Fully Recovered from COVID

via Unsplash

Thank you for all the well-wishes after I got COVID! By the time my last post went live on Tuesday (after the onset of mild symptoms on Saturday and first testing positive with my peak symptoms on Sunday), I was already feeling much better. I've since continued to recover fairly quickly: I'm now close to feeling 100%, though have continued to rest at home as much as possible. (K tested at home almost every day, but he never got a COVID positive and his symptoms stayed mild.) 

Because I hadn't taken advantage of early voting before I came down with COVID - and because a certain conservative-leaning news sources in New York insisted that the only particularly contested race on my ballot, for New York's governor, was going to be close - I needed to step out briefly on Tuesday to vote. (That race turned out the way I wanted.) I masked the entire time I was out of my apartment. It's barely a two-block walk to my poll site; I was in and out in slightly less than ten minutes; and my symptoms were down to a mild cold level, though with some icky-sounding congestion. Nonetheless, I still needed to lay down for an hour or two afterwards to recover my energy. 

While my case of COVID has been extremely mild and quick to pass - even compared to fully vaccinated and boosted friends who were not immunocompromised by pregnancy at the time they had COVID (though I'm the only one who got it after having one of the new bivalent boosters, since those came out so recently) - it definitely felt weird compared to various colds I've had previously, or the flu. I lost my sense of smell completely for two days, which felt out of proportion to the moderate congestion I still had by then. (That, in turn, significantly muted my sense of taste.) 

Hard to pinpoint exactly how, but the cough and congestion just felt really different from my usual bad colds in past years, it sounded much worse than it felt. I think the hit to my energy levels for a few days also felt worse than with typical colds, but I've bounced back now, very quickly. 

It's looking like my mild to moderate COVID case won't increase my schedule or intensity of prenatal care, but I might not be able to fully confirm this until my next appointment OB-GYN on Monday. I was already due to be seen at least weekly starting at 36 weeks next week no matter what, so I'm going to have plenty of medical supervision regardless. My blood sugar was fully back to normal by Monday afternoon, and it's continuing to look like I won't need to go on medication or insulin for gestational diabetes this pregnancy, which is a huge relief, as that would have opened up a lot of potential issues.