Been Awhile… How Covid Was the Beginning of a Rough Year

My husband and I tested positive for Covid for the first time one year ago. From the timing of our initial symptoms onset, we know we were exposed during a long plane flight. We were the only people wearing masks, but the duration of the flight was long enough that we had to remove our masks to drink and eat, probably for less than 20 minutes total during a 10 hour flight. Our symptoms were mild. We initially thought that it was just allergies, and we were testing every day. I tested negative for three days, and my husband for five days, before we each briefly spiked a fever and tested positive after that. If we had not been continually testing, my husband would have likely never known he had anything more than allergies and fatigue due to jet lag.

Me, on the other hand…

I do not have Long Covid, thankfully. But last summer’s variant had a common, lingering impact on many people, tachycardia. Tachycardia is defined as a heartrate over 100. That isn’t always cause for concern, but it is abnormal to have a resting heartrate that rapid. From June through September, I had a rapid heartrate with its accompanying fatigue. I went from walking an average of 10,000 steps a day (and frequently over 20,000 steps) to barely being able to walk to our car. I could only manage one thing per day; for example, if I did grocery shopping, I had no energy to do anything else. I had to sit during my planetarium presentations, and in early August, I was seriously wondering if I’d be able to teach in the Fall 2024 semester. I once briefly fainted behind the wheel while driving to my college.

My doctor took me seriously, and I wore a heart monitor in late July/early August, which confirmed the tachycardic episodes. In September, I had a treadmill EKG with ultrasound. Luckily, there did not seem to be any structural issues. By October, the tachycardia went away, seemingly on its own.  But not being able to do much over the summer meant I started the academic year behind, and things snowballed from there.  (And believe it or not, this was not even the worst thing that happened last summer, but that’s another blog entry.)

I wanted to share this because what was a very mild case of Covid in terms of traditional cold symptoms impaired my ability to work and play and live normally for over three months.

Vaxxed?

Of course, we were vaccinated. We received our first round of vaccinations in March 2021, when they were made available, and have received every booster since then. We traveled in June 2024, and we got our most recent eligible boosters in September/October 2023.

Oh, that isn’t what they were asking?

Sigh.

Several people asked me if I thought the Covid vaccine caused my tachycardia. They were asking me if the heart problem that started while testing positive for Covid was due to a vaccination that I received eight months previously.  After having six jabs with no reaction. (And now a seventh since.)

That is the level of disinformation campaigning against vaccines.

Masks and vaccines work. I’ve been back in the classroom, max vaxxed and masked for years now, with multiple known exposures from students and colleagues, and I have not (yet) gotten sick from those circumstances. Honestly? I haven’t been sick at all since I started masking, until that trip high above the surface of the Earth, enclosed in a metal tube with others who weren’t masked.

I hope to be back here, blogging more consistently. I also hope all of you are healthy and safe despite the infuriating timeline we live in.