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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2706 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I thought I caught COVID for the 8th time, but no, the PCR came back negative and it's likely just the bloody flu.

I was fervently hoping for a positive result (and confident in it, since I'd expect I'd know what the disease feels like by now), but it was not to be. No sick leave for me. You'd think being in contact with thirty or so immunocompromised people might make them care, but alas. Anosmia, the works, maybe I'll bother with the flu vaccine next time.

You got anosmia through flu???

As best as I could tell, yes, couldn't smell perfume or taste food. That increases the odds the COVID test was a false negative, for what it's worth, but I couldn't bother with the nasal rape of a new swab.

My family has had this for a couple of weeks, but haven't bothered with a Covid test, because it's not like we'd get extra sick leave. In the US sick leave and (paid) parental leave come from the same bucket, so I've no interest in taking time off unless I can't function. We don't have fevers, so maybe it's just a very, very long cold.

Yeah, if you're not getting any benefit from a formal positive diagnosis, you're doing much the same as with a regular cold or flu, lying in bed and trying not to spread it to anyone you care about. More serious if you're ailing or old, at which point paxlovid is a good shout, but for anyone outside that, just wait it out with a cup of something hot.

In my case, I am all too familiar with COVID and I could swear blindly this was a bout, but either the lab fucked up, or it's the flu. The complete anosmia was only for half a day, whereas with COVID it lasts at least one or two for me personally.

Huh. I have a very narrow nose but sticking a swab deep in there is no big deal.

Sorry, being sick sucks. Having to work while sick really sucks. I definitely see people blame forcing people to work while sick on US-specific idiocy so it's interesting to hear the same from another country.

I thought doing flu/RSV PCR along with any COVID PCR was standard? Maybe just in the US?

I guess he hasn't mentioned it in a bit, but for a while Daniel Griffin in the TWiV clinical updates was harping on the fact that COVID+flu happened enough and had a sufficiently different treatment plan that flu tests should always be done for COVID patients (I'm guessing he meant hospitalized ones?).

It's standard for the cancer patients, but gone are the days when most Indian hospitals provided PCR tests to their staff for free when suspected. At least I managed to get my money's worth when I worked in a (COVID) ICU during the peak of the pandemic here, and two weeks off certainly eased the very real pain. I was looking forward to the sick leave than anything else, my boss is an asshole who wouldn't approve it if it wasn't COVID, or at least he'd make a fuss about it.

Oh well, I'm alive and not at any risk, and thankfully today wasn't the worst day at work. Just a pretty bad one.

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