After almost 3 years I finally caught Covid

I still remember our first direct contact with the Covid craziness. We were camping at a campground on the Oregon coast in March of 2020. On the second morning of our campout we got a knock on the door from the camp staff telling us the camground was shutting down and we had to be out of there by noon. The entire city closed itself off to all tourism. Anybody who was not a local was told to leave.

Over the past (almost) 3 years since then there have been several times when I might have had a mild case of the virus but I never really bothered to test myself. I never had symptoms worse than a mild cold. Also, I work from home so my exposure was very limited.

Well, all that changed 2 weeks ago when we took a family vacation to Disneyland.

I’m just tired

There’s no way to know whether we caught the virus on the plane ride, at the hotel, or at the park, but I started feeling off by the second day at the park. I could feel a cold coming on and I felt really exhausted. Neither of those symptoms seemed really alarming. Cold’s come and go all the time and I attributed the exhaustion to doing more walking in those first two days around the park than I’d done in the previous 6 months. It took us a while to figure out how to use the Disny Genie system to plan which rides to go on so we ended up criss-crossing the park all day looking for rides that weren’t hour-long wait times.

By the third day I was sure I was sick, but still only felt mild cold symptoms. Unfortunately for my family we’d been living in close quarters and sharing food and drink for the whole time so there was no way they weren’t going to get sick. By the time we got back home my wife was sure it was more than just a cold and made us all take a home covid test. We ALL tested positive.

Symptoms

My kids seemed to handle the symptoms pretty well. The worst was my oldest daughter had a really bad sore throat for a couple of days. Otherwise they just had mild sniffles and slight cough. My wife had a worse cough and lots of congestion. My congestion was bad but my cough was milder than hers. The worst symptom I had was covid hives and dry, cracked skin on my fingers - both symptoms of Covid that I’d never even heard of.

The itching from the hives is really annoying. The only suggestion my doctor had for it was taking OTC Allegra. It helps a little, but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. Sometime I just want to scratch all the skin off my arms.

The dry skin on my fingers and hands is painful. I never used to use any kind of lotion on my hands, but since getting this I have to apply it 3-4 times per day. Any less than that and the skin on my hands starts cracking, which is pretty painful.

Recovery

As of this writing, we’re about 10 days past testing positive. My wife and son did another home test last night and they both tested negative. I’ve been feeling better overall, but I still have congestion and the hives+dry skin thing. From what I’ve read, in most cases the hives should clear up after a couple of weeks, but in some cases it can go on for months. Other people we’ve talked to said that they still feel congestion in their lungs months after testing negative. Not sure if this counts as “long-covid” yet, but we could be on track for it.