kontextmaschine:

Hm, okay, now that I’ve got iron addressed I tried to go down to 3 scoops creatine on waking and 2 before bed and that worked at first, but even not going out, past 7 as the 2 from last night wear off I’m too slumped

In retrospect it is flatly absurd that I figured that one out the day it started happening and had creatine on hand, so instead of years of crippling, maybe even life-threatening fatigue im just experiencing this as a magical weight loss program where I don’t have to do anything

Like, I was doing fine enough for myself in the world already that its particularly iffy how I appear to be like the human who won Covid, took two pretty serious shots at me but I frame-perfect parried them both

Ah, okay, the new symptom for this echo wave showed up and it’s a third kind of fatigue, qualitatively different from both the creatine and iron ones.

No clue what this one’s a deficiency of, but it’s weak enough I guess I could just tank it and be sluggish a while.

Okay, the snow’s retreated and it had pressed Strawberry Ridge down nice and packed, and Blueberry Hill enough I could take the parts that were already smashed flat and smash them super flat, so I did that for the ¼ on the perimeter I could teach from solid ground and hopefully those’ll bind as a solid base to start getting the rest tomorrow.

Realized that as of this last echo wave I can make do with 3 scoops creatine on waking/2 on sleep so I don’t get up in too much of a hole, but if I’m doing yard work I really need 4/2 or I get exhausted.

This 6 is a 3 scoop increase from before this wave, which had been 3 after starting at 4 last wave, but the *increased creatine demand* really includes about 2 scoop-equivalents my body makes itself every day, so while the last wave was really a 6 scoop increase in demand (and the original had been 10), this one was only 3, so it’s leveling off

Was starting to feel like I needed more creatine each day on an increasing upswing, shoulda guess what was happening was the iron hunger had got worse and I needed more of it to hold off fatigue.

That was my youngest symptom, so that’s still on track to wind down, now we’ll see if any new ones show up this time.

Just one day going to Subway a month or more after infection the world seemed unreal like I was on acid and my voice sounded insane, early on was depersonalization and even derealization but also a severe disinhibition, honestly a lot of details of this part are lost to me because a major aspect was memory issues, I simply wasn’t forming memories in the first place and was sort of operating on autopilot like blackout drunks do.

As it progressed it affected my sense of emotion and also a lot of parts involved in conceptualizing movement in 3D space. I had maybe 20% capacity to use my limbs in a controlled manner – I stumbled around the house holding myself up on furniture and completely failing to grasp the correct manipulation of food packaging, unable to mentally rotate objects (at one point I had to carry a flagpole through a door by trial and error) My arms constantly felt like lightning was running the length of them but were otherwise numb.

Early on it utterly paved flat my mental facilities for anxiety, revealing in retrospect that I had clearly built my life around an anxiety disorder, without them I am physically incapable of feeling guilt, shame, loss, regret, or terror (death-fear). There is now no length without contact at which I begin to feel rejected by others.

The bisexuality, yes. I suspect that’s actually related to the disinhibition somehow, which has now stabilized to the point I’m not feeling up strangers in bars when I get the whim, but I’m much more open and at ease than I was.

After a year and a half this started to retreat. The personality changes are permanent, also I see in true stereoscopic 3D and walk without flat feet now, I think to some degree I lost the functionality there and when I relearned it got it better. The memory, mental and physical motion issues cleared but they briefly return at lower levels with later Covid infections.

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

kaziusklasterzoroaster:

kontextmaschine:

I really cannot emphasize enough how this works like a reverse feederism thing, every day I wake up and run my hands over my belly and appreciate how not big it’s getting.

“Ew you’re making it sound sexual"– bitch it’s definitely sexual, since the personality change left me bisexual, "a hot, fit male body” is a major turn-on and object of desire and I am experiencing a transformation where I am gradually, helplessly becoming a hot, fit male body.

please please please see a doctor, losing weight this fast and this easily is concerning. 

I mean don’t for a second think I understand this as just how things are, I have the explicit understanding that this is the effect of a complex and mysterious disease, but I might as well appreciate it

But yes, to those of you concerned, I have a fairly good understanding of how this is working and it’s looking like it’s going to come in good.

I know why I’m losing weight! It’s because [black box] Covid issues mean I can’t generate ATP from the blood sugar off the food I’ve eaten to power my body functions.

But I CAN still generate energy anaerobically. Normally that’s limited but the limit is the supply of creatine, which the body creates naturally and uses for this, but I can pump my levels above normal by taking creatine monohydrate, sold as a bodybuilding supplement. It gets metabolized in about 24 hours, but I can just take more the next day!

The way it works is by breaking down stored fat. When bodybuilders use it, it means they have more energy available for their very extremes of exertion – they do 15 reps of the superheavy weight instead of 10, but then leave the gym to go to Bible study or wevs!

Because I’m patching a hole with it im basically drawing on that extra energy 24/7 – my normal resting energy consumption is higher than I can sustain without it.

Which means that I am burning fat at a constant, PRODIGIOUS rate.

I pray you, however, keep this in mind:

This has actually been going on for 2 years already, as an aftereffect of each Covid infection, and I have had experience with how it progresses. It begins with such a deficit of energy I have to take a lot of creatine to support a lot of anaerobic generation each day, but gradually decreases until I don’t need it anymore

The first time this showed up i suddenly needed 8 scoops of creatine to anaerobically generate enough energy to even keep breathing regularly, the time that started this wave I needed 5, I was down to maybe 2 ½ until this last case took me up to 4

It gets easier every time, and judging how this has been going I’m very confident to say it’ll end up with me at a “yeah, I played soccer matches after college” physique

AND HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT?

Like I was faffing about and then the 2010s looked mean and I was like “gather about, kids, I have a sense how this goes” and then from astoundingly correct prediction or SOMETHING I suddenly transformed into my ideal self

FUCKED UP

Long covid made you hot and bisexual?

AND socially smooth (I’m pretty sure the old personality was autistic and the new one’s not but still knows all the tricks the old one developed to get by) AND normal (non-flatfooted)-striding AND see in binocular true 3D.

It’s fucking nuts

sighinastorm:

kontextmaschine:

I love that I can jerk off about guys now. That’s just so neat!

Could you not before?

No, I was straight my whole life, I actually tried “bihacking” myself as a teen but while I succeeded in dispelling any aversion to m/m sexuality I ultimately had to accept I was just not into it. But in 2020 I caught Covid before vaccines existed, it spread to my brain and caused enough damage there that my existing personality was no longer viable, and after a period of depersonalization I generated a new one that is different in some major respects, including being bisexual.

Yeah, okay, these echo symptoms definitely got a boost from a recent under-the-radar case. I hope they don’t keep intensifying too much.

Hearing some talk that Long Covid can cause insulin insensitivity, which I guess from the lazy uninformed sound of it could be the aerobic generation issues I’ve been taking creatine to compensate for

(If I hadn’t hit on that I’d have been experiencing it as a debilitating, years-long fatigue. Another severe fatigue showing up with a later case lifts with daily iron supplements.)

At this point I’m fine with just 2 scoops of creatine every day as long as I’m not swinging a sledgehammer or anything (previously I had been alternating 2- and 3-scoop days). So that is clearing up but it only seems to be doing so on the same slow schedule as the first case the energy stuff showed up with, though with lower “slope”, as this episode started 3 shots in the hole vs. the previous’ 8.

The underlying issue still seems to be a difficulty in aerobic energy generation, I do wonder what the relationship is to reports associating long covid to diabetes, but last time this worked fine and eventually cleared with no needles, only weight loss, so riding this one out

kontextmaschine:

Huh, okay, if I keep up on my iron (it seems to take ~2hr to work through and clear the associated energy delivery issues while creatine only takes ~15 mins for its) I think I could go back down to 2 scoops/day

I’m kind of worried if the aerobic energy issues keep recurring, because the creatine helps replace it with anaerobic but that works by burning fat and I’m honestly starting to run low; I could probably go through 2 more multi-month processes of relying on it but I’d come out a little emaciated after the second

And chances are I catch XBB.1.5 before this set of echoes even fully clears

Since March of 2020, there have been maybe two months half a year ago that I was not experiencing some “long Covid” symptoms

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Huh, based on a chat realized my energy problems might have been anemia and got some iron pills. That was definitely part of it – I started maybe 3 creatine scoops/day in the hole a few days ago but was getting up to 3/12hr and still off, but then taking a 100% RDV iron pill every 8 hours, after 2 I was maybe 5g down, enough to just roll with it.

But there doesn’t seem to have been much change from a 3rd and none from a 4th. So maybe anemia was this case’s new long symptom but plus a mild echo of the 2nd case energy stuff?

I dunno what that means, my bone marrow, my liver? Or maybe there’s something going that’s consuming red blood cells and I had drained iron replacing them? I dunno. Wild.

The thing where I keep having to solve these little riddles to maintain bodily function is getting tired, honestly.

That said, how impressive is it that I can keep doing that while under the effects of a brain infection?

Tropes of Covid-worrier Twitter:

Shibboleths

• “Covid is airborne!” - that the virus is spread through exhaled aerosols, not airborne moisture droplets or surface-tainting “fomites”. A point they were genuinely more right on than authorities early on that still has some application – that only N95-type masks or respirators reliably stop transmission, not fabric or paper surgical masks. However, largely an ingroup signal at this point, they seem to believe that authorities not pointedly declaring it apropos of nothing causes or constitutes failure.
• Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes: a DIY air filter made of box fans and furnace filters, because above. They love these things and are always frustrated that schools and public places won’t welcome wild-eyed maniacs trying to set up their own homemade science fair projects everywhere.
• CO2 testing: they carry around little CO2 monitors and are always tutting about how high the readings they get are, less in their own right than because it’s a clear sign of a poorly ventilated space where exhalations are not being cleared. Once again, makes them look like maniacs.
• “SARS-CoV-2”: they kind of performatively always call Covid this, even using more characters of a tweet. I dunno if the intention was to differentiate the syndrome from the virus, or if putting it in the SARS lineage was supposed to draw on residual associations there, but by now it mostly seems like flaunting yourself as savvy.

Something there but iffy

• That danger and damage increases with multiple infections. It is true that Danger(Case1 + Case2) > Danger(Case1), which means that Case2 (and subsequents) has some nonzero risk, but they often act like Danger(Case1) < Danger(Case2), which I don’t see as well established at all.

Pretty convinced

• The danger of Covid now lies largely not in the initial “acute” respiratory infection, but in the chance of later “long Covid” progression to other organ systems, that may render the sufferer vulnerable to later mortality. Damaged heart muscles lead to later heart attacks; blood vessels to strokes & aneurysm; immune systems to later infection (as seems to be making this winter an atrocious pediatric respiratory infection season, or made Jair Bolsonaro an infection piñata). I myself can attest to later blood pressure swings that cause fainting. That this explains much of the increase in “all-cause mortality” above and beyond that attributed to Covid itself since the beginning of the pandemic.

Not convinced

• Immunity from prior infections or immunization does not durably reduce the severity of future ones. This is out of keeping with the experience of other coronaviruses already in regular human circulation and mutating into new variants, which after caught repeatedly throughout life become trivial. My own experience has my current infection (somewhere from my 4th to 6th, producing symptom “echoes” of the “long” portions of 1 and 2) as the worst since 2, but 2 was much less harsh than 1 and 3-current was nothing. I suspect this might be a stronger case against the background of a generally decreasing trend of severity. Also it might be the case that immunity wanes so subsequent cases are easier if they occur before it wears off (and leaves new immunity of its own), in which case attempts to stop any particular case with masking, isolation, or air treatment might make population-level health worse by lengthening average time between infections past acquired immunity duration.
• “Schools should have been reworking their ventilation systems for anti-viral effect!” My father was the solicitor for our school district, in which capacity one of the things he worked with was contracting. At one point the district upgraded ventilation systems in maybe a third of their secondary schools at once. From scoping through passing a bond, soliciting and evaluating bids to work completion (when the construction market was slack enough for contractors to hire labor and buy materials cheap) was 8 years. In a small subset of schools, that already had ductwork at all, in a rich school district where the bond passed on the first try. To attempt this for every school building in the US – let alone other public places – would likely exceed the national HVAC construction capacity for decades. The only precedent I can think of, the drive to rework hospital ventilation systems against Legionnaires, affected far fewer buildings and institutions that were then fairly flush with income streams atop the healthcare economy, still required extensive federal subsidy, and was ongoing decades later.

kontextmaschine:

Been having a flare-up of the issues I used to have with navigating 3D, the most notable case walking down a hall and for 4 seconds I was flanging in the first half-second of falling sideways into the wall

Like, this is totally brain damage

So I guess as whatever reassurance:

I’m someone who’s had reasonably rough COVID twice, once early on that went “long” and then just again with Omicron. Even if it gets that bad and goes that long for you – which it almost certainly won’t – can confirm that it eventually clears up, and Omicron now, after the vaccines, is nothing compared to how it was at first

The last time I had a sense of what day it was was Thursday, for reference