Winter of Misery - The End is Near!

Yay!  Today officially marks the "end" of winter 2024 here - a season that unfortunately will be remembered as one of misery and lots of sickness...

 

 

COVID

Those who follow me on other platforms will know that in mid-May, after nearly 3.5 years successfully evading COVID, I finally caught the bloody thing... and promptly passed in to the rest of my family, so now the whole household was down with the blasted rona. (A large part of successfully evading it was due to largely working from home during that time, including staying home 90% of the time for pretty much all of 2022 when Omicron we gangbusters, and masking up every time I otherwise left the house for most of that time until only relaxing things in 2023). 

Anyway, that came to an end this year. To this day, I'm not exactly where I caught it - but believe it was either at one of the doctor's clinics I had to step foot in for other reasons (after pretty much avoiding needing to go near those places since ~2-3 weeks just before the start of the pandemic), OR it was that pharmacist girl had a surgical mask on but was acting kinda lethargic... The cause doesn't matter now: on the Sunday afternoon, I had slight chills (but put it down to the cooling weather and not turning the heater), followed by a very running nose on a freezing Monday morning (just as some tradies came to replace our front doors), which had escalated to headache + fever by 10pm that night. What followed was one of the most torrid nights of my life (second only to the even worse ones I had getting the 3rd, 4th, and 5th/6th (??? - I lost count) booster), with fever + chills + headache + backpain. A week later (after sleeping for good chunks of the days in the days prior), I lost my voice (almost completely for a few days)... between that and really bad asthma + "throat knot strangulation" feeling, that pretty much summed up much of my June, with things only really starting to ease off in the last week or two of that month. 

Residual symptoms lasted all the way into mid-August. Otherwise, thankfully fatigue was not as severe for us as it has been for other folks.

Sydney Trip

In mid July, we took a few days trip over to Sydney for a cousin's wedding  (we'd missed the other 2 cousins' weddings from that branch of the family due to COVID travel restrictions, so we wanted to be there for this one at least).

Fortunately, we were "mostly recovered" by that time (but were still taking things easy and not pushing things too hard just in case). But yeah, this was pretty much our first trip overseas in like 5 years (the last time also being to a family gathering in mid-winter in Sydney, that time at the start of June 2019).

I've been meaning to write up a small "Trip Report" blog post about with a few highlights, but ended up missing the 1 month mark a week or two ago (due to a mix of work + maybe dealing with another minor sniffle picked up from there?)

We'll see... maybe this post will finally see the light of day next month (just in time for our next short trip :P)

Winter Illnesses

But yeah, this winter has been hellish in terms of various illnesses circulating around. Heck, 2 weeks ago, practically *everyone* in our team had some kind of sniffle (with others sounding quite unwell). That said, I think we got off lightly - have heard that 1-2 other teams in the company were *fully* out of action at various times.

So yeah... this is definitely a winter I think we all rather forget in general...