COVID-19: Episode 10: Still here

It's been a month since anyone but the three residents have been in the house -- Colleen's caregiver, V, was the last "outsider". I've done a couple of curb-side pickups, Colleen has had two MAC clinic appointments, and a few people have come to the door with deliveries. But we're as safe as anyone can be in this pandemic.

Meanwhile our daughter E is on the front lines -- she started work as a checker at Safeway around the beginning of March.

All the links under the cut will be repeated in Sunday's "Done Since" post, but I want to highlight this one in particular:

Even patients without respiratory complaints had Covid pneumonia. [...]

And here is what really surprised us: These patients did not report any sensation of breathing problems, even though their chest X-rays showed diffuse pneumonia and their oxygen was below normal.

We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature. [...]

Patients compensate for the low oxygen in their blood by breathing faster and deeper — and this happens without their realizing it. This silent hypoxia, and the patient’s physiological response to it, causes even more inflammation and more air sacs to collapse, and the pneumonia worsens until oxygen levels plummet. In effect, patients are injuring their own lungs by breathing harder and harder.

In other words, by the time you notice that you're out of breath, you've already damaged your lungs and are low enough on oxygen that you'll probably need to go on a ventilator immediately. With predictably bad consequences.

The reason I'm telling you this is to convince you to go out and get a pulse oximeter now and check your blood oxygen level every damned day whether you feel sick or not. If it starts going down, call your doctor no matter what other symptoms you don't have.

In one of my last trips into Rite Aid before we isolated, I bought myself a pulse oximeter and have used it almost every day, feeling somewhat silly about it. Turns out it isn't silly at all.

( Notes & links )