It’s been quite some time! I actually intended to take some time away from my blog after I finished everything up in November. There was a lot to be done with preparing for Christmas. I’m sure there were some colds tossed in there as well. Then I thought I might keep the break going in January since the holidays had been so busy. My plan was to start up blogging again at the start of February. Then, it happened. We all got COVID! After now having COVID, I’m pretty sure we never had COVID before.

My immune’s system readiness for COVID

My last COVID booster was back in July 2022 two days before I started chemotherapy. Sean had been bothering me about getting another booster now that I’ve finished up my treatment. The type of chemotherapy I received, Taxol, is not known to be quite as harsh on your bone marrow as the other types of chemo. That’s important because your bone marrow is where your body creates B cells – the white blood cells, or lymphocytes, that produce antibodies when you get sick. They checked my lymphocyte levels every week for treatment and they continue to check them at all of my infusions. From those tests I know that my lymphocyte level has never actually been low. It has always been on the low-end of the normal range, but never actually low. My white blood cells in general were occasionally low though. Many people who receive chemotherapy receive Neulasta, which is the brand name for a drug that is designed to boost your body’s production of white blood cells. I was fortunate that I did not need to take that.

It’s possible that some of my immunity was a bit compromised with all of the treatment I received, but nothing that would put me in the category of immunocompromised. I finally scheduled my bivalent booster for January 11th and it was a doozy for me! After only 8 hours, I experienced the “all-overs” and chills. I woke up in the middle of the night with a fever of 101.6! I felt pretty crappy for two days and then I just felt completely better. We planned to get Maddie’s bivalent booster as well when we could find a place near us.

Our COVID experience

We finally had Maddie scheduled for a COVID booster on January 24th. Sean had to pick her up in the middle of the day from school so we woke her up in the middle of a nap at school. She was pretty groggy when she woke up, but we went to her doctor’s office to get the shot. She did really well and was a great champ. While we were at the doctor’s office, we received a notification from her school that a kid in her classroom had tested positive for COVID and was last in school on Monday! When she didn’t perk up and seemed to get more tired in the afternoon, we decided to test her and she was positive for COVID! Sean and I decided to take tests. I was negative, but Sean turned out to be slightly positive. My booster had been less than 2 weeks earlier, so I probably didn’t have full protection yet. I was hopeful to avoid it though.

So Maddie ended up getting her booster and COVID on the same day! That night, she developed a fever, but it was hard to tell whether it was a side effect of her booster or from the illness. Maddie didn’t have a fever after that night. She had some congestion, but she ended up appearing to get better after only a day or two. Sean tested negative the next day, but then tested very strongly positive the next day (Thursday). The day that Maddie tested positive, my throat felt a bit sore, so I was surprised when my test was negative. I continued to test negative and thought I was going to be out of the woods, but then I tested strongly positive on Sunday – 5 days after Maddie and Sean originally tested positive.

We had done the best we could to stay separate in our house. Sean took care of Maddie since both of them had very mild illness. I wore a mask around the two of them. Sean started taking Paxlovid on Friday and tested negative on Sunday. It’s weird, because I lost my voice, but felt mostly fine all of those days. Then on Sunday, I started to feel off, which is what prompted me to test. That night I developed congestion and sinus pressure that was unlike any colds I normally have. The most notable thing was that my back teeth felt sore as well as my cheekbones! It was pretty uncomfortable.

On Monday, I contacted my oncologist’s office to let them know that I tested positive and was experiencing some unpleasant symptoms. They ended up prescribing me Paxlovid that I picked up that evening. I took my first dose that night and it was, by far, my worst night. I woke up at 12:30 AM and realized I had a fever of 102. I was shivering, having night sweats and aching all over. I took some Tylenol and was finally able to get some rest around 2 AM. My biometric data from my watch clearly showed that my body was stressed out to the max.

I basically ended up maintaining my Tylenol every 6 hours because that helped with the body aches and sinus pressure. My Paxlovid didn’t exactly feel like it “kicked in” until Day 3 when I started to feel markedly better. COVID was by the far the worst illness I can remember having in my memory. Taking Paxlovid was an interesting experience as well. Sean and I both developed the “COVID mouth” where you get this disgusting taste in your mouth. It has a mouth-feel like the iron in spinach, but the taste is really gross. It took me until Sunday February 5th to officially test negative again.

Since then I have felt better and better every day, but, unlike other viruses, COVID really seems to linger. According to my biometrics, my resting heart rate and sleeping respiration had still been higher than normal and only in the last two days has gone back to normal. My HRV was much lower than normal and my body wasn’t “recharging” even after a full night of sleep. It was especially distressing because I had some really important meetings this past week and I was afraid that I was going to miss them. Sean ended up rebounding after he finished his Paxlovid, so that freaked me out.

Ultimately, I’m glad that Maddie had a very mild COVID infection. While it was unfortunate that Sean’s was so long, I’m glad that his was relatively mild as well. The most important thing I would say to others is to definitely take it easy. I stopped cycling, which was very sad, but probably helped me to recover. Although, I felt like death so I wasn’t even tempted to get on the bike when I felt I couldn’t get out of bed!

In other news

In the new year, I had plans to start investigating breast cancer advocacy pathways in earnest. Despite being sidelined with COVID and being pretty busy with work, I had the opportunity to begin this exploration. I initially reached out to a researcher at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Andy Ewald, who is the co-lead for the Cancer Invasion and Metastasis Program at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. He helped me to get linked up with the National Breast Cancer Coalition and Friends of Cancer Research. There is still quite a bit of research to do as I find my rightful place and I will definitely write more blog posts about this. In other exciting news, I also applied for access to the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. It is a collection of participating cancer registries that collects data on tumors and individual results in the United States. I will probably have some blog posts about that in the near future as well!