Guess who got COVID?

Despite being vaccinated twice, boosted once and wearing a mask more often than Clayton Moore (completely dated and unnecessary Lone Ranger reference) I got some form of COVID and I’m guessing it was the latest edition:

Omicrud.

(And if you think I got the name wrong, just wait until you catch it.)

If you’re a skeptic of the medical community and science in general, you might think taking more shots than Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid on a Bolivian vacation didn’t do me much good, but being a “the syringe is half-full” kind of guy, I think:

How much sicker would I be if I weren’t vaccinated?

After reading several on-line articles that appear to have been written by robots from the future whose originally-programmed language wasn’t English, it would appear that vaccination may not stop you from getting infected with Omicron because it’s much more contagious than the COVID Classic we started with, but vaccination tends to lessen the severity of the Omicron symptoms.

And if what I got was the Omicron JV, you really don’t want to play the varsity.

Barely-related robot-translation story alert

Once I realized I was more diseased than an over-worked porn star, I isolated myself (fortunately, I’m the only person in my family who tested positive) and I just completed my fifth day of being alone in the same room and lucky for me it’s got a TV and so far my record is three movies in one day, but then I saw the Mayaguez Indians were playing the Caguas Creoles (apparently politically-correct outrage about team names is still working its way South) in the Roberto Clemente Professional Baseball League on FS2.

I tuned it in, but the announcers had pretty heavy Latin accents so then I turned on the captioning feature in hopes that would help me understand what they were saying, but apparently whatever computer program is supposed to take what announcers say and turn it into written English was confused by their accents as well because I got to hear a story about that great Cincinnati Reds player “Joni” Bench. 

At another point somebody made an error and threw the “bull” away and then the word “hoar” appeared on my screen and still I don’t know if that was an attempt to spell “however” or a negative comment on an umpire.

Also, the announcers just seemed like two Latin dudes talking calmly about baseball while watching a game and didn’t seem to feel the need to sell the action with those “RAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG, THAT ONE AIN’T COMIN’ BACK!!!” home run calls that have been the fashion ever since ESPN fucked up sports reporting.

In any case, turns out baseball is way more entertaining if you’re also watching the captioning feature make extremely random phonetical guesses at what the announcers just said.  

The Omicrud symptoms

So I get cataract surgery Monday morning and by Tuesday night I’m feeling kinda blah and then develop a case of the shakes that would make a young Elvis Presley proud and old one exhausted and before long I’m lying under four blankets trying to stay warm and convince myself that this isn’t anything to worry about because over the past two years every time I sneeze or cough I think, “Oh, no…here it comes” and get tested and if I counted right I’ve been tested eight times and always come up negative.

But it turns out one of the Omicron symptoms is chills and I definitely had that one covered, so let’s check it off the list and move on to the other symptoms and how I experienced them. 

Loss of taste and smell

Normally, the only good part about getting a flu-like disease is rapid weight loss when you lose your appetite and simultaneously cough up half your body weight in snot.

For me, that’s like hitting the reset button on all those bad habits that got you into trouble in the first place – a midafternoon snack, an Irish coffee that has slowly over the years become 52% Irish and 48% coffee – and after you’re sick those bad habits have to be re-established because all your dials have been set back to zero and if you’re smart (which often leaves me out) you don’t re-establish them.

Unfortunately for me, food still tastes good and since I’m locked in a room without much else to do, feeding time at the zoo is a high point of the day, so I guess I haven’t lost my sense of taste although I now think two kinds of plaid look good together and those “high water” pants women are wearing are extremely attractive and the music of Katy Perry is pure genius.

Katy Perry sidebar

I’m probably focusing on Katy Perry because I was semi-forced to watch her new video when it was shown at half-time during the College Football National Championship game in one of those cross-promotional events that only make sense to people who work in advertising and are so desperate for an idea that they convince themselves that football fans are also Katy Perry fans and after some beer-bellied construction worker hears Katy’s new song and watches her pretty much incomprehensible video – a team of dancers rubbing their crotches in what appears to be an oil refinery with the world’s worst security – that fat construction worker is going to stand in line with a bunch of nine-year-old girls and buy Katy Perry concert tickets.

On the other hand:

This is a picture of Katy “lactating” beer on stage so maybe she’s more appealing to football fans than I originally thought.

Anyway…

Her new video and song are called “When I’m Gone” and for me it can’t be soon enough because Katy seems like one of those entertainers who would promote her deeply-felt love of God or bang the entire defensive line of the Minnesota Vikings if either one or possibly both would increase record sales.

And if that seems overly harsh; she started it.

I was perfectly fine not talking or thinking about Katy Perry until she fucked up a good football game.

Sore throat

At one point my throat was so sore I was trying to avoid swallowing which you do way more than you realize when your throat’s not sore and made me think the Smith Brothers Cough Drop Company really dropped the ball when they didn’t hire Linda Lovelace to be their spokesperson.

(See? Now that’s a cross-promotion that makes sense.)

A cough

I not only have a cough, I have a “productive” cough and for those of you unfamiliar with medical terminology, that’s a cough so well-developed it goes out on its own, rents an apartment, gets a part-time job and contributes at least half its paycheck to the person who gave the cough its start and right now I could really use the income because for the past five days the most productive thing about me has been that cough.

Dehydration

One of the signs that you’re dehydrated is your urine turning dark and at one point my urine appeared to be the exact same color as the orange juice I’ve been guzzling so the obvious conclusion is I need to drink way more water or way less orange juice.

Fatigue

Hold on…too tired to write…I’ll get back to you on this one after I take yet another four-and-a-half hour nap.

The Runs

I suspect one of the reasons I occasionally feel so fatigued is my body seems to be devoting all its energy into taking something relatively solid like Hamburger Helper and dissolving it into a liquid indistinguishable from the water currently flowing in the Missouri River.

Confusion

This symptom seems overly vague since I’ve suffered “confusion” ever since seeing Little Richard on TV in the early 60s and not being entirely sure what gender I was looking at.

BTW: Little Richard is one of my heroes because think about what Black men were going through in the 1960s and Richard was just out there being whatever he was and he didn’t get lynched so I guess Southern Racists were just as confused as I was and had conversations that went:

“Dang, Billy Bob…he don’t appear that interested in any of our White women.”

“Yeah, Cletus…and I find him strangely attractive.”

The Omicrud Conclusion

The timing could not have been much worse and I’ve called the people who did my eye surgery to warn them that I came down sick the night after they worked on me and rescheduled follow-up appointments and I sincerely hope I didn’t do anything to endanger other people’s health, a guilt some people don’t seem to feel in the slightest.

If you want to scare the Missouri River Water out of yourself, read the following Associated Press story because some scientists point out that since too many people are refusing to get vaccinated it’s giving the virus more chances to mutate and there’s no guarantee it won’t mutate into something we don’t have a vaccine for.

Neat, huh?

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-science-health-pandemics-dc99bc9f769dd6d7cb669e3d185c6261

And while they’re saying the Omicron symptoms seem milder than the other variants, they’re also saying it hasn’t been around long enough to know whether it’s doing long-term damage to our lungs, so my future as a bagpipe player might be in jeopardy which once again proves it’s an ill wind that blows no good and starts coughing like a two-pack-a-day smoker if it tries.

Also, my experience points out that the COVID numbers are even worse than we think because I took a home test and didn’t feel sick enough to go to the hospital, so my illness is not showing up in anyone’s statistics and there have to be a whole lot of people who fall into the same category.

And finally…

If you catch the Omicrud, get sick and decide to pass time by watching the Creoles and Indians series which continues tonight, make damn sure you turn on the captions.