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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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've caught COVID 4 times as confirmed by RT-PCR, and I suspect at least 2 or 3 more times. At my age, it's not really an issue, one of the hazards of the job really, especially given that I was in an ICU at the height of Delta.
At this point, I don't bother getting tested unless I could get a comfy fortnight of sick leave. I used to fret about infecting the older members of my family, but they've made it through their own infections without much consequence, so I treat it like a new variant of seasonal flu. It's here to stay for the foreseeable future, and life has to go on.
That's...a lot. I'm 55, but have a BMI of like 22, don't smoke, and exercise literally every day (though not for a week). I guess age still comes into play for various reasons. I do hope if I were to get it again (or a new strain) I'd not have the same brutal fever.
I was catching COVID every 6 months or so, which, if memory serves, is about as long as natural immunity persists. I spent a year as an intern in an extremely busy government hospital in questionable conditions, think rationing out one N95 every week levels, before vaccines were available. The bulk of my stint in an ICU was also before I got a vaccine, and that's with me cutting ahead of the queue as a medical professional.
Of course, as is now common knowledge, the vaccines don't prevent transmission and whatever they do for infections, it wasn't sufficient when I'm spending entire days cooped up with severe COVID cases.
Funnily enough, I could have sworn I'd caught COVID a few months back, but sadly the PCR came back negative. It felt precisely like COVID, including a day of total anosmia, but eh, could have been test error or just the flu. So I was back to work sniffling away, COVID sick leave is enshrined here, but the hospital I was working at wasn't so considerate of anything else that didn't literally leave me bedridden.
In terms of the fever you had, well, I'm not aware of anything better than paracetamol, ibuprofen or other NSAIDs. You could consider paxlovid, but I don't know how readily available that is in Japan. It's one of the only drugs that reliably works, and reduces severity and mortality. I think stocks globally are past the stage when they had to be carefully rationed out to the most morbid, but perhaps the doctors you saw didn't think you needed it. If you have the bad luck to catch it again, make sure to ask!
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I haven't seen you too much lately! How's everything been going? UK treating you right?
I'm alright, thanks for asking!
I'm leaving for the UK in a few weeks, which means a lot of hectic last minute preparation and packing, and wrangling bureaucracy, which leaves less time than can be desired for Motteposting haha. I presume I'll be kept on my feet for the first few weeks once I'm there, but the perk of that is that you have more procrastination posting to look forward to!
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