I’m not sure if my fever is back because of COVID, if it’s because I tried to stop coasting off of a low dose of prednisone to keep from coughing (as the poison seems to cure the poison in this case) or… what, but I suppose I’ll be finding out as the day goes on. I’m due to take my last dose of Paxlovid this evening, and then my primary care physician wants me to make an appointment to see him sometime next week — depending on his availability, that is — to make sure that I don’t have any long-term… problems (writing posts while on Paxlovid is fun, I swear) as a result of this, and to make sure that it hasn’t worsened my heart or lung problems. Ironically, the only thing that I’m protected from is the cytokine… thing that happens at the end of some COVID-19 infections because I’m immunocompromised, and people who are immunocompromised can’t surmount a cytokine response like that in a lot of — almost all — cases, which is probably the only good thing to come out of all of this and my circumstances. It’s the cytokine (over-)response that kills people.

Then again, with the health problems that I have, COVID-19 could simply kill me by virtue of killing me, so me actually coming down with it was never ideal in the first place. I tried hard for three years to prevent that.