Skip to main content

Quarantined

I've joined the quarantined masses, having caught cold with a cough a few days ago. Is it the coronavirus? I don't know. Tests are being rationed and my request was denied.

The only thing I'm taking is Umcka cold care. Yesterday, pre-quarantine, I saw I needed more--and you have to start taking it immediately after the start of symptoms for it to work. I ordered a box online and picked it up at the store, where the cashier put it in my trunk while I stayed in my car. I even wore a scarf I could put over my face in case I had to leave my car.

After getting home, I tried to get a test. In Indiana, you need a doctor's order to get one, so I called the urgent care center I went to for my bronchitis last year. After completing a questionnaire online and talking to technical support, then straightening out confusion over time zones, I had a teleconference with a nurse practitioner. He said that whether I had the coronavirus or just a cold, his advice was the same: stay home and get well. I'm not supposed to leave the house until I've been without symptoms for three days. Since I'm still coughing, the earliest day that could be is Monday.

The earliest I can go back to work at the office is Wednesday--seven days after the start of being ill. Fortunately, I've been bringing my laptop home every night, so today, feeling better, I fired it up and got quite a bit of work done.

Hoosiers are on their honor to stay home if they're quarantined. Nobody from the county came by and put a Quarantine sign on my house or fitted me with an tracking bracelet. The police in Indiana aren't stopping people to verify they're on an essential errand. A few motorists have gotten citations for violating the emergency order after being stopped for other offenses, but I don't know if there's a list of people who aren't supposed to be out and about. In any case, I'm planning to stay home until my cough has been gone for three days. (That's the only symptom that's left.) Coronavirus is disastrous for some people, and if I have it, I don't want to give it to anyone.

I'm very happy I got my cortisol levels (mostly) fixed when I did. I'd have been a sitting duck with low cortisol, low thyroid, and bronchitis.

I'm also very happy I'm no longer riding the Denver bus every day shoehorned with passengers. About the time I moved, my employer was moving to another building where my commute would have been even longer (it already took almost an hour to get to work) and our offices would have been even smaller. But almost everyone thought I was nuts for leaving. Of course, I didn't move to be well-situated in case of a pandemic, but I live in a city that's a lot less crowded in a house that's paid for.  Who's the nutty one now?

So I will be housebound for Easter. The church across the street will be empty. I wonder if the bells will chime the songs they normally play on that day--or if they'll wait until the people can come out.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more