect to three specific countries: Iran (with 95 reported cases and 15 deaths), South Korea (with 977 cases and 7 deaths), and Italy (with 260 cases and 7 deaths). Of course, since there appears to be about a ten-day window between infection and detectability, these numbers will all be entirely wrong within a few weeks. But the new numbers we will surely have in two weeks’ time too will be unreliable, of course, thereby leading us even further down the rabbit hole in terms of understanding how much of this is hyped-up newsfeed and how much, a serious threat that we should all be taking very seriously. Nor do I want to fall into the trap of assuming that if the Stock Market is reacting to the fear of a global pandemic, those jitters must be justified!

In terms of our own country, the numbers are also hard to understand. As of last Thursday, there are exactly 53 cases of people sick with COVID-19 in the United States. Of them, twelve were people who traveled to China and became sick there, three are American citizens who had been living in Wuhan and were evacuated back to the U.S., thirty-six are U.S. nationals who were passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and only two were made sick through human-to-human transmission inside the U.S.  Are those very low numbers a sign that we should all relax and not panic? Or would taking those numbers as a sign that this is basically a problem for China, Iran, and a handful of other countries be precisely the head-in-the-sand approach our nation should definitely not be taking…and particularly not while our numbers are still low enough for us to respond meaningfully to keep safe the rest of the population? That the President has named Vice President Pence to spearhead the American response to the COVID-19 outbreak is also confusing: should we be more relieved that the government is at least doing something, or should we be more worried that the man at the helm has no background or training of any sort in epidemiology or public health policy? It’s hard to say!

The world is filled with experts who will weigh in and attempt to chart a course forward for our nation—and for the other nations of the world as well, of course—that somehow manages to contain the threat from becoming an unstoppable menace. But what I myself have learned from all my recent reading about COVID-19 has less to do with virology and more to do with the spiritual principle I see shining through all those numbers and predictions.

The story of Adam and Eve, perhaps the most famous of all biblical stories, has at its core the simple idea that all human beings, descended from the same two ancestors, are therefore reasonably to be taken as each other’s kin. (This apparently is not merely a spiritual truth either: click here or here for some serious scientific support for that notion that there once actually was an Eve from whom humankind is descended.) For me, that is the lesson that underlies the whole COVID-19 crisis as well.

On the first of December, a single man is hospitalized in a huge Chinese city that most people outside of China have never visited or even heard of. Eventually, he is diagnosed with a coronavirus that no one has previously identified. Not two months later, there are cases in every province of China. By the middle of February, there are cases in countries as far apart as Australia and Germany, and as disparate as Finland and Cambodia. There are confirmed cases in forty countries on all five of the world’s five continents. In our own country, the confirmed cases are weirdly spread out in states as distant from each other as possible: Massachusetts, California, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Washington.

It seems all to have happened so quickly, far more like the way children living in the same home or attending the same school would easily infect each other with the flu than the way you would expect a virus to spread across the entire world in a matter of weeks. But embedded in the COVID-19 story is a deep truth unrelated to the ill ease the concept of a world-wide pandemic engenders naturally: that the biblical narrative had it right when it described humankind as a vast, interrelated network of distant cousins…and that the prophet has it exactly correctly when he wrote about all humankind having one heavenly Parent and about there being one God who made us all in the divine image not arbitrarily or accidentally, but specifically to embed in our history and our nature the fact that we are truly each other’s kin in this world and so neither naturally nor inevitably each other’s enemies.

That even writing that out has a certain mawkish, Pollyanna-ish feel to it is not at all a good thing. It sounds that way to me as well! But behind my own disinclination to embrace this notion of an intertwined humanity (reflective, in its own strange way, of the intertwined helices characteristic of the recombinant DNA that truly does link all human beings to each other) lies the challenge to set aside the natural prejudice we all bring to our analysis of the world and our place in it and to embrace in its place a sense of us all as extended brethren, as members of the same human family, as passengers in the same boat that either will or will not survive long enough to bring those traveling on it to their desired destination before foundering on the shoals of our own fractiousness and quarrelsomeness. If any good comes from the sudden spread of this terrible virus, it will derive from the degree to which its almost instant spread throughout the world is able to suggest—and to how many—the deep truth that we truly are all in this together.