CAUTION: This narrative chronicles one family's experience and should not be considered advice in anyone's case! I'm an engineer, not a medical professional!
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of having to live with COVID. As previously stated, Hunky Husband first showed symptoms of COVID-19 on 9 January - two days after his annual wellness check. According to the CDC's Isolation and Exposure Tool (that has been re-installed on the CDC website), in the absence of fever (and having used no medications to reduce fever), the person with COVID-19 should be able to break isolation without masking 10 days after first symptoms - 19 January for HH. Note that this presupposes two negative antigen tests at 48-hour intervals. I did not, on the advice of Dr N, give HH further testing. Dr N said that HH could test positive for days/weeks/months without it meaning anything.
By 24 January, I decided that if I was ever going to contract COVID-19 from HH, I should have done it by then - 15 days after first symptoms. At that point, I resumed sleeping with HH (how titillating!) The next day, I started coughing and had a sore throat. I tested negative. On th 26th, I felt worse and had headache, became bilious, and had a "fever". (Two degrees above one's normal is considered a "fever" in us oldsters - my actual temperature once measured 100.1 degrees F for a short period of time.) On 27 January I repeated testing and had a strong positive indication.
At 6:53am, I left a message for Dr A's nurse at our medical clinic, outlining my experience and asking advice. When four hours had passed without a call-back, I started getting pissed.
Note on HH's dementia: He obsesses. Have I told you that? He couldn't keep in mind that I was ill (and he asked, "Where do you think you got it?" completely losing memory of his recent bout with COVID) and he obsessed over feeling powerless to help me. He wanted to take me to the doctor's office, which I would not do without being told to go there. Eventually, HH was really in a tizzy. He wanted to take me to the hospital.
Since, at that point, I had tried every way I knew to get a real person on the clinic's phone and since it was getting about closing time for the practice, I called our pharmacy, Derby Drug that is in the same building. Nearly all of the people at the pharmacy have dealt with HH and me enough to know who we are. Alexa answered. "Is the clinic next door to you open today?" Alexa said, "Yes". I explained the situation to her. "Let me do some checking with them for you. I'll call you back." When she got back to me, Alexa said that Dr A's nurse had already left for the day, but that she was advised to have me go to their associated urgent care clinic that is in the same building - open 4pm-10pm. HH and I hustled ourselves and our double masks out to the urgent care clinic.
The wait was for an hour, but the nurse practitioner (AP RN) Halsey and her assistant took good care of us. Nurse H sent prescriptions to our pharmacy, and we left.
Well, the pharmacy didn't stock what Nurse H had prescribed - Ritonavir, one of the components of Paxlovid. (Ritonavir-Boosted Nirmatrelvir is Paxlovid. Nirmatrelvir, has a known interaction with statin drugs, one of which I take.) The only place in the area that seemed to stock Ritonavir, alone, would be a 40- or 50-mile round trip for pickup. At 6:03pm, having been sent home by the Mercedes while she and Nurse H worked it all out, I received a phone call from her. Dr H had prescribed a different antiviral, Molnupiravir, which Mercedes had on hand. If I wished to pick up my prescriptions she would remain there until I arrived - the pharmacy was technically closed at 6:00pm. I thanked Mercedes but told her that I would be there at 9:00am, the 28th - today, when the pharmacy opened.
All is well. I have taken my first dose of each prescription and, I'm sure, will be feeling chipper and well by tomorrow. Ah, yes, wishful thinking. Don't rain on my parade.
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