In February 2020, my family and I went to Disney World. When we got back, I was really sick. We were still weeks away from the World Health Organization officially declaring COVID a pandemic, and it wasn’t even an issue on the national radar yet. 

Did I have COVID? Maybe. I felt awful, probably the worst I’d felt in a long time. Of course, we know COVID was moving around the world already at that point because China had kept it secret, and Disney World would be the place to go if you wanted to catch an airborne disease. So, while I’ll never know whether or not I had COVID during the first wave, I can say with high confidence that in the three years since the pandemic began, I’d yet to catch it—until last week.

COVID had hit my house once before, yet I’d managed to avoid it. I’d been hoping to avoid it again. For a while, even after I’d been really sick, I’d tested negative three times on at-home COVID tests. But those were expired tests, and a freshly bought test ultimately showed I was positive.

So, how has it been? Well, it hasn’t been fun, I can tell you that. I’ve been feeling exhausted pretty much all the time and had the worst sore throat of my life. It’s been a struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and I’ve barely been able to eat (I’ve lost six pounds in a few days).

The strangest part has been how COVID has been like cycling through different symptoms. Extreme fatigue one day, a painful sore throat the next. The following day congestion… Today, it feels like a nasty head cold. Things have been getting better, but I still feel generally lousy.

Sometimes you see people on social media reveal a positive COVID test, and they act like they’ve received a death sentence. As unpleasant as this illness has been, I only had one awful day (Sunday, February 26), followed by days of perceptible improvement. That one bad day, I was in bed pretty much the entire time watching (or mostly listening to Seinfeld episodes on Netflix. I couldn’t even write that day. I wrote three articles for PJMedia on Monday, mostly short, which wiped me out. I was markedly better on Tuesday. I wrote a little more but had to relax at times during the day, and I still needed to take Motrin to keep my temperature down. I hope it won’t be long before I return to normal.