Had an online meeting with members of the training committee a few days ago, and some of them had mentioned that they’d been having a lot of patients coming in for headache. These patients turned out to be COVID positive, and it seems that headache is now a prominent presenting symptom. Of course that night I started having a throbbing headache. I didn’t want to take paracetamol, to allow for more accurate temperature monitoring.

The next day I started feeling weak and with a bit of malaise. Pain and weakness are subjective and cannot be measured or observed, unlike fever and cough, so I could either be having a prodrome, or just being whiny. I also started getting nauseous, but I think it’s because I forced myself to finish the remaining soggy contents of a giant Doritos bag. I’ve had that bag for over two months, taking pride in my ability to partition it over seven feedings.

I had myself swabbed for COVID, and was asked by the hospital if I wanted to use some old unused credits to pay for the test. In my dying voice I said yes, yes I want to use them. I then saw the bill that was covered by the credits: P5,000. How can we expect to reach sufficient testing for the public if it costs this much.

I locked myself in my room for over a day, waiting for the results. As soon as I got the negative results my headache, malaise, weakness, and nausea disappeared. The way my chronic cough disappeared in 2011 immediately when I had an X-ray done. Or when my abdominal pain disappeared when I had the abdominal CT scan in 2012!

So to answer the mystery if I was having a prodrome or was just being whiny, the answer is yes, I admit, I was just being whiny.

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