2020 Life Logs, Day 324: Interesting 24 Hours
Date: Friday, November 20, 2020
Weather: Partly Cloudy; High 59, Low 48 Degrees
Location: At Home in The Cottage, Falmouth, MA
I wrote last night’s log early in the evening, and things went downhill after that. I had a full evening of ‘watching’ lined up, starting with a 7 pm Zoom presented by the Woods Hole Historical Museum with the title, “Getting History Right: Telling Our Story from the Wampanoag Perspective.” A local Wampanoag led the conversation retelling the story of the first Thanksgiving from the Wampanoag point of view. I really enjoyed the presentation but was so glad that I could choose not to be on video and have my audio muted as I was buried in tissues by the end of the hour. No, I wasn’t crying. My nose started running and just wouldn’t stop. And I was sneezing and felt chilled. I took a couple of Sudafed to try to stop the runny nose and continued with my watching. The Sudafed helped, but while I watched an interview with President Obama from 10 to 11 pm, I stared to panic. Was I getting a cold or was it Covid? It was midnight when I convinced myself that I was okay, so I went to bed and slept just fine. I got up with Shadow at 6:00 am and went right back to bed. But I was encouraged as there was no runny nose. I got up at 9 am, took a shower, and felt okay, but I coughed a couple of times. I took Shadow for his morning mile-long walk and felt a heaviness in my chest. But I had no temperature, I certainly hadn’t lost my sense of smell or taste, and I really felt fine. What to do? It’s bad enough to get a cold just before Thanksgiving, but Covid?? My primary care is with Community Health Center of Cape Cod and on Tuesday I received an email update on Covid testing from them. I looked up the email and called the number. I got a real nurse and she told me that I would need to have a Zoom meeting with a physician’s assistant to okay the testing, but since it was Friday, she would go ahead and schedule an appointment time for a test. It had to be approved by the PA, but she was sure it would be. An hour or so later, the PA approved the test but agreed with me that I probably had either a cold or an allergy-related issue. She told me to take an Allegra once a day, use Flonase nasal spray at night, and suck on dark chocolate to stop any coughing. I asked her repeat that last bit of advice. I had never heard of using dark chocolate instead of cough drops. She explained that dark chocolate contains a natural cough depressant named theobromine that is much more effective than cough drops. The theobromine comes from the cacao bean and is in all chocolate, just more of it is in dark chocolate. I told her that my grandsons would love this advice. Fast forward to later in the afternoon when I went for the testing. That was easy. You drive up to a parking space marked for Covid testing, a real doctor comes out to greet you and check your photo id, then he administers the test while you sit in your car. The hard part is the time it takes to get the results, somewhere between two to five days. But hopefully I will get Negative results by Wednesday so I can have Thanksgiving with the Goldstones. Or if I am fine tomorrow morning, maybe we will just chalk this up to another strange instant cold and life will go on as normal. Whatever happens, this has been an interesting 24 hours. I hope the next 24 hours are much more normal. Or is there such a thing as ‘normal’ anymore?
