Fever!
Covid-19 in September 2019?
In working up a rough draft of one of the articles I have planned, I went trolling through my old Facebook archive to locate a couple of peer-reviewed papers. In doing so, I happened across a post I wrote on September 22, 2019, and it occurred to me for the first time that I may have had covid in spring 2019 in the southern hemisphere. (!)
I have generally dismissed accounts of its circulation that are many months prior to November 2019, and I certainly can’t prove it, but I thought this was an interesting entry for multiple reasons.
Fever is a powerful healing force.
I've had a number of benign "sebaceous cysts" in my life that have had to be cut out with minor surgeries. A few weeks ago, I got another one. I know they're nothing more than a cosmetic nuisance, but I thought about injecting a tiny amount of my Coley vaccine into it to get rid of it. But didn't really have time to deal with the ensuing fever.
Turns out I didn't need to do that, as I came down with a sort of mystery fever very rapidly last week after a few days of a sinus infection (my first in years). Over the course of merely a half hour I went from fully functional to a shivering, teeth chattering mass with 5 blankets piled on top.
I have not experienced that sort of natural fever in many years, and I'm not sure I've experienced such a rapid onset. I'm rarely ill.
The fever broke in the middle of the night and I woke up next morning feeling fine.
The sebaceous cyst that had been the size of a pea the night before was gone.
I’ve heard a lot of people with similar stories in retrospect. In early 2020 I also had a 3 week long dry persistent cough, which is also very unusual for me. I can’t help but wonder…
People are way too eager to reduce fevers with medication. I will always remember when my youngest son had a high fever- his paediatrician told me he never treats fever until it gets to dangerous levels (the exact opposite advice as what most doctors/nurses give people). The body knows what it’s doing…trust it.
I’ve read that one reason the flu pandemic was so deadly in 1918 was that the new medication, aspirin, was overly used to combat fevers and therefore fevers were not allowed to do their work.