This did NOT come as a surprise, but... My Mom is now COVID positive. We retested her with a home kit because her symptoms worsened and matched the worst ones that I had back on Tuesday night / Wednesday morning. We assumed that the tests from 2 days ago may just have been taken a bit too early, despite the fact that she was slightly symptomatic.
Well, this sucks. She doesn't go through these infections as rapidly as I do (I'm probably at 85-90% back to normal today). She might benefit from an antiviral, specifically Paxlovid, but we're going to ask her primary care physician.
Initially, 2 days ago, the PCP was against using Paxlovid altogether. He's definitely one of the physicians who's quite skeptical around a lot of the commonly released guidelines regarding COVID (as am I - our regulatory bodies destroyed our trust), especially since he treated literally thousands of cases of COVID during the pandemic. I trust his outpatient experience more than my own.
Thus, I'm not prescribing Paxlovid to my Mom on my own. I'm interested to hear why he doesn't want to use Paxlovid / why it may be more harmful to her. From what I've already read, it may not be very useful for milder cases (severity is typically based on vital signs, etc., even if the symptoms really suck) in people who are not at high risk of hospitalization, so that may be the reason he provides. Risks vs. benefits are always something we consider in the practice of medicine.
Well, here's hoping that she'll recover quickly. We have to see an accountant for taxes in 5 days (don't plan to infect him!), and then we had planned for an art show in April, my favorite one to attend with my family. That would be the first genuinely fun thing I'd do in 2025, and the first in nearly a year. I'm unequivocally not counting on it because I've had a serious of very bad luck with these things (last year, I got sick right before the same art show and couldn't go). I already did my best to make peace with not going this year even before the illnesses began. We'll see whether my meditation and mind-calming techniques work because this is the one that hurts me the most.
(Obviously I want her to recover regardless of the timing of whatever I want to do! I just want her to stop hurting... she's had a very difficult year)