Viruses with chronic illness
For normal, healthy people, a virus is usually a short term illness. You feel terrible for a few days, and perhaps take a week to recover. For people with other health 'complications', viruses can stick around and make a difficult situation much harder to deal with.
It’s frustrating to hear comments and advice such as “You’ll feel better in a day or two”, or “Just take this tablet and it will let you go on”.
Chronic illness sufferers know that these viruses can linger, can develop into worse illnesses, don’t respond to ‘normal’ levels of medication. And viruses always make chronic illness symptoms much worse.
I recently got an unidentified virus.
Fever, malaise, exhaustion, brain fog, headaches and body pain. Seemed like the flu, only without the dripping nose and dreadful cough. It threatened a few times to drop onto my chest and morph to bronchitis. Eventually, it settled into severe sinusitis - just the inflammation, no infection. But, the headaches, oy!
It knocked me out for two weeks while it was trying to make up its mind what type of virus it was. I was going from bed to couch, and back again, sleeping 15+ hours.
I probably should have taken more time off work as the virus made all of my pain symptoms flare (fibromyalgia, endometriosis, etc.). But two weeks was what the doctor recommended.
One week back at work teaching, still with fever, headaches and dizziness, and I’ve now picked up a tummy bug to knock me down once again.
Teaching exposes you to too many viruses
If only students (and co-workers) would stay away when ill. I have always been sickest during term, while I was teaching, and in open-plan offices because people kept coming to school or work while sick.
There is this culture in many countries of just keep going. Even making it into an earworm advertising jingle - “Soldier on with Codral”.
But those people infect everyone around them.
In Japan, when you have a fever, you stay home - that’s the most infectious period when you have caught a virus. Then, as long as you have symptoms, you mask to stop the infected exhaled water droplets from spreading and infecting everyone around you. I wish this was normal in the rest of the world.
Virus infections are getting nastier (covid)
Update 2026: Ahhh… how naiive this was, to hope for common sense and people taking care of others.
There will be a big problem in future years, as children have been exposed to and caught covid and other respiratory illnesses so many times, because of policies that force them to attend, and force them to not wear masks. Covid irreparably causes damage to so many internal organs. And we don’t yet know what long-term effects this may have, although the current best guesses are more heart disease, dementia, and cancer.
Masks work - the number of flu infections during the covid period where masks were mandatory for all was almost non-existent. Of course, infections are back as a big problem now that covid is endemic because people refuse to mask.
Now that I am on immune suppressants, and my kidneys are nearly dead because of the sclerosis, any viral infection could end my life. That’s why I no longer teach. Or work non-remotely.
If people used common sense, stayed home and masked when ill, I wouldn’t have to worry about viral infections and fear for my life.
How do you cope with virus+chronic illness?
What do you do when you get a virus or other illness? Take time off and rest, or battle through?