D’you know: I think I may have had COVID last January/February. I’ve been keeping my eye out for studies showing gut symptoms for COVID and experts now think about 1 in 5 (20%) of people may only show gut symptoms and none of the fever, cough etc:
Review finds almost 20 percent of COVID-19 patients only show gastrointestinal symptoms
P had just been poorly for 3 weeks after Christmas with what we thought then was just a normal virus. Then again, P never gets ill and he really struggled to pull himself out of this one – he suffered post-viral symptoms for a good few weeks until I gave him some lauric acid (of course!). At the time, of course, we didn’t know about COVID-19 and I dismissed it when they said it had not been seen in the UK or Europe until around March.
I had my suspicions, though, as another family member also had a really bad respiratory virus around the same time. In fact, we now know the first cases were in the UK in January and some believe it was even earlier than that.
At the end of January, I decided to take P on holiday to Devon for a rest. Very unlike him, he struggled to walk along the cliffs to the nearest shop, which he had to do – because I fell ill on day one!
I thought it was food poisoning or a gut bug (which it may well have been, for all I know) but it felt very odd. I had terrible nausea, cramping, vomiting, diarrhoea, the whole works. But what was most odd was that I felt like an elephant had taken up residence on my chest! I felt really hot, it was difficult to breathe, I was hallucinating at one point – and this lasted the whole week. I returned from Devon with a blanket over my legs, feeling like Bambi! Some holiday…
I recovered much more quickly than P – a little more fatigued than usual but nothing too long-lasting, thank goodness.
I do wonder if it was COVID. I was tempted to test us for antibodies, but I’m not sure of the validity of the testing and, from the look of it, they may not be around now anyway. I’m hoping that the experts who believe we may develop T cell immunity to the virus are right, but I can’t test for that. I think T cell immunity will be an important subject in the coming months..
Anyway, no idea but the point about it just being gut-based is an important one, so I thought I’d share my experience with you.