I can't tell you what a recovery is like because I haven't fully recovered, but I'm getting there. I'm a male in my late 30's, in case anyone of a similar age and gender wants to know what it might be like for them.

I missed work for a few days last week due to a strange light-headedness and a small-but-chronic cough that wouldn't seem to go away but wasn't really getting any worse, either. On Thursday I suddenly felt a little better, so I decided to return to finish up a few projects I had been working on. Thursday went by without issue, as did the first part of Friday.

On my two-mile walk home from work on Friday I began to notice a strong "burning" feeling in my lower lungs, kind of like how it feels to smoke pot and hold it in for a bit. Within four hours of coming home I was in bed with chills, body aches and a fever of 101 degrees. That fever would reach 102.7 by midnight, and I would spend the next four days sweating, rocking back and forth on the floor from the intense body aches I was experiencing, and coughing harder than I've ever coughed in my life. Over those four days, my fever did not drop below 100 degrees.

You might think "I've had some awful coughs," but this one felt a bit different from most of the bad coughs I've had in the past. Instead of merely feeling like I needed to clear something out of my throat, a slow, continuous drip of some sort of fluid was slowly moving to what felt like the absolute bottom of my lungs, and if I didn't produce the deepest, most intense cough imaginable in the next minute or two that fluid was going to start accumulating down there--so I did exactly that: coughed as hard as I could, every few minutes, for four solid days. I felt like this condition was torturing me by being preventable, but only if I gave it my constant attention. I am still coughing as I write this.

This cough deserves a few more paragraphs. A "normal" cough doesn't get anything out of the bottom of your lungs. I had to teach myself how to cough in a very unusual way--kind of like I was trying to whisper the word "huh" as loudly as I could four or five times to push the loose fluid up from my lower lungs, then gradually changing the motion into more of a traditional upper-lung cough to carry the fluid up and out of my lungs. Once I figured that out, I was able to conserve a lot more energy while still managing to get all of the fluid out. I'm not even sure I would have been able to keep it up for as long as I did had I kept trying to cough the normal way.

The cause of the cough seemed to be whatever was making a "crackling" sound in my lungs when I took a breath. When I opened my mouth and blew air out of my lungs, a bubbling sound was apparent to everyone around me. This bubbling sound would go away when I would cough intensely, but would gradually return as fluid continued to fill my lungs. The doctor referred to it as a "crackling" sound, so that's how I'll refer to it here. This is still currently happening, although to a much lesser extent.

I managed two to three hours of sleep per day for the entire duration of the illness, solely because I needed to cough or I would eventually be unable to cough all of whatever was running down there back up again. In my opinion, this alone is enough to kill a lot of elderly people. I don't know many 90-year-olds who can cough as hard and as often as I felt like I needed to in order to get through this illness without assistance of some kind--especially not while being extremely sleep-deprived.

On Tuesday of this week I actually felt better enough to go to the doctor's office, so I had my wife take me there and wait outside. When I got in the office, the entire staff was wearing face masks, and I was the only person in the waiting area. I was given the required pre-screening for my state, Idaho, which still requires someone to visit another country in order to be tested for the virus, and then I was ushered back out into the waiting area. Within seconds (this never happens at a doctor's office!) I was brought into an examination room. By this point I was sweating quite a bit and having a bit of difficulty breathing, as I had barely moved for the past few days and was finding the whole experience to be more difficult than I had expected it to be. They sat me down, asked me to repeat my symptoms to them, then listened to my lungs. My lungs were "crackling," so they gave me an array of tests for various viruses that they thought I might have and sent me off to get an x-ray.

Because I'm in Idaho, the test I got was basically a diagnosis by omission. They tested me for the things they thought I might have that weren't the coronavirus, and all of those tests came back negative so they were forced to assume that what I had was actually the coronavirus and gave me information explaining that I was to remain quarantined in my home for two weeks. As I was leaving I overheard the nurses saying that one of the doctors there had been going on an absolute tirade because she knew that the virus was in town and no one could get them testing kits to confirm it. She had apparently seen so many patients with my exact symptoms over the past few days that she was acing visibly agitated, as were all of the nurses. It's worth noting that the doctor's office I went to to get diagnosed is now ONLY seeing patients with respiratory symptoms. All other patients are being directed to a separate facility to avoid exposure. This change was made literally hours after I was diagnosed.

I returned to my car, told my wife that I was quarantined, and we drove home. I already had a suspicion that I had the virus by this point, so neither of us were very surprised. It was a surprisingly casual car ride home, but my wife has now confessed to me that she was terribly afraid that something was going to happen to me at the time. I did get a pretty cool doctor's note that excuses me from work for having COVID-19, which I am most definitely framing and putting next to my desk when all of this is over.

My condition has been gradually improving over the three days that have passed since then, but I'm still having some noticeable symptoms. My cough has drastically improved, but the deep, awful coughs are still returning from time to time. I feel EXTREMELY exhausted, in the sense that I feel like I need to be sleeping almost every moment that I'm not actually sleeping. I've actually managed to sleep and eat quite a bit now that I feel a bit better, but none of the weight I lost has returned. I actually think it did me a favor in this regard.

So far my wife hasn't had it yet, but she currently has none of the symptoms that I had leading up to my illness. We're both crossing our fingers and hoping that she ends up being a "silent carrier." I actually think that both of my kids have or had it--I suspect I got it from my son, since he was sick with a 103 degree fever about a week before I got sick--because they've both been coughing quite a bit over the past few weeks, but neither of them seemed to get much of anything compared to what I ended up having to suffer through.

I've been working from home since I started to recover, and so far it hasn't been that bad. I actually feel a bit lucky to have a job that allows me to do this, although some aspects of my job do not lend themselves to working from home as well as others do. I suspect I'll discover an enormous mountain of paperwork waiting for me on my desk whenever I'm finally allowed to return.

On a positive note, because I haven't died from the coronavirus I was able to see the SpaceX satellite train pass over my area last night, and it was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. I wasn't expecting it at all, so I was understandably shocked to see satellite after satellite passing over my head--seemingly without end--with no explanation as to why it was happening. For at least one solid minute my recovering brain tried to convince me that the satellites must have something to do with the virus--after all, both events were quite unusual--but soon enough I remembered reading about the satellite train and my surprise turned into wonder. I'm glad that, despite all of the awful things currently happening on Earth, awesome stuff like this is still going on. I think the satellites are going to be the thing I remember most about the time I was sick, because seeing them made a lasting impression on me.

This ended up being pretty long, but hopefully someone finds some of this information helpful.