Finally

This is a milestone. I finally tested positive for covid. A drugstore test shows the dreaded pink line. If I don’t have the rona, I must be pregnant.

I can’t be bothered typing “COVID-19.” I’m even getting too lazy to type “coronavirus.” Covid, covid, covid. This term is not case-sensitive any more.

Why do I say “finally”? Because I’ve had pretty much the same symptoms about 4 times, and the tests, including one PCR, always came out negative. The tests are lame. I’m pretty sure I had the virus.

I had covid in the US in 2020. I had it in Egypt in 2021. I had it in Turkey in 2021. I just had it here again. I think I had it one more time here, but I can’t remember. Maybe not. Maybe I’m remembering testing myself here after flying home from another country where a PCR test failed me.

So why do have I tested negative over and over? I follow the directions on the home tests, and you can’t screw up a PCR.

I’m thrilled I tested positive, because it shows I’m not one of those people who get covid one day and have to be flown to the hospital the next. Is this true of every strain or just this one? My guess: a whole bunch of strains. I’ve been sick several times, several different strains have been running around when I’ve been ill, and not one strain, including the one that got me when I was unvaccinated, amounted to anything. It is a virtual certainty that I’ve had whatever was around in 2020, plus Delta and Omicron.

So does this mean there is no strain that can get me? I would guess it means there is no strain YET that can get me, but covid changes. Who knows what the next variant will be like?

The virus can change, and I suppose I can, too. Covid really nails the very elderly, and presumably, many of these same people would have been fine had they gotten sick decades earlier.

Am I going to keep getting more and more severe cases as I get older? If not, will vaccines and earlier bouts build me up so I’m less vulnerable than old people who got sick during the first two years? No idea. I don’t know, and neither do the best scientists on Earth.

One thing seems to be clear, and I know people will hate reading it. Ivermectin seems to help.

When I have taken ivermectin as soon as I realized I was sick, my symptoms have improved a lot or disappeared within a few hours. When I’ve taken it after letting more time go by, when the symptoms have become more severe, my symptoms have changed less, but still significantly.

It’s not the placebo effect. The placebo effect doesn’t make snot stop coming out of your nose, break a fever, or make your throat feel better. It may be that my body just happened to bounce back after I took ivermectin, and maybe ivermectin did nothing at all, but the improvement wasn’t my imagination.

Don’t tell me about studies “proving” ivermectin doesn’t help. If you think that ever happened, you have a very shallow understanding of studies, statistics, word games, and politics. Doctors are generally bad scientists, and they’re the ones who do most studies. They ask the wrong questions. They choose the wrong subjects. They take money from entities that have an interest in cooking the results. They misinterpret the data. Their entire profession leans left, hard. Doctors have done some truly stupid studies over the years, and they have clung to them until they almost had to be beaten to get them to let go. Virtually no one who runs around claiming studies proved ivermectin has any idea what questions were asked, what kind of subjects were chosen, who paid for the studies, or what the raw data looked like. Give me a few million dollars, and I’ll do a study and prove dogs believe in Santa.

I don’t claim ivermectin helps. Maybe it doesn’t. I know what happened to me repeatedly when I took it, and that’s good enough. Experience is a good enough teacher in perhaps 99 out of 100 cases in a typical person’s life. You shouldn’t ignore it just because it involves health.

I remember being given an antibiotic called Levaquin. Every time I tried to sleep, I felt like I was in hell as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was instantly in a place of torment and screaming. Amazing nightmares. Nobody had to do a study to tell me to quit using it. I had a similar problem with hibiscus tea. Glad I quit taking Levaquin, because the same establishment that did studies proving it was safe later concluded it could cause permanent tendon damage.

My mother refused to take thalidomide when she was pregnant with me. Kind of glad she didn’t read the studies saying it was fine.

I think Rhodah had covid in Singapore. Snot, fatigue, and a bad headache. Didn’t want to get out of bed. I slept right next to her and never caught it. Then I came back here and lived like a hermit. Got covid anyway. She didn’t catch it when I had it in Egypt and Turkey.

Her version of covid was very minor, like mine. She didn’t want to get out of bed, but she was certainly able to. On her worst day, we walked around town and did things.

I’m overjoyed to have proof I had covid, because as long as you don’t know you’ve had it, you wonder how it will affect you. I’ve always hoped to test positive except when it endangered my ability to fly.

I have probably flown with covid. Oh, well. That’s on the governments who make the rules and the people who give the tests. I answered every question and did as I was told. I played their game and didn’t take it upon myself to add new rules. I gave them some credit for knowing what they were doing.

I never flew with symptoms. That much, I can say for sure.

So now what do I do? Hide in a hole and have people bring me food?

The web says people are generally no longer contagious after 10 days. I had a fever on January 29. When I got the fever, I realized I had felt funny for at least two days, pushing me back to January 27. That makes this day 13. Guess I won’t be eating Papa John’s.

I have been out several times. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t know what I had, though, and as I have said, I had had the same symptoms before, along with at least 5 negative test results.

I may not have covid now. The tests are not very reliable.

Here is good news: my inability to taste beer is almost completely gone. Maybe it is completely gone. I had to blow my nose earlier today, and I don’t feel totally right, but my nose works, and beer no longer tastes like seltzer with hops.

I don’t know what to say about the many, many people who started having symptoms, hoped they wouldn’t get really sick, and then went to the hospital or died. It has to be terrible, slowly realizing you’re one of the cursed ones. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you’re very unlikely to get sick, but if you’re in the high-risk group, you have no idea whether you’re facing a cold, a couple of amputations, or death. You just have to wait and find out.

This illness is taking a long time, but on the other hand, it has amounted to nothing. For the first two days or so, I just felt like something wasn’t right. I wondered if I was dehydrated from drinking beer. Then I had chills for one night, and I actually enjoyed them. Then the fever broke, I had a very mild cold and a slight cough, and from time to time I coughed something unpleasant up while I was trying to talk. For one day, I could not smell anything at all, and then my sense of smell started coming back.

There were a couple of afternoons when I very suddenly felt like I had to go to bed right away because staying awake took a lot of effort.

I feel like Thucydides describing the plague, but my story is dull compared to his.

When I was in Egypt, feeling just like this only a little worse, I walked around all day on cloudless 114-degree summer days, looking at pyramids and temples. Rhodah could not keep up. I could do it right now.

God has been extremely good to me, as always.

Night before last, I had a dream. I was in bed, and a little transparent spirit was on my chest. It was about like a terrier. I couldn’t see the shape of it clearly, but it acted like a terrier trying to maul me. I felt nothing at all, and I kept telling it I spoke failure to it in the name of Jesus Christ. It didn’t run off, but it didn’t accomplish anything, either. I looked beside the bed, at the baseboard, and I saw big creatures like daddy longlegs, also transparent. They stood about 6 inches tall. They seemed confused. They were wobbling around, trying to walk. I hated them. I hit them with a gun and made them explode.

My experience with covid has been a lot like the dream. Harassment that hasn’t harmed me at all.

I hate to think about what I deserve. Different story.

In other news, the stout I kegged is finally showing signs of carbonation. I put it on 20 psi of CO2, and that was day before yesterday. That’s a lot. Stout is supposed to require only a tiny amount of carbonation, and I was warned to be careful, but it took maybe 36 hours before I got enough foam to feel like I could remove the CO2 and hook up the beer gas.

The stout tastes almost exactly like Old Rasputin imperial stout, except it contains a lot less alcohol. Except for the differences in ABV and intensity of flavor, these beers taste the same to me. I can’t complain about that, because Old Rasputin is the best factory beer I’ve ever had. I set out to brew something slightly dryer, though.

This beer may still have some fermenting to do, so maybe all is well. Past versions have dried out with time.

MORE

Funny; my comments quit working just as I tried to answer a question about ivermectin. Suspicious, but I suppose the leftist nuts who are killing freedom of expression have better things to do than interfere with my blog.

Anyway, here is the answer I was going to give:

I think I went with the dose the Indians claimed to get good results with. Twelve mg per day, I believe. Unless it was mcg. Anyway, it worked out to be what a horse takes for worms, corrected for my weight.

Not recommending ivermectin for anyone but myself. For all I know, you will die hideously.