On 17 January 2022, at 3:45 am, my body shivered as if I was lying outside on a freezing night. But that wasn’t the case, I was inside the bed enjoying the comfort of a warm blanket.
A day before, during the afternoon, I felt some glitch in my throat while supervising soil investigation work at Baneshwor, Kathmandu. Due to a hectic week, I had to finish a report of the previous site (Dillibazaar) and plan quickly for another site, so I was not much bothered by the glitch.
Because of work, I was quite away from social media and the news. I had heard about the Omicron variant and its steeply rising number in the country from my parents. Despite following effective precautionary measures like wearing masks and social distancing while working in the field, sometimes it got overlooked. Maybe because of this, the virus got me.
As soon as I realized that I had a fever, I knew I had the virus. My wife was sleeping next to me, and I was pretty sure that the virus had gotten to her too. Then my attention shifted towards the work that was going on. I had to hand over the data that I was taking and instruct someone for the same. On the way, I gave a PCR test, and after about five hours of giving my swab samples, my result came back positive.
The whole day my fever ranged from 101-103 F. I took paracetamol 500 mg in the morning and the afternoon, but it did not work. In the night, before going to bed, I took two tablets of 500 mg, and it worked wonders. The fever dropped, and I was all in sweat. The leg that had been hurting me all day long began to slowly recover. I quickly fell asleep, but the sleep wasn’t as smooth as it used to be.
The next day, I had a headache and had started to cough. It continued for the next day as well, with a runny nose. My appetite for food, which was lost, was slowly coming back on the fourth day. I felt quite well on the seventh day, but a little weakness remained, which I think is normal.
As I was gradually recovering, my wife started showing symptoms. She suffered more than me. Fever wasn’t much high on her case, but it was observed intermittently. She had horrible body pain. She showed different symptoms in stages, one after the other, but the cough lasted quite a while. Even on the tenth day, she was coughing, but slowly it went away.
Luckily, the virus did not catch my parents. We had isolated ourselves from the day that I started showing symptoms. My wife and I looked after each other in turn. I thought of other people who were suffering but did not have a warm place to live in the cold winter. I thought of homeless people, had they got Covid? How did they cope? How must have old people suffered?
A few months before, I had been to Rautahat for soil investigation works, and I noticed that no one wore masks. One morning, I went to a local tea shop and I had chat with the shopkeeper. I asked him how Covid had hit the area. He told me that, Covid is just a hoax. It’s normal to have a cold, cough, and fever. Further, he told the ones who stayed at home and drank hot water got cured but the ones who went to the hospital, frightened, were dead. I just smiled and left the place. Such is the scenario of our country.
In the end, for me, it ended well. Omicron provided natural immunity. Had it been Delta variant, the situation might have been worse. I felt gratitude for the family and home that I possessed.