Yet Another Corona Blog

   My father and mother both got vaccinated on Friday.  My father threw up the next day and he lost oxygen saturation, so they put him on two liters per minute without any fever. He quickly improved over the next 24 hours.  We are hoping to transition my father to lower intensity assisted living with my mother in two weeks.    After getting vaccinated, my mother's only symptom was feeling lethargic for a couple of days.          My health is continuing to improve.  I jogged a mile twice last week and walked another 9 miles total.  My resting heart rate continues to drop.  It peaked around December 20th at 73 beats per minute (bpm).  I'm down to about 61 bpm.  Before covid, my resting heart rate was 56.  I lost 25 pounds during covid and I have regained 20 of those 25 pounds.  I think my stress level is lower for two reasons:  my mother has been staying with me which is nice because we talk more easily in person than on the phone, and I have not been working very much due to cov

  I posted this on Reddit in response to "Martin Luther King, Jr. said, 'If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.' What are your life examples of this?." My son Tor was very ill with pulmonary vein stenosis, a narrowing of the veins between the lungs and heart. Between ages 4 and 9 he was hospitalized about 10 times often needing 10 liters per minute of oxygen or a CPAP. Back then, his diagnosis was "Idiopathic Pulmonary Hemosiderosis" which was usually fatal within 10 years of diagnosis. In the summer of 2009 when he was 9, he had been hospitalized for about a month and was taking 1 gram of prednisone a week (that's a lot anyone and he weighed 50 pounds). He was at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia fighting for his life. He had not been able to sit up in bed for about a month, he could not stand, he had a feeding tube going through his nose, and his sp

Good news!   My dad will be discharged from Twin Lake Rehab on Saturday (two days from now).  I think that his lungs are much better and he might only need a liter or two of oxygen per minute.  I have a portable oxygen generator, so I will bring that with me.  Apparently there is a good chance of him falling, so we will be using a wheel chair.  We will be traveling to Harmony in State College, the assisted living apartment complex where my mother is staying.   My resting heart rate is dropping a bit down to like 65, so that's great.  I'm only working around 10 hours a week right now, but hopefully I will feel better next week.  Today is the first day that I was able to do high intensity interval training.  I was able to get my heart rate up to around 170 during the intervals.   So, everything is headed in the right direction.  

   My dad is still in the rehab center, but we are hoping that he will be transitioned to assisted living with my mother sometime in the next week.    A few days ago, I visited my doctor.  He said that I'm still a bit sick and that my lungs are still congested.  My resting heart rate is higher than usual, about 70 beats per minute.  Usually, it is in the upper 50s.   That's a chart of my resting heart rate over the last year according to my iPhone.  You can see it go up in November when I got the coronavirus.  

Yesterday, I tested positive for Covid-19 antibodies, so that indicates that I had covid-19 despite the 7 negative nasal swab tests. Dad is still in the rehab center, but he is only using 2 liters per minute oxygen.  We expect that he will be sent to the Harmony assisted living center in State College, PA this week. My day time oxygen saturations are fine (like 95%), but I still am tired and I have to be careful when I stand up because I sometimes feel like I'm going to pass out.  My resting heart rate is 69 beats per minutes.  My resting heart rate before covid was in the upper 50s.  

    My father has improved a lot of the last few days.  He wanted to leave the rehab center today, but they said he would die if he left without oxygen, but I'm not so sure they're right about that.  Dad is down to 3 liters a minute and saturating around 96% which means he may be able to be on room air either now or in a couple of days.  He still has balance issues and he is not always 100% there mentally, but my brother is working on getting him discharged so that he can join my mother at Harmony assisted living in State College, PA.    Today, I was well enough to shovel snow!  I had to shovel a small path to my car and I had to shovel little lanes for each tire and get the snow off the car.  I was able to do that and drive for an hour afterward. I still have an elevated resting heart rate and I often feel a bit of dizziness when I first get up.  But my resting heart rate is returning to normal and I usually need to wait a minute or less for the dizziness to clear.      In sum