and things went downhill from there

This contract work is knocking me on my ass. Oddly, it's when I have the most to write about here that I write the lease. I intend this to be my first in a string of trying to get back into updating this thing regularly.

I noticed a bit of distortion in my vision while taking a shower Thursday morning, and my first thought was, "Oh, great, my retina issue has come back." At first, I only saw it when I shut my eyes, and I hoped it was just a result of a bit of errant shampoo. Over the next couple of minutes, the distortion got noticeably worse, though.

Then I recognized what it was and realised that it was not a retinal issue - it was an ocular migraine. I don't get these very often, in fact, it's been a couple of years since my last. As soon as I got out of the shower, I took an aspirin as a precaution that this might want to turn into a headache.

Like previous times when I've had these, over the quarter of an hour, the distortion slowly danced and jiggled its way into a larger and larger crescent in my vision until it escaped my field of view, leaving things wavy and indistinct in its path for a few minutes.

For many, these turn into full-blown migraine headaches, but I'm fortunate to have never suffered one of those. In the wake of this ocular event, I was left with brain fog and a strong feeling of detachment. My head felt like a headache wanted to happen, but couldn't quite pull it off. It cleared up after a couple of hours, just leaving me feeling somewhat wiped.

In other news, atara and I got notified on Tuesday that we'd been exposed to somebody with COVID on the weekend. We spent much of Saturday with him, including spending a lot of time together in an enclosed car. Fortunately, between all of us being fully up-to-date on our boosters, and him not being symptomatic at the time, I think we dodged a bullet. We both tested negative a couple of days after we'd have expected symptoms to show up from the weekend, and so far we're still showing no signs.

I was reading a thread in r/Coffee this morning where posters who had come down with COVID-19 described the lasting effects it left even after they had recovered. There was the usual array of symptoms like fatigue, heart palpitations, lack of energy and lingering shortness of breath, but the most frequently cited aftermath was a long-lasting loss of taste and smell. Some complained that they'd caught it back in March, and even now they were finally only able to start smelling pungent things like vinegar. One writer complained that even smelling salts couldn't punch through it - making his eyes water a bit, but otherwise leaving no impression on him.

A few commented on how even after they got their sense of taste/smell back, everything smelled like sewage or sulphur.

Which is why I am convinced that a cold I had a couple of years back was a corona virus rather than rhino virus, or one of the other varieties. It was a comparatively mild and short-lived cold, but it completely knocked out my sense of taste and smell, even after the other symptoms had cleared up. It dragged on for a couple of weeks, to the point where I began to despair that whatever virus I'd caught had done permanent damage to my olfactory sense. When they finally did start coming back, everything smelled like sulphur.

It was bad enough having that linger for weeks - I can't imagine losing those senses for months at a time.