— चार हजार सात सौ उनतीस —

It's so hard to gauge the point at which you should start panicking.

I don't feel terrible today . . . but, I don't feel great. I did not get enough sleep last night, which maybe had to do, at least partly, with the chai I made for Shobhit and me. When I went to bed, I had a sudden coughing fit, and it sort of felt like there was suddenly dust in the air. I had to sit up just to feel like I was getting it out. But, once that passed and I lay down again, I really didn’t cough any more at all, and not for the rest of the night, so far as I know.

Perhaps most importantly, my temperature last night was 96.74° and this morning it was 97.02°. So I have that going for me at least.

That said, Shobhit spent a lot of the day yesterday with a headache, and when he first started making parathas to have for dinner, he had to go sit on the couch because he felt like he was going to fall over. Within minutes he was back and he finished the cooking, telling me he didn't feel a whole lot better but, I guess, enough better. He still had plenty of an appetite thereafter, and by the end of the evening he was at least behaving as though he was fine. Same with this morning before he left for work, aside from his truly crazy-making incessant throat-clearing and the coughing he knows is caused by drinking coffee. Our doctor deduced long ago that his frequent coughing is tied to acid reflux, which he's been taking medication for now for a year or two; it's common enough that his boss has already openly talked about how unconcerned he is about Shobhit coughing: "You cough all the time anyway." That's not going to be any reassurance to customers at the store who might hear it, but whatever. Hopefully he manages to find ways to suppress it. He takes NyQuil to work with him pretty much every day.

But this thing yesterday was different. Again, he seemed to be doing okay this morning, aside from the annoying cough and throat-clearing. More concerning is how tired I feel, and . . . I hesitate to say "fatigued." That's too strong a word, and I know what the achy bones of the flu feels like. This isn't that. At least not yet. Still, I don't feel quite right, and I occasionally have slight lightheadedness—which is a thing that has sort of come and gone semi-regularly since the cold I caught in Sydney in February. Tomorrow is the two-month anniversary of when we left for Australia, though; it's been a while now. If I get sick now, it's not likely to be tied to that. Is it? Whatever the case, the idea of getting sick is frightening. And just being scared might be exacerbating things on its own.

There's been a lot of talk about people not getting sick for up to two weeks after they catch COVID-19. So it's like, if I were to get sick now, I suppose in all likelihood I would have caught it at one of the few places I've gone out shopping. Or hell, even walking past someone on the street. And now there's data that suggests people already have antibodies and basically had the virus run through their system without ever having symptoms at all. I kind of dream of being one of those people: discovering I have antibodies and therefore being able to, at least to a degree, assume that means I am now immune. It would be reckless and dangerous to assume that without an antibody test result though, and also what are the actual odds that I won that particular lottery? Probably pretty low.

Still. I sort of feel like I could use a nap. That would probably be the case even under normal circumstances though, with how late it was last night before I finally fell asleep. My Sleep Cycle app says I was in bed six hours and eight minutes, and asleep five hours and 33 minutes. How the hell it calculates that, I have no idea. I've managed okay on that little sleep before. But never combined with this level of worry and risk. Let's just hope that once I get a more full night's sleep tonight, I feel normal again tomorrow. I mean, shit. Tomorrow officially starts my Birth Week! Which, for the first time since starting them in 2004, I will be spending almost entirely inside at home. In fact I canceled taking vacation time for the whole week and will only take a full day off work on Thursday, for my birthday itself. The last time I did not take the entire week off for my birthday was, again, 2004.

This part sort of works out, though: at Shobhit's suggestion, I updated my vacation accrual projections document I've been maintaining now for many years. I had been on track to end 2020 having taken the most vacation time I've ever taken in a given year, before I canceled four of the five vacation days for my Birth Week. As of now, I'm projected to be taking 18 days off total this year, instead of 22. Twelve of those days were already taken for the Australia trip alone, so the other six days include Christmas and New Year's from the year's first paycheck, and then looking forward: the one day for my birthday; one day for Shobhit's and my anniversary in June; one day for a summer trip to visit Mom and Bill in Idaho; and another day for the Christmastime visit back to Idaho in December. Even that's an optimistic estimate; god knows whether it will feel safe to travel in July, and I fear it may not. Of course and as always, we'll see. Nothing is going to feel truly "normal" again for another year, maybe two. All of my Birth Week "celebrating" I'll be doing this year will be via video chat. I just hope against hope it doesn't have to happen that way yet again in 2021.

— चार हजार सात सौ उनतीस —

— चार हजार सात सौ उनतीस —

. . . And now I've just returned from a little over an hour lunch break at the dining table, with Karen on FaceTime: my twice-monthly Lunch with Karen. She told me about how David, her husband, had cleaned their oven for the first time in the ten-plus years they had it, and how much fun she and Anita had looking through the glass window in the oven door, actually clear enough to see through for the first time in years, watching the dough rise as they made something called "Dutch Babies." I kept wanting to call them Dutch Ovens, but that's a very different thing.

We talked a lot about COVID-19 related stuff, as always. We commiserated on not knowing how much to worry any time we feel like we're not feeling quite as healthy as we should be feeling. And in the last fifteen minutes or so of our call, I gave her a rundown of my altered Birth Week plans, which officially begin tomorrow: scrapping "Discovery Pass State Parks Tour" from 2020 completely and just bumping in to next year; renaming this year's theme to "Virtual Quarantinis."

I made myself a sandwich with the last cheese bagel we had left. I meant to ask Karen what she was eating but I forgot. She didn't like the angle her evidently precariously balanced iPhone was giving of her video feed, so she called me back using FaceTime on her actual laptop, which did work better. I was talking to her on my iPad.

It was nice just to have someone to chat with for an hour. You know, in the end, I'm not sure my days with social activity are that much fewer on average even when it nearly all has to be done virtually. The cumulative hours themselves are definitely fewer, but the total number of "social review points," while definitely lessened, won't be as dramatically lowered as I initially feared, I don't think.

— चार हजार सात सौ उनतीस —

In other news, I was on the phone with yet another Apple Care support agent for around an hour yesterday, and I think she may have fixed my problem with the disappeared playlists. They're actually visible on my phone now, although a bunch of them are gray and when I tap them I get an error that says "This song is not currently available in your country or region." Huh? I need to try syncing with the phone actually hooked up to my computer and see if that makes a difference, which I will do later. The lady was very cool, and she enjoyed talking to me so much, and was so sympathetic to my now-three-days of issues and phone calls, she told me how I can contact her directly if and when I have further issues. So I felt really good about that.

Then I helped Shobhit make parathas and we had a very nice lentil and rice dinner.

— चार हजार सात सौ उनतीस —

[posted 1:21 pm]