My COVID infection
After I had not been feeling well for several days, I was diagnosed with COVID on the 15th of August 2022 after a rapid test followed by a PCR test. At the time, I had no idea how strong the infection would be and how long I would be dealing with it. The consequences and developments also took me by surprise.
I spent the first three weeks or so with my COVID infection almost exclusively in bed. Despite three COVID vaccinations, I initially had severe cold symptoms. These subsided after a few days; but a severely impaired ability to concentrate, permanent fatigue and severe pain in my joints persisted. Due to the joint pain, I was prescribed painkillers.
After about four weeks, the acute symptoms seemed to subside gradually. My ability to concentrate still showed deficits, and the joint pain was still sporadically present; but things seemed to be improving slowly. As was to be expected, I still felt very weak and exhausted, but I hoped for a speedy recovery. However, in the following period there were repeated minor setbacks, and especially the joint pain returned sporadically and with varying intensity. The permanent fatigue did not abate – I needed around 14 to 18 hours of sleep every day.
After about six weeks, I felt much better; the pain in my joints had largely disappeared. However, severe fatigue and exhaustion remained. Nevertheless, I slowly started my recovery program. Tentative and very short walks were literally the first steps back into normal life. The walks did me good; I had the feeling that with every step and I was walking the fatigue out of my body. I tried to increase my steps every day. Most of the time I succeeded although there were setbacks every now and then.
In the following three weeks, my performance increased significantly with the help of my daily walks. After about nine weeks, I perceived that I had regained 80 to 90 percent of my original physical capacity.
During my COVID infection and the subsequent rehabilitation phase, my body weight had reduced by around ten kilograms. Thus, I had almost reached my desired weight again! The reward for my efforts was my first pilgrimage on the Way of St. James from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain.
The trip was great. Except for one day, I coped with the exertion of the pilgrimage from mid to late November 2022 very well. To compensate for the sometimes also very exhausting daily stages, I had long rest periods of at least twelve hours daily.
I believed that I had now completely overcome my COVID infection. However, in the days before Christmas, stronger physical reactions occurred again, which matched the typical COVID symptoms I was familiar with. The constant fatigue had accompanied me already since my infection in August 2022, and in the weeks before Christmas I noticed partly strong pain in the joints of the upper half of the body again. Especially if I had not slept enough, these symptoms kept occurring again and again.
In January and February 2023, it felt like constant ups and downs. On some days, I could hardly move at all or only very poorly, and the pain, particularly in my joints, caused me a lot of discomfort. At times, I also had headaches, and on some days my ability to concentrate also seemed to be limited.
If I didn’t get the minimum ten or rather twelve hours of sleep that my body required, I could very likely find myself with a headache and/or pain in my joints the following day.
I was surprised that that a certain amount of physical exertion in the form of walks seemed to have a rather positive effect on my well-being. Although I was sometimes very tired and needed a longer rest after the extensive walks, which I usually only did at weekends due to my job and the weather conditions in winter, I never had any joint pain in my upper body.
Thus, the three months or so until my next holiday leave at the beginning of March 2023 were very challenging; I tried to survive from weekend to weekend, hoping daily for an improvement in the situation.
I used the vacation in March to stabilise my physical performance and to give my body a sufficient amount of rest. With the three-day pilgrimage in Ireland, I was able to put both plans into practice, combined with the hope that my situation would improve significantly in the further course of 2023.
March 2023
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