So after last Monday’s post, I wasn’t getting any better and was tested Tuesday for Covid and sure enough, the test came back positive. I had monoclonal antibody (Regeneron) therapy Wednesday afternoon, had a fairly uneventful evening, ate dinner, and went to bed.
Sometime that night, the fever woke me. Passive immobility, flaccid limbs that don’t respond to the body’s commands, would have been a blessing compared to immobility characterized by actively flexed, painfully rigid muscles. Unable to move, or call for help, I just got to lay there, wet the bed, and have the kind of thoughts that only a fevered brain can produce. The predominant one of those being that the fever was causing permanent brain damage and that I would be in this state forever. In case you were wondering, there’s nothing good about laying helpless while imagining your ability burning away one neuron at a time.
(Would it be too dramatic to say that’s just MS on a sped up timeline?)
Ok, enough with the horror story. We’re all sick and my wife was in a central location, so as to be able to tend to everyone better. She walked in for a periodic check, felt my head, got tylenol in me, and strategically placed ice packs around me for max cooling (we have 3 small boys, so we have lots of ice packs on hand). When the fever eased, she changed my clothes, sponge bathed me, and changed the bed while I was in it, sort of all at the same time. (Those are some of the real perks of being married to a nurse despite what nurse fan fiction would have you believe).
Anyway, the fever never came back, but left me so exhausted I slept most of Thursday and have been in slow recovery mode since.
That fever would have laid me low without MS, but my tale would have been one of staggering to the medicine cabinet for tylenol instead of laying helpless waiting for help. Right now, on my best days, I couldn’t live alone, but I don’t live alone, so it’s easy to forget my disabilities sometimes. Well, not “forget”, more like “not be forced to remember” all the time. An illness is the lemon juice in the paper cut that forces you to acknowledge its existence. My time having an invisible illness is long gone but there’s “visible” and “slapped in the face with it visible” and apparently I don’t like being slapped in the face.
I’ll be all the way better next week.