Hello everyone,
I’ve had thoughts bubbling up in the head for a bit that were threatening to emerge into a post some day. It’s going to be about Covid so conveniently, there’s a bit of cricket before so people who want to filter Covid out can quietly step away …
One thought that cropped up again while watching the India vs England Test Match was the old adage : “Would you rather bowl 20 overs for 100 taking 5 wickets or bowl 20 overs for 20 taking 1 wicket.” 100 off 20 is expensive but those wickets change the game.
The answer, of course, is “did we win ?” Cricket isn’t an individual game, it’s a team game. There are occasions where that 100 for 5 off 20 would have lost the game because the other team might have only been chasing 150 and the other bowlers couldn’t get wickets or pressure.
One of the cricket memories is when we won by I think 6 runs with about 5 overs left in the game. We only had 3 regular bowlers that day, so the playing conditions meant we had to make up 10 of the 40 overs (max 10 overs each) with part time bowlers. We started my last over with the other team needing that 7 runs to win, with 3 wickets left and the batsman at the other end on 48 not out. The game was petering out into a reasonably comfortable win for them. It didn’t.
We won. I took 3 wickets in 4 balls to finish with 9.4 overs, 24 runs, 6 wickets in the game. However, we wouldn’t have won without Big Dave getting the top 3 batsmen out and the captain and spin bowler creating pressure at his end for no wickets. And there were other games where I didn’t give many runs away (10 overs 19 runs 1 wicket was my most economical) but I saw those games as failures for me because my job was to get people out.
It’s like yeah, I liked taking the wickets. But I liked winning games even more and the best way of stopping people scoring was to get them out and back in the pavilion.
Looking forward to another good day of cricket from India tomorrow.
Covid ? I think I had it last year around March / April time, perhaps going into May as well. I might still have some of the effects.
However, I will never know for sure. I don’t know if it’s hypochondria either … I definitely had something up with me around that time. Going through the symptoms everyone knows about :
Cough – Definitely. I had a very serious cough around March / April. It was bad enough that I was having that vision going dark think that happens when you’re coughing for too long. My voice was off as well, with feelings that if I tried to use it too much, more coughing would happen. It was quite some time before I could attempt to sing along to the music again.
Nose being yucky – Oh yes. But it’s only been around that time. Could have been a cold.
Diarrhea – yes. And this is one area where you want to be careful when looking back at symptoms after the event.
Looking at the timeline again, I arrived back in the UK from Canada on Sunday 23 Feb. The car service was the next weekend (Saturday 29 Feb) and I stopped at the Gloucester Services farm shop on the way back. I think the bun I had there was then responsible for me running to and from the loo for the rest of the day. So, an example of memory joining dots that are unconnected.
I was then in work, with an away trip to a contractor sometime around then, until everyone started breaking up. My last day in office was Friday 20 March (I have a pic of a topping up shop run !). I think I had an extended number of meetings with my potential carrier vector person the week before. A few days later, he ended up in hospital with acute pneumonia and it was bad enough that I didn’t know whether or not he’d be coming back to fulfil his temporary contract.
What we never found out was whether that pneumonia was just very serious pneumonia or the more sinister thing. Testing wasn’t a common thing back then.
But anyway, my worst times were in that week or several after we all broke up from work. It could have been burn out, I hadn’t had a break since Xmas and there had been the Canada work trip.
Another timeline marker is actually a game I don’t own ! Mount and Blade II came out on 30 March last year and I’d been watching the Fuzzy and Co multiplayer streams. Or rather, I was attempting to, because half the time I was lying back in the chair trying not to overheat and overstress.
Again, could be a coincidence because my brand of hayfever sensitivity kicks off around that time of year as well. I can’t remember it ever being that bad though. Attempting to vacuum the house would lead to perhaps a couple of minutes of exerting and then I’d need to lie down in the chair and cool off.
So that’s symptoms including : difficulty breathing, extended coughing, overheating and since then, extreme tiredness. I think I also had the brain fog affecting me through April and May. This happened last year :
It was a real effort to put that together. I’d intended to write a “Sleepy’s going racing !” April Fools post but I didn’t know if I’d be able to finish the model in time. What would previously have been easy, became a real effort to push through. I was also having difficulty framing the thoughts that go behind posts like that. Oh and with the plague situation erupting, I didn’t think it was appropriate to do an April Fools post that year.
I think that mental side is part of it as well. This time last year, Covid was just coming on the scene. We didn’t know what it was, we didn’t understand it, there was no testing for it, we didn’t know what palliative care was appropriate to help people through the worst of it. We thought it could end the world. Or at least, I did cos I can be a pessimist like that.
Is there any more to tell ? Can’t remember that much of it. It took several months for my voice to recover. I didn’t get the altered sense of taste or smell. I could deal with higher summer temperatures ok. I’m still pretty tired, although the controls I’ve built up over the years usually help me counter tiredness until it builds up too much and I burn out.
Those memories do mean I take absolutely no chances with Covid, with my best means of defense against it being a very simple : Don’t People. I do miss people a lot … but I may also have passed on what I had in March last year to others. That’s the thing with this, the asymptomatic people don’t know they have it so they don’t take the precautions that could protect others. I even developed a habit where if I was talking to someone, I’d point my mouth away from them so I wasn’t breathing on them.
I think that’s my tale done. The conclusion is :
What do you think ? Do you think I had covid last year ? Or could it have been something different. Without any testing on the person who was my potential vector of infection, I’ll never know.
Stay safe everyone, be well and …
Masks save lives.