When I woke up with pressure in my sinuses and a sore throat the morning of July 27, I was convinced it was a sinus infection. After all, my husband and I were vaccinated back in April with both doses of Pfizer.
I didn’t have a fever, I didn’t have a cough, and I could still smell and taste everything.
I was tired and dragging — but hey, the common cold still exists, right? So I did what I would normally do: Stayed home, had my husband bring me the ingredients for chicken soup, overdid the Vitamin C and water, and tried desperately to take a long, quick walk outdoors in an attempt to burn out the illness.
On Wednesday, I felt a little worse. But then Thursday came.
I woke up to my head feeling like the Hindenburg — inflated and on fire. The pressure in my sinuses could be felt from my eyeballs to my eardrums, and it continued up over my head into what I can only describe as similar to a migraine.
“That’s it, time to bring out the big guns,” I thought. I made an appointment online with the CVS Minute Clinic, with a plan to request some antibiotics. Clearly, this sinus infection wasn’t going to leave quietly.
If you had asked me that morning if I thought I would test positive for COVID-19 within the hour, I would’ve replied with a confident “no.”
That may be one important lesson to take away from this: Concerning one’s health these days, be confident of nothing.
Positive for COVID-19
At the Minute Clinic, a nurse practitioner checked my vitals, listened to my lungs and then asked if I’d allow her to test me for COVID-19 just to rule it out.
I agreed, and she swabbed me herself. She said results usually took about 10 minutes to come back if they were negative.
While she was looking into my throat and ears, the results of the rapid test “dinged” in the little machine.
I don’t think two minutes had elapsed, and her immediate response was “uh-oh.”
I looked at the little screen on the rapid test machine and the words “COVID-19 POSITIVE” were showing.
Putting my family at risk
