Octopus of Bliss

There is a suite of symptoms, and whenever one of them steps back, another will take the solo. A new one drove me out of bed in the wee hours last night, hard to describe but horrid. I stubbornly continue to hold out hope that I'm on an improvement trajectory. However, I did have to go back to bed and spend most of the morning napping.

I "learned" something today, which I enclose in scare quotes because I looked it up on the internet. I was curious about the recent increase in my blood pressure, and wondered if it might have anything to do with covid. Oh, yes indeed--there are several reputable papers concluding that even non-severe covid can result in a lasting rise in blood pressure. The plausible mechanism for this is residual spike proteins bonding themselves with ACE2 sites. Well, isn't that just lovely. I can't prove I'm suffering from this effect, rather than just being fat and stubborn, which would be my doctor's preferred hypothesis, but it would explain some things.

Moving on to a more cheerful note, I had evolved a plan that perhaps today would be a good day for some limited activity, just to get the blood flowing again. My back has started to ache, probably from sitting around all the time. Pre-nap, this didn't seem as if it would work out, but after that, it did, at least a little bit. While we were sitting out in our yard on a balmy sunny day, I snapped and trimmed a bag of green beans before they became inedible, and also fixed up some strawberries, ditto. I bought a lot of stuff before the latest viral incursion, when I was optimistically thinking I would fix us some nice dinners to invigorate us. I changed the sheets on the bed, because who doesn't like fresh sheets after they've been sick, and put the old ones in the wash, and put away some clean napkins that were sitting around atop the dryer. That's about enough for now.