My Covid Experience 4: Start of Recovery

After Christmas 2021 I thankfully started to feel a lot better.

The advice from my GP was ringing in my ears at the start of the New Year and I knew I needed to eat well and exercise more. Firstly I decided to do Dry January to give my body a total break from alcohol. Secondly me and my gorgeous wife decided to try to do a wholefood January as well. We both went plant based in 2019 but the aim for January 2022 was to cook from raw ingredients and as few processed foods or meals as possible. My third and final thing was to start exercise – more than just walking.

The first two were relatively straightforward for me but exercise was different. I started off by doing 10 minute sessions of stretching in the morning. These were a mixture of some yoga moves and exercises from Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. These started to loosen up my very stiff body.

In my 20s I used to run and swim but that was 30 years ago. I knew I had to try to exercise and push myself as I felt better. on 17 January 2022 I stepped out for my first run in years. Actually is was more like 1/3 run and 2/3 walk but I did run. I only did 1.51k at a pace of 8 minutes 28 seconds per kilometre but I did it. I did the same thing 2 days later and I was slightly faster. I started going running 2 or 3 times a week and I started to run more and walk less. Now as I write (June 2022) I run 2.5k three times a week and my pace is around 6 minutes 15 seconds per kilometre and I am happy with that. I achieved one of my goals last month as I did my first parkrun which is 5k and I did it in just over 30 minutes with my gorgeous wife. (On 3 of the other days of the week I do some HIIT training, you can see an example of it here.)

I also started cycling to our local street market in Lewisham to pick up fruit and vegetables. It is only about 1k each way but it felt good. I now go at least once a week. I have also cycled to the Thames a few times and one cold winter morning I made it to see sunrise over the Thames in Greenwich.

I used to enjoy swimming and I recently went swimming at Charlton Lido for the first time. I did 600 metres in about 30 minutes. Very slow but very satisfying.

After 6 months of exercising I am looking forward to it almost every time I go.

I am also trying to get meditation but I am finding that a lot harder. There are other things I am trying such as cold showering, trying to read more, regular early sleep times, intermittent fasting, restricted time eating, no caffeine after 14.00 and 4 or 5 alcohol clear days a week. I don’t do them all together or all of them regularly but I am trying different things to see what sticks and I think will work for me.

After exercising and trying different things I have lost a few kilos in weight and I fell fitter and happier. My friend, John, asked me what do I want to get out of trying all these different things? It was a good question and other than the usual lose weight and get fitter answer it made me think. I think a few of other things I want to get out of this are a lower resting heart rate, be happier, be open to trying new things and not end up a miserable older man. These may change over time but it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

My Covid Experience 1: Getting Covid 2020

My Covid Experience 2: For A Year, 2021

My Covid Experience 3: The Second Virus

Charlton Lido

My Covid Experience 3: The Second Virus

2021 went on and even though I was tired I didn’t feel ill.

In July/August we had a family holiday in Scotland (Edinburgh, Loch Ness, Elgin, Fochabers, Portgordon and more) and visited Holy Island on the way back. It was a fantastic break. Even though I was tired things were happening and in early November 2021 we had a family meet up in Hertfordshire which I really enjoyed.

In the last week of November 2021 I started to feel unwell again. Very quickly I couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without stopping for breath and I was aching all over. My Fitbit (I know it isn’t exact) showed that my O2 sats were dropping and my resting heart rate had jumped 20 points in a few days. At nights I was struggling to sleep and sweating so much that I had to change during the night every night as I was soaked. I couldn’t leave the house and my gorgeous wife was having to do everything.

Thankfully my gorgeous wife and daughter weren’t getting ill. Just to make sure I did a PCR test and it came back negative so it wasn’t covid. After two and a half weeks of feeling bad I got a telephone consultation with my GP. He called me in for an examination. At 7.10 on a cold December morning armed with my negative lateral flow test I went to see my GP.

My GP examined me and his first question was why I hadn’t called before. He told me I had a couple of infections and put me on antibiotics and a very short course of steroids. He told me that as I had long covid I would feel any ear, nose, throat or chest infections very badly for a few years and I should contact the surgery immediately. I found this really shocking as on the news they were saying to stay away from GP surgerys as much as possible. He also sent me for a full set of blood tests and told me to exercise and eat well as soon as I felt better. Finally if I wasn’t any better in 7 days to come straight back in.

My gorgeous wife picked up my antibiotics and steroids and I started them both that afternoon. Within 2 days I started to feel a lot better. After 7 days I felt better than I had since before I got Covid in December 2020 and I could look forward to Christmas 2021.

My Covid Experience 1: Getting Covid 2020

My Covid Experience 2: For A Year, 2021

My Covid Experience 4: Start of Recovery

Edinburgh Castle

Loch Ness

A Portgordon sunset.

Elgin Cathedral

The castle on Holy Island, Lindisfarne.

My Covid Experience 2: For A Year, 2021

By the third week of January 2020 it was time to get back to work (we are currently dog walkers). People were very kind and waited for us to get back to walking. It was exhausting and every afternoon I needed to sleep. I couldn’t do much exercise but I could walk. However during the week I needed to sleep most afternoons just to get through.

Thanks to the amazing efforts of the scientific community I was lucky enough to get my first Covid vaccination in March 2021. It felt wonderful and with the doctors and volunteers cheering us through it felt fantastic. Unfortunately for me this vaccination meant I lost my sense of smell again – I had about 6 weeks when I was able to smell. (As I write this in June 2022 it still hasn’t come back properly. One benefit I have had is that I can chop onions without crying – I chopped 2 kilos with no effect one day.) I had my second vaccination in May 2021 and I am still very grateful to all the people who worked to develop and deliver these vaccinations – thank you.

During this year my sense of smell did not return but other things happened. I got phantosmia (smelling things that aren’t there) and parosmia (distorted sense of smell) when I did smell something. For example I would randomly smell burning and rotten sewage when neither were around which was disconcerting at first but something I got used to. I also smelled the wrong things, driving past a field with freshly spread manure I thought I smelled violets – very strange. I have been doing smell training every day for a year and I occasionally get the right smells now for 2 to 3 seconds which is an improvement.

I know some people have really struggled with their loss of smell but I am lucky as I can still taste everything. It has had some unusual impacts. For a year I manually checked that our gas hob was turned off every night as I couldn’t smell the gas; after a year of it never happening I relaxed. Checking food is more difficult as I cannot smell if food is off or going off. I have to ask my gorgeous wife to sniff food for me to check it is safe.

Along with this I had a thing called post nasal drip. It sounds odd and basically it felt to me like a hair was tickling the back of my throat all the time. I spoke to my GP and he gave me something for it but it never really went away and was very annoying as it made me cough.

I think the worst thing was the tiredness. I needed to sleep for at least an hour in the afternoon about 5 days a week. Thankfully I could fit it around my life but it was always there.

In July 2021 my mother died and it hit me harder than I thought it would. She was quite old but it was still a surprise and I think the way I was already feeling didn’t help.

So 2021 carried on and I was still exhausted but not getting worse.

My Covid Experience 1: Getting Covid 2020

My Covid Experience 3: The Second Virus

My Covid Experience 4: Start of Recovery

My jars for my daily smell training.

My Covid Experience 1: Getting Covid 2020

A short thread of blogs about having Covid.

In October 2019 during the half term break we took a trip to Vossemeren, Center Parcs in Belgium (picture at the top). It was a lovely holiday with a drive through Northern France and a short trip into the Netherlands. I didn’t realise that this would be my last trip abroad as things have worked out (this is as I write in June 2022).

As we all know Covid came along for us in 2020 and here in the UK we went into our first lockdown in March 2020. These were scary times with food and toilet roll shortages. The days were punctuated with daily press conferences and changing advice. Thankfully we didn’t get ill and carried on following the rules.

In December 2020 the next door council Greenwich tried to close their schools due to the rise of Covid infections. The then Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, threatened them with legal action to stay open on 15 December 2020. All the schools stayed open and the virus was spreading through the schools. Maybe my council, Lewisham, would have followed suit – but who knows. My daughter stayed in school until the end of term a few days later.

By Christmas Day 2020 I was on the maximum daily dosage of paracetamol and not feeling well, but I enjoyed my family Christmas. On the morning of 27 December 2020 I lost my sense of smell and there was no doubt it was Covid. My 13 year old daughter was the same and we both had a PCR test and came back positive next day. It was 12 days since schools were threatened with legal action not to close. Over the next 2 days my wife and 19 year old son tested positive for Covid.

Covid hit me and my wife harder than the teenagers but they felt ill as well. We just lay as heaps for several days. People kindly offered to walk our dog as we couldn’t go out which was fantastic from our friends and neighbours. I think the sight of me all hunched up and obviously ill letting the dog run to them put some people off but others kept on walking him, to them all I am very grateful.

I had all the classic symptoms – aches, pains, loss of sense of taste and loss of sense of smell. There were others – I had a cough that hurt my lungs and reminded me of having bronchitis when I was a child. The headaches felt almost as much as the cluster headaches I had had 20 years before and nothing would stop them. My knee hurt again and it hadn’t for a year after years of aching. Covid seemed to be bringing back lots of things I had had in the past and it felt terrible.

Around day 7 or 8 I suddenly felt a change and I wasn’t as bad. Thankfully by day 14 I was coming out of it. I was exhausted and totally drained. I started sleeping for an hour or two each afternoon even though I was recovering but I had no energy. I still couldn’t smell or taste anything and I had added too much salt to my food for taste and my tongue started to crack. I stopped the salt and drank more water and my tongue quickly healed. We took our dog for a walk for 20 minutes and then slept for almost 3 hours, it was exhausting. Slowly we all got better. I got my sense of taste back, I had missed the taste of coffee more than anything. I also got most of my sense of smell back which was amazing, you don’t know what you have until it is gone.

So surely it was just time to recover now and carry on as normal – or was it?

My Covid Experience 2: For A Year, 2021

My Covid Experience 3: The Second Virus

My Covid Experience 4: Start of Recovery